Looking for my belly

Looking for my belly is a performance/lecture in which I propose a postcolonial and feminist rewriting of the history of Arab dances. It is based on a study of archives and colonial texts that weaves together ‘lived experience’ and historical sources. What remains of ‘belly dancing’? What remains of ‘North African dances’? What is a ‘contemporary Arab dance’, and who decides on the ‘contemporaneity’ of Arab artists? Beyond its aesthetic and artistic dimension, I hypothesise that the Arab dancing body is a construction linked to heterogeneous and sometimes antagonistic discourses, whether they be nationalist, colonialist, or conservative. This lecture/performance is a polyphonic rewriting of the history of belly dances, combining the voices of western colonial texts, the voices of the indigenous and the colonised, and the voices of contemporary dancers.