steampunk bellydance

I’m not sure exactly how long steampunk bellydance has been a thing–I believe my first exposure started around the time that Beats Antique started adding Creepy Circus Music(tm) to their repertoire, about 2008-2009. What I find interesting, given my general bibliomania, is that this was my first exposure to the overall concept of steampunk, rather than finding the genre through fiction. But I think that’s significant, given the importance of making and costuming in the steampunk movement. There are a lot of different ways to do steampunk bellydance, and in some cases, it’s really a question of costume rather than anything inherent in the choreography.

Within the multitudes contained by the broad genre “bellydance,” steampunk falls squarely under “fusion.” It’s a matter of flavoring bellydance costuming and movements with bits and pieces of another genre and/or style. Take a look at this piece, the Dragonettes dancing to Abney Park’s song “Katyusha”:

(This is the first video that comes up when you search for “steampunk bellydance” on YouTube, by the way.) The base costuming is pretty standard-issue tribal style: multi-tiered skirt over full pants, choli-ish tops, head ornamentation. However, the details are steampunk: the iconic goggles rather than Central Asian metalwork, and the vest and boleros have a somewhat industrial look. Only one dancer is wearing a belt, but it’s studded leather with an attached pouch like a holster, rather than a shisha-embroidered, camel-tasseled sash. The way the skirts are tucked up resembles the ruched overskirts and bustles of mid-nineteenth century Western fashion.

The dancing, too, is typical tribal style group improv (and beautifully performed, I would add). The only moves that you probably wouldn’t find elsewhere in standard bellydance are the kicks, which add a taste of nineteenth century can-can but also seem like a bit of a nod to some European and American folk dance styles. The music is Abney Park, which is probably the steampunk band, and the song itself is a sterling example of folklorismus–something that did not arise spontaneously over time in an authentic folklore context, but is deliberately created in the style of folk music/dance/art, often for tourism purposes, usually to inspire feelings of authenticity and patriotism. This song was written in 1938 to inspire Russian patriotism in the face of the threat of German invasion during World War II, drawing on the musical and lyrical style of Russian folk song. From a contemporary perspective, then, it carries the same aura of exoticism also found in bellydance, and like bellydance, it is a construct composed of folkloric elements without being “folk” in the strict, academic sense. I think that’s one of the reasons this fusion works so well–the “Eastern” and “Western” elements are well-balanced in how they reference their respective base cultures.

This one is Alyssa and Aniqua dancing to Beats Antique’s “Roustabout,” the Creepy Circus Music piece mentioned above.

This is a good example of what has otherwise become, unfortunately, an extremely overused trope in steampunk bellydance: the dancing doll. The costuming is not at all bellydance, and to be honest, I rather cringe at the very idea of dancing in stilletto-heeled boots. Do note, however, that the dancer in white is wearing a corset, and both women are wearing tiny top hats at a saucy tilt–both elements typical of steampunk cosplay. The choreography runs the usual pattern of dancing doll numbers: dolls wake up, dance in jerky unison, run temporarily amok, return to submission to their mechanical imperatives, and finally run out of steam. My only criticisms here are that the costumes illustrate the main reason why most bellydancers wear outfits that hide leg movement–unlike ballet, where you want people admiring your legwork, bellydance legs generally support what’s going on up above, and are rather awkward when revealed to public eye–and the dancers’ arm movements are a little too soft for the mechanical motions they’re supposed to represent.

One reason that everyone does dancing doll numbers for steampunk bellydance is that they are a natural fit–“Roustabout” and other examples of Creepy Circus Music lend themselves well to jerky, “clockwork” moves that fit the themes of industrial technology, mad science, transgressive humanity, and displaced/repressed representations of slavery that are endemic to steampunk literature. Those moves provide a great opportunity to show off the pops, locks, and other isolations of bellydance. To that extent, the fusion fits. But I think they often fall flat because the dancers aren’t really paying attention to the underlying ideas of decay and corruption that drive the steampunk side of things here. Abney Park’s “Herr Drosselmeyer’s Doll” makes the connection between dancing doll and sex toy explicit, and I find it interesting that the mechanical dance works much better here as ballet–though when the dancer starts to get “sexy,” all of a sudden bellydance undulations and shimmies break through. I also like the way the tutu gets used with a nod to hoop dancing:

A big part of modern bellydance is dancing with props–veil, cane, sword, candle, fan–and a big part of steampunk cosplay is parasols, especially in the wake of Gail Carriger’s best-selling Parasol Protectorate series. It’s a natural progression to use parasols in steampunk bellydance, and I particularly like this performance to Beats Antique’s “Erase” by the troupe Umbra. (And I want those long lace-ruffled pants. Like, now.)

The choreography is straightforward urban tribal style, as is the costuming, but with a dug-out-of-grandma’s-attic flair that nods to steampunk Victorianism. The parasols, though, are what I would say really makes this steampunk rather than urban tribal. Compare to this piece, by PURE Sarasota, which is not at all steampunk, but incorporates Japanese parasols used similarly to traditional folkloric Middle Eastern cane dance:

And finally (for the moment), some performances that are not, strictly speaking, steampunk, but that I think get more to the heart of the matter than many: Rachel Brice and her troupe Indigo did a show called Le Serpent Rouge in 2010 that nodded to vaudeville/honky-tonk/general nineteenth-early-twentieth century traveling entertainments. Although her dancing, along with partners-in-crime Mardi Love and Zoe Jakes (of Beats Antique), is urban tribal style, the music and show context have a steampunk vibe, especially the vaguely Eastern European, klezmer-verging-on-jazz, or outright jazz itself numbers. Some of these are kind of long, but man, are they worth watching. This, people, is how it’s done:

foundation myth

Once upon a time (1987, to be precise), there were three little teaching assistants: Leslie, Susan, and Dan. In those days, when Folklore was a discipline in which you could get a Masters or PhD at UCLA, the field was going through one of its periodic convulsions in which everyone and his youngest brother was arguing about what folklore “really” is. A useful side effect of this exercise is that, once you have defined folklore to your fancy (which generally boils down to “what I like to study”), it becomes possible to define people who don’t fit that definition as “not real folklorists.” For it is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among folklorists, that all folklorists are good folklorists, and anyone whose work isn’t up to snuff isn’t a bad folklorist, or a sloppy scholar, or a just plain annoying person who won’t shut up at faculty meetings, but isn’t really a folklorist at all.

Jacob and William Grimm–a couple of real folklorists! Don’t they look interesting?

Susan studied how people told stories about things that had happened to them in the course of daily life. Dan studied people who saw visions of the Virgin Mary, space aliens, and other things that probably don’t exist in mundane reality. Leslie studied comparative mythology, especially medieval Celtic stories about journeys to the Otherworld. And all of them had been told at one point or another that they weren’t real folklorists. One day, as they were sitting around in the TA office, they came to the conclusion that all this arguing about “real” folklore was a waste of time.

“We study this stuff because it’s interesting,” one of them said.

“So why don’t we just change the name of the Center for Folklore and Mythology Studies to the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff and get down to studying it rather than wasting time arguing about it?” said another. (I’m pretty sure it was me, but Susan or Dan may dispute this. It wouldn’t be a myth worth its salt if there weren’t variants.)

“Yeah!” said the third, because there had to be dialogue for everyone. “As long as it’s real interesting, you can come here and study it.”

And thus was born the idea for the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff.

The Gundestrup Cauldron. You could spend a lifetime thinking about the imagery on this thing.

UCLA eventually threw its weight behind the alternative notion of changing the name of the Folklore and Mythology Center and Program to “Closed for Business.” Dan became a bona fide professor of Folklore, which is a mightily legitimating position to be in, so if he finds something interesting, it’s folklore enough to be getting on with. Susan became a corporate librarian, where she doesn’t have to worry about how people tell stories but still pays attention, because it’s interesting. And I became an academic editor and writer and intellectual flibbertigibbet, because there is just too much Interesting Stuff in the world. Ooooooh, shiny!

But the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff (CSRIS) never really left me. For the last two years, I’ve been working on a Novel As Yet To Be Securely Titled that mashes up a lot of Celtic mythology with steampunk, alternate history, and anything else that takes my fancy. It’s set in 1920 in a world where, due to a concatenation of circumstances, the New World was colonized by the Welsh in the late twelfth century and, rather than having a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, Northern Europe reverted to its various indigenous paganisms. Oh yeah, and there are Galatian bellydancers.(“What do I want to have in this novel?” I asked myself. “Prince Madoc! And Druids! And … and bellydancers!” And for a while I thought I was sunk, until I remembered that there was a tribe of Celts who, in the second century BCE, made it as far east as central Anatolia and were still speaking a recognizably Celtic language in the fourth century CE, but who surely picked up some local habits as well ….)

It strikes me that a CSRIS is a perfect venue to talk about the background to what I’m writing, through essays, musing, rants, book reviews, and imagery: Celtic mythology, Welsh history and language, 1920s fashion and design, bellydance (particularly of a Turkish bent) and its music, Bollywood item numbers, alternate history and steampunk, paganism (neo- and otherwise), the most interesting cats in the world, and all the other shiny, pretty stuff there is to think with.

Because as long as it’s interesting, we don’t need no steenkin’ academic disciplines.

Florrie and Nellie, the Most Interesting Cats in the World