FAYETTEVILLE — Jennifer Steinauer lowers her right hip, then thrusts it out to the side, scooping upward and back inward, using her right leg to help the motion flow. Then she does the same on the left side, completing a lateral figure eight.
That belly dancing move is called the taxeem. When she reverses the motion, lifting the hip first, she does the maya.
In proper belly dance posture, her knees are slightly bent, engaging the long muscles on the front of her thighs, the quadriceps. She tucks her tailbone to lengthen the spine and pulls her shoulders down and back. Her heels are together with toes facing slightly outward. Arm movements start in the shoulder and are led by the elbows, like a puppet on a string, with support by midback muscles.
Steinauer’s “love affair with belly dancing” began at age 5 in her native Florida, when she saw a belly dancer with a ball python in the Moroccan Square at Busch Gardens. She insisted that be her first Halloween costume.
Looking back from age 35, she remembers a childhood filled with ballet and tap dance, along with acrobatics, gymnastics and cheerleading. But she didn’t encounter belly dancing again until she was about 30 and living in Hastings, Neb. A friend who owned an art gallery hired a belly dance troupe from Lincoln for an art show opening, and Steinauer was “blown away.”
“It was not the typical cabaret-style belly dancers where you see the pink chiffon with the little jingle-y sequin bras,” she says. “It was so earthy. It was tribal.”
The dancers blended moves of diverse cultures from the Middle East to Africa, Romania and India.
Steinauer started taking lessons at a YWCA in a town about 20 miles away, twice a month. “Because of my dance background, it came pretty quick,” she says.
Then a stay-at-home mom, she absorbed everything she could about belly dancing — videos, music, reading. After about a year, she started teaching beginning tribal dance classes at the YWCA in Hastings. She later added intermediate and advanced classes, along with a performance troupe. The Prairie Moon belly dance troupe performed for money as a professional organization.
“A lot of women are curious about belly dancing. And it’s this feminine thing. It is so woman,” Steinauer says. “There’s a lot of women that are totally scared of it; they think, ‘Oh that’s just a bunch of sexual gyrations.’ They have no idea what a powerful dance this is for identifying yourself as a woman, as a creative being.” At the start of classes, she always explains the history of belly dance. Tribal dance was done barefoot and on bare earth, to help animals procreate, to bring rain, to grow crops. It was a female ceremony, especially done in the tent of a woman in labor. “The tribal women would come and they would dance the dance of the belly, helping this baby come into the world,” she says. Before giving birth, pregnant women would belly dance, “because it was so helpful in labor, to have all this core muscle work, all this strength right here in the core.” It also helped alleviate menstrual cramps. A dancer named Little Egypt introduced belly dancing to the United States in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair. “It made quite a stir,” Steinauer says.
MIND AND BODY Steinauer taught American tribal style and tribal fusion style for four years in Nebraska. American tribal combines an eclectic mix of styles and moves from Arabic and Egyptian sources. Tribal fusion combines dances and moves from many countries with elements of modern dance. Another popular style is cabaret, which is familiar from old Hollywood movies. Hers went beyond an exercise class, becoming a “sisterhood” as students started hanging out together and creating costumes. She got into fiber arts, knitting and crocheting costumes.
When Steinauer moved here a year ago, she began teaching yoga at Fayetteville Athletic Club. She taught a belly dancing class last fall and is in the middle of a six-week course this summer.
In the hour-long class, she begins with basic moves, breaking them down into slow and fast parts. She also teaches transitions between moves and cues for transitions. In tribal style, the moves are all done in four-four time.
“The slow moves are very specific isolations” of muscles, she says. “The fast moves, they’re more upbeat, they’re a lot more fun and they’re more aerobic.”
Like yoga and Pilates, which she also teaches, this type of fitness trains the body and the mind.
“It’s a lot about mind and muscle coordination,” she says. “It’s like you have to burn new dendrites in the brain to get your body to move like this. It just takes practice, practice, practice, and then all of a sudden your body gets it. But in doing that, you’re moving muscles that you’ve never moved before or you’ve rarely moved.”
The rectus abdominis — the belly’s “vanity muscles” or “six pack” — are worked by conventional crunches. Belly dancing works underlying layers of abdominal muscle. With slow moves like the taxeem and the maya, dancers have to pull their abdominal muscles toward the inside.
“And all these muscles are engaging, and it helps to create that beautiful hourglass shape that women have,” she says.
“You get a shape in your abdominal area that you can’t get from [lifting ] weights or sit-ups or anything else,” she says. “It slims the waist down. And I’ve never seen anything else that does that. It actually tapers the waistline in.”
A belly roll isolates the lower and upper abdominals. The lower abs are pooched out as the lower belly stretches, while the upper abs are pulled in tight. Then, the lower abs are pulled in, while the upper abs stretch out.
“It’s back and forth and back and forth, and that’s how you get the belly roll,” she says.
Steinauer draws an oval in the air from above the hip down to the midthigh — the “saddlebag” area. “This area that troubles all women, this gets worked so heavily in belly dancing,” she says.
“The more you do belly dancing, the harder of a workout it becomes because you start to get really into that muscle and you start really specifying your movements.”
Mixing slow and fast moves, belly dancing gets the heart rate up and then brings it down, “which is actually better for your heart,” she says, than always doing a steady-state aerobic workout.
With moves like the Arabic and the shimmy, dancers stand on the balls of their feet — working the backs of their legs. Many moves also lengthen and stretch muscles and help the ligaments.
“You’re moving every body part. You’re even moving your wrists,” she says. SHIMMYING IN THE KITCHEN
Jennifer Schuyler’s mother and aunt belonged to a belly dance troupe in Little Rock when she was a little girl. She tagged along to practices and shows, and her grandmother made her an outfit when she was about 6.
She danced off and on when she was a teenager.
“It was so unique and so different from what the other kids my age were taking,” she says.
She had four children and got away from belly dance. But, she knew her friend, Kelley Screeton, belly danced. So Schuyler refreshed her moves with modern videos. She was pleased by how much she remembered.
The pair founded Elemental Belly Dance Troupe last winter. For a while, they taught classes at a store in Damascus.
Schuyler, who recently moved to Cabot, works the night shift as a cardiac nurse at Baptist Health Medical Center. She didn’t do any other regular exercise before she started belly dancing.
Her 10-year-old daughter dances with her, sometimes for public events, and she’s started to teach her 7-year-old daughter. She loves that she can share this with her daughters, like her mother did with her.
“It kind of brings me full circle,” she says.
At any given time, she says, someone can walk into their house and there will be music playing and she and her daughters will be “doing dishes and shimmying around the kitchen.”
In the past year that Schuyler started belly dancing again, she’s lost about 35 pounds. “You’re using muscles that you don’t usually use, and that you don’t usually use in a lot of other things that you do to exercise,” she says.
It’s strengthened her neck and lower back muscles, alleviating previous pain. And she’s more limber.
She says the dance form celebrates a woman’s curves.
“Belly dance is wonderful because you can do it at any age and you can do it at any shape,” she says. “You don’t have to be Twiggy to look good belly dancing.”
Screeton, who lives in North Little Rock, says she remembers her maternal grandmother taking a belly dancing course at a YWCA, just for fun. Then, she saw a belly dancer at a Los Angeles county fair when she was 16.
“It was the grace, the sensuality, and it was powerful and yet feminine at the same time,” says Screeton, 40. “It kind of puts you back in touch with being a girl, instead of being someone’s mom, someone’s wife, someone’s daughter.”
Once in Arkansas, she started learning belly dance with her friend, Schuyler, to get back into shape. She played volleyball in high school and college, a sport that involved jumping, diving and leaping. She had strong muscles, particularly in her upper body, but “you sort of lose your curve.” “ Belly dance has kind of whittled away the extras, ” she says. Screeton says belly dancing has been a good cardiovascular workout, helping control her blood pressure. It’s also strengthened and toned her legs, trimmed and toned her arms and shaved inches from her hips.
LEARNING TO RELAX Jennifer Tripp had studied dance — ballet, jazz and tap — from age 5 through college, but she didn’t discover belly dance until she moved to Lowell. In 2001, she took classes at the Arts Center of the Ozarks in Springdale.
Now 32, she’s been doing belly dance ever since and teaches classes in Fayetteville. She’s also leader of the Desert Fire Dance Troupe, which was founded in the mid-1970 s.
She grew up with lots of other dancers who were “itty, bitty, teeny tiny things.” Though belly dancing has toned her body somewhat, she enjoys that women from slender to plus size can do it.
“I love that it celebrates a woman’s body and doesn’t make you feel guilty for not being a size 2,” she says.
Tripp no longer wears baggy clothes because belly dancing made her “more comfortable with my body,” she says.
Her ballet background helped her immediately with holding the correct posture during moves, with her tailbone tucked and stomach in. But she was used to the snappy, straight movements of jazz and tap, and it took her a little while to relax her moves for belly dance, which “is a little more fluid.”
“You do get a good exercise, but you don’t feel like you’ve worked,” she says. “I hate to exercise, but I love to belly dance.”
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