Group gives belly dancing new image

Minutes before the Different Drummer Belly Dancers of Bloomington were scheduled to perform at the 2005 Allerton Belly Dance Festival, one thought ran through the mind of the troupe’s founder and director Margaret Lion, “Oh my God, what if everyone’s going to be offended?”
The troupe had decided to perform their signature number, a belly dance version of Sir-Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”
There was usually no cause for worry since their routine audience was Bloomington. But in the middle of rural Allerton, Ill., Lion and her troupe were concerned the song choice may not have been wholesome enough for the small-town.  
The troupe, made up of Lion and three of her dancing buddies, took the stage. The dancers were dressed in the traditional layered outfit that complimented the troupe’s American Tribal belly dance style — cropped shirts underneath bras with coins and tassels, and jingling hip wraps over floor-length skirts.
“How many of you think your butt is too big?” she asked the crowd. All the women in the audience raised a hand.  
“How many of you love belly dancing? Because it doesn’t matter how big, or small, or what shape you are, or color, size or age,” Lion said to the audience. “You all look good belly dancing! Well, this is our ode to the backside.”  
In 2003, Lion organized a group of herself and three friends out of her initial desire to combine her love of belly dance with her love of
rock ‘n’ roll.
The women rehearsed in Lion’s living room. A performance opportunity arose in the fall of that year, and Lion ran with it.
“I thought, ‘I really want to perform at this venue, and I want to do something fun, but I don’t really want to perform by myself. I want a troupe there with me,’”
Lion said.
Though originally organized as a one-time gig, the troupe continued to dance together.
Even though the members have changed since that first performance (and many times since), the idea behind the troupe is the same now as it was eight years ago — expression through the art of
belly dance.  
“If there’s a style we like, we do it. If there’s a move we like, we do it. . . my troupe is not limited,” Lion said.
A challenge of having a belly dance troupe in a college town is the constant flow of people in and out of a group of performers.
Lion, however, said she is optimistic about the frequent turnover. She said change is what fuels the overall flow of creativity.
The newest member is Irina Shishova, a Moscow native rounding out the first year of her MBA program with the Kelley School of Business. She stumbled upon Lion’s troupe after a drawing class in 2005 and has been dancing
ever since.
Jeana Jorgensen is an IU folklore and gender studies doctoral candidate. Having grown up in California, she began belly dancing in high school and joined Different Drummer upon moving to Bloomington six years ago.
“I was always a tomboy growing up,” Jorgensen said. “I was stick thin, and then when I went through puberty, I got hips, and I hated it. I hated my body and there was no way for me to feel good about who
I was.
“I took a belly dance class on a whim when I was 16. It made me feel good to have hips because you used hips a lot in belly dance.”
But while the troupe has a positive self-image attitude toward belly dancing, a stigma still exists: It’s too sexy. Belly dancers are aware of the stereotypes, and the members of Different Drummer are
no exception.
Jorgensen, who completed her undergraduate studies in California before she moved to Indiana, decided to deal with these misconceptions
constructively.
“I had this problem when I was coming out to Indiana. My professor back at Berkley, who had done his graduate work at Indiana, he was like, ‘Well, don’t tell them you belly dance. That’s a little too risqué,” Jorgensen said. “But I‘m ‘out’ as a belly dancer.”
“I try to be very open about it because hopefully it will teach someone something new either about Middle Eastern culture or the way the dance is practiced here.”  
Bloomington has at least five troupes and many solo dancers.
Different Drummer Dancers set themselves apart by taking belly dancing, using innovative music and making certain choreography choices, to make a foreign dance form more accessible to a
Midwestern audience.
For these women, belly dance is about being inclusive. As Jorgensen described it, “It’s something that is family-friendly and that anyone can enjoy and anyone
can learn.”
Different Drummer, as the name suggests, has never been a troupe to abide by conventional Middle Eastern music, which focuses much more on rhythmic complexity than Western music.     
“We don’t dance to a lot of straight-up Middle Eastern music,” Jorgensen said. “I think it’s some of the most beautiful music in the world, but one of the things we do in the troupe is try to connect with our audience, and a lot of Americans just don’t know how to relate to Middle
Eastern music.”