Different Drummer belly dance troupe founder, director struggles with the stability a broken left foot brings

The volume rises, music filling the living room of an eastside Bloomington house. Three dancers’ hips shake back and forth, rhythmically, in time with the
music.

Margaret Lion, the director, wants to get up and dance, but her foot prevents her from joining her troupe members as they spin and twirl, rolling up and down onto the balls of their feet. She’s a belly dancer at heart, but her left foot, broken since November, blocks her way.

Margaret tries, though. While the rest of the troupe members dance on their feet, she watches their rhythmic actions. Margaret moves her arms, allows her torso to sway back and forth.

Today, her belly dance costume is out of place in comparison to those of the rest of the troupe. Instead of bracelets and a beaded skirt, she wears a white IU women’s basketball T-shirt and two bright flowers, one pink and one yellow, in her brown hair.

The music Margaret plays from her spot on a chair in the corner of the sunlit living room is not traditional, cabaret-style dance music. The troupe puts on a video of a dance choreographed to the theme of “Pirates of the Caribbean.” The rest of the troupe members mimic the figures on the TV screen while Margaret tries to verbally direct.

She laughs and cheers for the other members of her troupe even as she longs to join them. But Margaret is usually laughing. The other members of her troupe say she’s up-front about what she thinks and how she feels, and she almost always feels happy. The laughs and smiles are real, they say.

***

Margaret founded Different Drummer Belly Dancers. When she’s not dancing, she teaches a course about computers in the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. She has a husband but no kids and no intention of having them. She’s a Bloomington native who only ever left the town for a four-year stint in Philadelphia, but she came running back. She didn’t want to turn 30 in Philly because she belongs in the Midwest, she says. She says she’s a fan girl, and her vices are Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, expert belly dancers and IU women’s basketball.

She was at a basketball game when she broke her left foot.

On her way down to the court at Assembly Hall to help with halftime during a women’s game, Margaret didn’t notice a missing metal step, so she fell, breaking her fifth metatarsal.

“I went down,” she says. “There just wasn’t a step there.”

Her injury has intruded into her daily life more than she anticipated. She has come to rely more heavily on the support of her husband and friends. She couldn’t feed herself or even get a glass of water without help.

Getting up to help the dancers in her troupe was an ordeal. She had to pick up the crutches leaning against the wall next to her chair, hoist herself into a standing position and slowly move forward, leaning to stay upright and using her hands to demonstrate suggestions to improve the dance.

But since the troupe began, Margaret has experienced more than her share of injury, which became a joke with the original members of the troupe. She says when she was injured, no one else was allowed to be hurt.

First it was a broken wrist just a few months after the troupe was founded. Then, in 2005, she threw out her back and was stuck in a brace for months. In the past, she’s suffered from tendonitis, which has gone away because she’s been mostly off her feet since November. It’s the good thing about breaking her foot, she says.

But her broken foot has challenged her more than either of her previous injuries did.

“Back surgery recovery was a no-brainer,” she says. “I could walk around and do anything, and they didn’t want me to move a whole lot. It was just easier to get around than it is now.”

More importantly for Margaret, after brief downtime, she was able to return to dancing. Belly dancing helped to make her back stronger, and when her wrist was broken, she just wore a purple cast audience members often confused for a glove, she says.

This time, it’s harder.

“Not being able to dance is just really weird,” she says. “It sucks. It really does.”

***

When Margaret founded Different Drummer, she wanted to marry the dancing she’d come to love in the previous 10 years of intensive practice with the music she grew up with.

“I wanted to show that the dancing is what it is,” she says. “It’s not just this folkloric thing or this cabaret thing. The whole point of the troupe for me was to get this group that was willing to dance to rock and roll.”

She and her troupe primarily use the American Tribal Style of dancing.

ATS was developed in the 1980s by Carolena Nericcio, leader of a San Francisco troupe that had little time to rehearse.

It comprises a set of about 80 moves and allows for improvisation through simple communication between lead and following dancers.

Margaret says people don’t expect to find belly dancers outside of Greek and Turkish restaurants where they might seem to fit into the atmosphere.

Margaret has no interest in dancing in restaurants, though.

The group’s biggest performance of the year is at Gen Con in Indianapolis, one of the country’s largest gaming conventions. The group has done steampunk shows, roller derbies and county fairs.

“There’s just sort of that concept of belly dance that’s just one step up from strippers,” she says. “It’s not. You say that, I’ll probably hit you.”

That’s part of what Margaret is out to prove: Belly dance is dance.

Other than Margaret, the original Different Drummer Belly Dancers have moved on, but there’s a new cast of characters: Irina Shishova, who joined the troupe in 2005, and Liby Ball and Britt Jones, who both joined last fall after Margaret asked some of her students to join the team.

Because of Margaret’s injury and the search for new members, the group started practicing again fewer than two months before a visit from Nericcio in March.

Liby and Britt might be new to the troupe, but Margaret treats them like
family nonetheless.

She calls the troupe members “sweetie” and “honey” and “dear.” She sees them as peers.

They don’t critique each other because it’s as much about having fun as it is about putting on a show. When one member starts to feel superior, it’s time for her to move on.

“That’s what I call the flow of the creativity,” she says. “There comes a time when you do need to be off on your own or you do need to form your own troupe. It’s just natural. The troupe is not a solid, fixed thing. It’s going to constantly evolve.”

***

The healing is a slow process, but it’s a process that’s underway.

During the first months after the injury, Margaret moved from sterile, silver metal crutches to a bright pink cane decorated with flowers.

The boot that was on her left foot is gone, and she bought new shoes. On Tuesday, she wore sneakers for the first time in five months.

“It’s pretty cool,” she says. “I’m wearing real shoes.”

But she says she doesn’t want to push it. The last thing she wants is more surgery, and her foot is still healing. She knows because she can still feel the head of the screw the doctors put in to help fix her foot.

“That’s where the healing is happening,” she says. “So I can feel it. I feel it less and less each day, so that’s good.”

She started physical therapy, two sessions a week, and started swimming again in February.

She had been off her leg since November and originally didn’t plan on dancing again until the summer. She’s found that she can do some easier dance moves already, but she won’t be fully recovered until June, she says.

From her corner in the eastside Bloomington living room, she smiles while Irina, Liby and Britt dance. She claps when the song ends and cheers for them.

The happiness is genuine — Irina says Margaret doesn’t hide her true feelings — but she longs to be next to them, to be able to perform onstage.

She’ll continue to try, moving her arms the same way the rest of the troupe does and following their movements with her eyes. But when her troupe was part of a hafla, a belly dance party, in March, she watched from the crowd.

She says she was going to be too busy organizing the event to join in anyway and that she planned to clap and cheer from the audience, but being onstage is why she loves to dance.

“I have performance needs,” she says. “I want to perform.”