Well the Ithaca Festival is over. Julie and I had a lot of fun. On Saturday afternoon there were two back-to-back bellydance performances that Julie and I went to in the Ithaca Commons. The first was a joint performance by June Seaney’s two troupes, Chandani and Ishtar’s Daughters. Julie and I got there a bit early and found good seats near the front. While we were sitting there waiting for the performance to start, a fellow sitting to my left turned to me and said, “I don’t know about this. Some of these belly dancers look kind of old!” I was a little bit taken aback by this crass comment, but I just replied, “Well in bellydancing there are no age restrictions. You find all ages bellydancing, from teenagers to women in their 80s.” He said “Well I think that they all ought to be beautiful, and they all ought to be under 30.” I said nothing in response to this, to my mind, incredibly stupid comment. After a few minutes I noticed that he left. Apparently the dancers were not hot enough for him. Perhaps what he really wanted was something more like a strip show than a dance performance. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but a strip show is a strip show and dancing is dancing.
Right after June and her dancers got done there was another bellydance performance at the opposite end of the Commons, by the troupe Mirage. Julie and I have kind of a long history with Mirage, since she used to dance with them a few years ago and I used to do some drumming with them (which is how Julie and I first met). While we were watching the Mirage dancers perform I noticed three guys standing next to me who looked like Arabs, they were talking among themselves in what sounded like it could be Arabic. Not only that, but they were singing along with all of the Arabic songs! One of the Mirage dance pieces was performed to a recording of a song by the great Egyptian pop singer Hakim. I turned to one of these Arab guys and said to him, “This song is by Hakim, is that right?” He said “Yes, Hakim.” Later after the song and the dance had finished, this guy conferred with his two friends in Arabic and then turned to me and said, “How you know Hakim?” I explained that I’ve heard Hakim’s CDs and that that I like his music very much. I added that I play Arabic music, on the nai. He said, “Oh, nai. That is good.”
