Today's Gazette
Gut-level diplomacy
First, they hit Place des Arts. If things go as planned, the Bellydance Superstars will then do the Middle East
VICTOR SWOBODA, Freelance
Published: Saturday, November 24 2007Can a troupe of American belly dancers bring peace to the Middle East where guns and diplomats have failed? Unlikely. But if producer Miles Copeland succeeds in his plan to present the Bellydance Superstars in Damascus, Cairo and other Mideast centres, he's certain that the effort can at least be counted on to bring some much-needed American goodwill to the area.
Copeland visited those cities this year to talk to American and local diplomats about bringing his troupe. Formed five years ago, the Bellydance Superstars have performed in 18 countries, including a three-month stint at the famous casino in Monte Carlo.
Montreal's Club Soda has presented them twice. Tomorrow, the 14 female dancers and their Syrian-born percussionist, Isaam Houshan, perform their show, Babelesque, in the larger, more upscale surroundings of Théâtre Maisonneuve.
But never has the group been seen in the Middle East.
Ironically, belly dancing has struggled to survive in Egypt, one of the cradles of the art form.
"In the last 10 years, the fundamentalist movement became more conservative," Jillina Carlana, the group's main choreographer and veteran performer, explained in a recent cellphone interview from their travelling "belly bus" as it rolled toward Chicago.
Carlana spends one month each year studying in Egypt. "At one point, they banned all Western belly dancers (the ban is lifted now). They wanted to preserve the work for Egyptians.
"The Middle East has a love-hate relationship with belly dancing. They have well-known stars, and Egyptians have belly dancing at weddings and important events, but the men wouldn't want their wives or daughters dancing."
Bellydance Superstars have to confront preconceived notions in the West, too.
"In America, bellydancing is entertainment while you're having your falafel, never the main course," Copeland said from his office in Los Angeles.
Copeland, 63, knows the Middle East well, having grown up during the late 1940s and '50s largely in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, where, according to his online biography, his father served as a CIA agent. As a boy in Lebanon, Copeland saw belly dancing occasionally on television.
"Few people know this, but the first show I ever did was a dancing-girl show behind an English rock group, Rupert's People, at the American University in Beirut in 1968. We painted the girls up and they danced around," he said.
Catching the showbiz bug, he went on to bigger things, most notably producing the recordings and tours of The Police and, later, Sting. In the late 1990s, he discovered fusion music - Arabic and Western.
"My past and present merged. The exotic nature of Arabic instrumentation and vocalizing with Western music made this marriage." Mideast music was little appreciated in the West then. After September 11, 2001, selling Mideast sounds became still tougher.
"But I realized from Desert Rose, Sting's biggest hit, that if the public was exposed to the music, they'd buy it."
As a hook for the music, Copeland staged a belly dance competition, thinking that 20-30 girls might enter. More than 180 came from across the United States. Auditions whittled the number to 13. Three of them, including the slender-waisted winner, Amar Gamal, ended up joining the initial Bellydance Superstars.
