Zahirah (Kisha Rivera)

     To sum it up in few words, Belly dance is a basically a gift I gave to myself.  But, that is not to say that the journey has been so simple.  I've always loved dance, music and the arts, and in my youth was always involved in a choir, play or musical.  It was always in my blood.  I think sometime in 2003, I saw a live concert special with Shakira, whom I idolized at the time, and she began belly dancing in such a sensual, provocative way.  I was blown away! This was so much different than her usual rocker-chic, tough girl persona she usually depicted on stage.  That was what I loved about her.  At that moment, she embodied everthing that is amazing about a woman - the ability to be hard and fierce, and graceful and sexy all at once. 

     As a teenager and into early adulthood, I was discouraged from "being" sexy - wearing makeup, shorts, anything tight etc.  I was made to feel as though there was something wrong with me if men looked at me in a certain way, and so I got into the habit of covering up and wearing baggy clothes.  I also started feeling more shameful about my body too.  I didn't start dressing more feminine until my early twenties, but I always felt that slight tinge of shame, especially if I got attention, regardless of whether it was positive or negative.

    Around the same time, I got involved in a serious relationship that began shortly after another destructive serious relationship was ending.  Although it was a much more positive relationship, I didn't feel much better about myself and didn't feel appreciated enough.  I was coming home every night, cooking, cleaning, basically keeping house and found myself wondering, "What about me?" I had neglected myself for so long.  In February 2005, as a Valentine's Day gift to myself, I signed up for my first 6-week belly dance course with Kaeshi Chai, and I haven't looked back since.  Needless to say, my passion for bellydance has outlasted and outgrew that former relationship, and I'm much happier and complete because of it.

     The greatest thing about this artform is that it has taught me and continues to teach me to embrace all the qualities of being a woman - sexy, flirty, bitchy, funny, graceful, beautiful.  As I continue to learn and grow and develop as a dancer, I feel more and more in touch with the feminine spirit and with the woman I am meant to be.  That's not to say that I am completely healed and don't struggle with the same issues every now and then, but I am aware of them more consciously than ever before, and I have the strength within me to conquer them.  That is something I didn't have before.

     Only time will tell where the dance will lead me, and at this point I am not entirely sure about that, but I do know that I eventually want to share this inspiring, beautiful artform with others.  I have had my negative and positive experiences, as in anything in life, but when I dance, I am so free and so at peace that I know it will forever be a part of me, in the same way that it has forever changed me.

My Story - Kathy Bellamy

I am using my given name for this, because when I started, that is the only part of my persona that anyone identified with.  Only because I had not yet debuted my other persona, Najla Bell. 

I took my first bellydance class at the gym in the late 90’s.  The class was being offered on a trial basis.  I loved the class, but unfortunately, many of the women felt self-conscious of the curious on-lookers that would sneak a peek into the small window of the aerobics room while bellydance class was going on.  Thus, the class did not continue as part of the regular schedule.  After that, the notion of taking classes lay dormant in my brain for a couple of years.  In 2000, I was getting married and my future husband and I were having a Jack and Jill party instead of a bridal shower/stag.  Woo-hoo!  Party with friends and family… gotta love that!  Out of the blue, I got the idea to dress up in disguise and bellydance for my fiancé.  Oh, I was so caught up in the notion of it all.  I ordered “Atea and Friends” off the internet, made my costume, and studied alone in the basement while he wasn’t home.  On the night of our party, I pulled out my secret bag of goodies and ran off to the bathroom to change.  I had the best man cue up my music and get Dave into the centre of the dance floor.  Was I out of my bloody mind!!!?  Well, I pulled it off and he was speechless (not an easy feat) and I still remember hearing my beautiful mother-in-law’s laugh watching me embarrass her son.  I did so many things wrong, but looking back, luckily there were no bellydance police there and everyone thought it was great!  They could not believe that I would do this and wondered where I had picked up the skills (I use the term very loosely) to perform.  Looking back it was pretty gutsy of me, but heck, I managed to throw my butt off the edge of a bungee platform in Australia, so I guess this was no worse. 

I began classes in Michigan shortly after the wedding and learned some valuable lessons through my teachers.  Najwa al-Qamar is a wonderful supportive woman and I am absolutely speechless watching her perform (esp classical Egyptian cabaret which is my personal favourite.)  I have managed to foster an international network of dancers between Windsor and Detroit, which makes our circle here even larger and more diverse.  I began teaching in 2004 and my favourite thing about teaching is watching baby beginners evolve over 6 weeks.  Moves that were oh so awkward and maybe even impossible in the early stages suddenly transition into beautiful flowing waves of movement from their bodies.  My other favourite thing is all of the wonderful people I have connected with and how we all support each other, physically, emotionally, or however is needed.  I wish I could devote myself full-time to the dance, alas, maybe when I retire I can attain that goal. (Come on 649!)

Whatever you do, have fun and challenge yourself to grow.

My Story - Meaghan Shields

It seems only fitting that I found my inroads to bellydance, the most feminine of dance forms, through my gateway to this world; my mother. Through the tumultuous haze of adolescence, I found my devotion to ballet waning after a decade of study and practice. My mother, a lifelong lover of movement, had been taking bellydance classes with Roula Said in Burlington, Ontario and convinced me to come to a few classes with her. I enjoyed these classes, but was not feeling overly committed to making space for more dance in my life.

Time passed, I left Burlington to pursue a higher education in Toronto, and Roula concluded her classes in Burlington in the third trimester of her pregnancy. On her last night of classes, my mother drove her to the GO Train and, as a mother of five, passed on a few words of wisdom:
“I know you’re not thinking of this right now, but when you do (and you will) need a babysitter, you should call my eldest daughter, Meggie. She lives in Toronto and is a great mother’s helper.”

Roula stored these words away for safekeeping and soon gave birth to one Laila Rifka Buchbinder, a true beauty to behold. Six months later, returning to teaching and all of the other demands of modern life, Roula heeded my mother’s words and called me seeking my care for Laila. I gladly agreed, thus beginning my own relationship with Roula and her family. I remember taking care of Laila at Roula’s old studio on Spadina while she taught, and enjoying the feeling of contributing to a genuinely positive women’s space. Roula generously opened her craft to me, offering that if I ever wanted to do her classes, I may do so free of charge. I took advantage of this gift only sparingly, feeling my time rather consumed by the rigors of academia and a long-distance relationship.
Time passed and I continued to care for an ever-growing Laila. The romantic relationship that had been the centre of my life for four years came to a gradual end and I entered a phase of transformation. As many women do, I took the opportunity to shed a skin, and focused on loving myself. In doing so, I began to study with Roula with more diligence, attending class once and then twice a week. My love for bellydance was blooming.

Roula saw something in me and nurtured my growth as a dancer, giving me lots of positive reinforcement, opportunities for performance and leadership, and consciously grooming me for development. I finished my degree and opened my life and time more fully to the arts, taking the position of administrator in Roula’s husband’s music business and beginning to teach one class a week at the newly formed Om Laila Bellydance studio.
Time passed and I now teach three classes at Om Laila and two more at other locations. I help Roula with the day-to-day administration of the business and studio, am a member of The Roulettes:RM2(with the delectable Mayada, now also on her way to motherhood!), I lead the newly born Om Laila Student Troupe, teach workshops, perform publicly and privately and can’t believe that this is my life. I also remain close friends with our special school’s namesake, a lovely young girl who recently turned five.

This is a beautiful life I lead and the path that lead me to the place I am today was through means most natural; the wisdom of mothers. I find true joy in this part of my life story and am happy to be able to share it here among others. Thank you for reading about how I found bellydance! 

My Story - Roula Said

My journey to bellydance has been a great challenge to articulate and is long overdue. What do I share and what do I keep private? I have always sought an authentic voice in my work, yet have kept silent about some of the deepest currents that run through it. I have decided to lay down my truth here and I warn you, it’s not always pretty...but perhaps it will speak to yours.

I came to Canada from the Middle East at the age of four and a half. I am a Palestinian-Canadian who spent a large portion of my childhood wishing I were white and fantasizing about changing my name to Laura. I hated pretty much anything Arabic - especially the music...and I found bellydancers to be totally embarrassing. At family and Arab community events, my friends and I would only dance to the Western music that the DJ played - when it was time for the Arabic band, we would bail into the hallway and make fun of the singing.

Somewhere around the age of 18, I fell in love with Billy Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Natalie Cole (in her early days) ...and to my great surprise, Om Kalsoum. I already loved to dance so I began to think that I might like to dance to her.

My dear friend Sophie Giraud from Trinity College, University of Toronto, had grown up in Turkey and loved bellydance. She began to study with a rather infamous character on the Toronto bellydance scene by the name of Eddie Manneh. In my last year, my college’s Sadie Hawkins formal was themed “One Thousand and One Nights” and Eddie’s dancers were hired to entertain. Just as the bellydance show was coming to an end and the final strains of the music lingered, I came bursting through the doors of Seaman Hall flying high on single malt whiskey and a few other items which I will leave to your imagination. When people saw me, they began to chant my name and pound their beer bottles on the tables spurring me on to dance before the music ended. I had never really bellydanced in my life but I got up there and moved as I was called to.

When it was over, Eddie was all over me like a dirty shirt - “What’s your name? Where are you from? Is your family here? Why don’t you come and take some classes?”
I almost said yes, but then something else came out of my mouth - like it had a mind and will of its own: “You rip women off...you get them to dance and then you keep the money...you’re manipulative...you will take advantage of me...I’m going to be really good”...and so on. He, of course, protested and I eventually stopped my litany of bold accusations. When the school year was over, my desire to dance had reached new heights and I finally relented and called Eddie, hoping that I was wrong about him at our dramatic first meeting (and that I hadn’t totally burned that bridge). Later that same day, before I had gone in and paid my money, I met a most unusual character who changed the course of my path entirely.

I ran into Colleen at the home of mutual acquaintance. She was unlike anyone I had ever met - she hissed like a snake when she laughed and was disarmingly cute at the same time, sporting long red braids and girlish bangs. She was in her forties I would guess but had the twinkle of a child in her eye. I asked her what she did in life and to my insane delight, she told me she was a bellydancer.

“No way”, I blurted out, “I just called a bellydance school today and I go in to check it out tomorrow”.

“You didn’t call Eddie did you?”... she squinted her eyes at me.

“I did”, I confessed. “I don’t know anyone else - do you teach?”.

“You can’t learn to bellydance from a man”, she admonished. “I don’t teach anymore but I will teach you. Come over to my place tomorrow”

And so I did. I learned that her dancer name was “Princess Natoma”. Our sessions mainly consisted of her rolling joints and reading my Tarot cards. She immediately told me to make sure that I never take my clothes off and that I always get my own dressing room. I concurred - though I felt like I had a ways to go before these things would be of concern to me. I don’t remember actually learning any dance steps and I was definitely headed down a different artistic path than the Princess, but in some strange and bittersweet way, I feel like she did me a great service. Bless you Princess wherever you are.

Then I got very sick - it started the July before my 23rd birthday and intensified through the endless months to follow. The medical community had some labels for what was happening inside me, but I have come to call it “The Lake of Pain and Confusion”. I got swallowed, pulled under, and stripped raw by an emotional and visceral undertow that I couldn’t fight. I wouldn’t wish my experience on my worst enemy. Perhaps I will elaborate another time, but suffice it to say that I survived and I am grateful and I never want to go back there ever again. It became very clear that I had more than a few skeletons in my closet.

Shortly after my 24th birthday, my friend Sophie treated me to a reading from a very charismatic palm reader named Singh Modi, who was in town from New York City. The minute he looked at my hand, he blurted out in his adorable accent, “You are a dancer, why don’t you dance?” His words and his energy hit me like a slap upside the head. Unsure how to answer him, I said that I didn’t really know why - I wanted to dance, I had even taken a few lessons - I was just kind of lost at the moment. He proceeded to tell me a lot of very accurate things about my life - particularly about the preceding year which had involved some serious trauma that had reverberations deep into my past and would reach far into my future. He kept coming back to the dancing - stressing that I HAD to dance. He told me that I would become very sick if I didn’t - that I had already nearly died in the past year and that my need for healing both spiritually and physically had come to a crisis point. I knew inside that he was right.

I saw him on a Friday - I remember it well because the next day was my last day of work at my retail job. Later that same day, I looked in Now Magazine to see if there was anything of interest in the Help Wanted section. There was: “Small Folkloric Dance Company and School seeking a publicist and administrator”. I called immediately. The school was Arabesque Academy (in its very early days). I started work there on Monday. I was suddenly around bellydance all the time and I felt like I had fallen into a field of clover. However, the challenges of finding my way into my body (as this dance would demand that I do) were just beginning.

I was offered free classes as part of the payment for my services at Arabesque but I couldn’t take them because the few times that I did, I felt so confused and upset that I left in tears. My back went into such an excruciating state of seizure that I could barely walk at times. In the mornings, I couldn’t move a millimeter in either direction without literally shrieking in pain. My endlessly patient boyfriend, Victor, would lift me out of bed and stand me on my feet - that would help me get going and then slowly my back would feel better enough for me to get on with my day. I spent every extra penny that I earned on my back and little by little I began to heal, though for years the pain never really went away. In those early years I had the worst hip work as a bellydancer - my pelvis was quite frozen and seemed practically out of reach to me. Looking back, when I did manage to fire up my hips, there was harshness, defiance and anger in my movements. It took a long time, a lot of deep learning, and some painful remembering and releasing for me to develop the qualities of earthiness, sweetness, and flow in my dance.

I recently heard the beautifully brazen Amy Sigil of Unmata telling her heavy personal story with freedom and ferocity - she has inspired and enlisted my heart to speak mine.
This is deeply uncomfortable territory, I am aware as I write, but here it is. Rape for a Middle Eastern girl is tantamount to a death sentence, even if nobody is actually going to kill her (though many still do die rather than live as embodiments of their family’s shame). As an only child of a very gentle soul who was also a widow, I was a very easy target. It is hard to explain the kind of inner violence that resonates in the wiring of someone whose experience of purity and sense of worthiness to live is taken away at a young age. It is quite literally, unbearable. In order to survive, the consciousness must be divided and the memory of such horrors eradicated from conscious attention or awareness. This state of division must be maintained at all cost and sets a person up for a very challenging and disjointed life. It’s one thing to survive a violent act or acts and another to not know (consciously) that you have. There is always something screaming inside you - hopefully it gets your attention and your help.

My journey to bellydance has always been in part, a journey toward healing and empowerment - as I know it is for many of us. In my case, it also includes the reclaiming of the essence - through movement, music and poetry - of the cultures that for me have also represented some very heavy personal karma. At the recent International Bellydance Conference of Canada, I heard male Turkish bellydancer, Ozgen Ozgec speak of how painful it was to see an American Tribal dancer move, albeit beautifully, to music that was played at his circumcision. For me, the sound of Arabic and Greek music was to some degree the soundtrack of my personal hell (and, paradoxically, many loving familial memories). Bellydance was by no means an escape into an exotic world - it was entering the belly of the beast.

The Arab night club scene was definitely not great for my soul or my body for very long. I began to hate dancing and decided to turn my attention to Arabic music instead. I began to study qanun, singing and percussion with George Sawa thinking I would prefer to make the music rather than dance to it. I co-founded a band in Toronto called Maza Meze - we played Arabic and Greek music initially and then began to create original tunes. In this context, my love for dancing came back...on my terms.

I now combine my devotion for bellydance and Arabic music within my own school and system - Om Laila. Om Laila has its own story that reaches beyond my own to include my many students, teachers and co-conspitators. Bellydance, especially through the Om Laila lens, remains my primary vessel for transforming my range of human experiences into gifts of personal power, freedom and joy. It is my pleasure to share these treasures generously with my students and audiences.

My Story - Chantal Dos Santos

I was 22 and was looking for a new way to get in shape. I found a bellydance studio very close to where I was living in Toronto at the time. The first thing I loved was the music, so I started downloading song I could find. Immediately, I had questions. Questions that my teacher couldn't answer. So I left it. A year later, I was living in Toronto again  close to Arabesque Academy, and started taking classes there. I still had questions about the music...and they had answers! So I kept taking classes, and have continued to in every city I move to. But it's the music that drove me and still drives me to dance!