A woman's place, a woman's language.

With so many ‘male’ places in our society and culture, it is liberating to create a ‘female’ one.

A place to be a woman, without being the mother, the wife, the girlfriend, the daughter. Yet a woman. Because there is also a womanhood to be discovered, apart from those definitions. It's not that we do not want to be mothers, wives, girlfriends and daughters - we love to, they are important aspects of our lives and our personalities. But we are so many other things too. And for those we are looking for a new language.

Sometimes we will allow others into this new place we are creating, to watch and enjoy, or even to participate, to talk to us with this new language...
But before we can do that, we have to create that place, that language together.

Belly dance has been danced and enjoyed by women for possibly thousands of years. For women and in women's places, for and with each other, in a joint communication and intimacy that we, Western women seldom experience. If you like, this is the ‘harem’, in the positive sense of the word. It is a place and a language that women can use to dance, that is ‘talk’, with each other.
There is something amazingly intimate about belly dancing together. It provides us with both energy and peace. It's sensual, erotic, sexy…. Above all, it is a shared intimacy, the joy of sharing, of participating, of discovering we have bodies and we live in them.
We want to move and be moved.

Belly dancing can also be a language that we bring to the outside world, where we let others enjoy it - the sensuality of a shoulder, hips, hair, an arm, a smile.
It is a language for being sensual, sexy, erotic, seductive,... for yourself and for others, male or female. But with our own language, not theirs. As a subject, not an object. Active, not passive. A coming to one's own, not an alienation.
In the end, the sensuality of belly dancing does not make me into an object, to please the gaze of others. Because I am still and always am present within it, with my own sensuality.

Artemisia, October 2003