To Dance With Meaning by Tammy Johnson 02/22/2012
 After a few years of investment in costumes, classes, weekend workshops and performances, I was ready to take my bellydance experience to the next level. So there I was, sampling class number three on my list of local bellydance offerings. Facing a mirror, I attempted to mimic the instructor’s every move. I couldn’t help but think about how I looked like no one else there. This wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. I had felt this way through grade school, college and in many professional settings. But it was a strange sensation to have with bellydance. Unnerving, even. An hour later, after paying for the class, I didn’t get as much as a hello or thank you. Etang and I have had many conversations about this and other experiences in dance classes. Bellydance for us has become more than a way of gracefully moving from point A to point B. The dance has become an essential means of self-connection, as well as a way of creating community with others. In the hour spent working on technique, we want something more. That is why we begin each class with a warm-up routine that explicitly incorporates the Your Body Raks four central values. I would think that it would be difficult to be a good dancer if you weren’t fully present. So we start there, asking each woman to listen to her body and be open to learning something new about the dance and herself. Extending the connection from self to others comes next with the concept of awareness. This acknowledges that we are building a community of women who confidently take their place on the dance floor, but consciously make space for others, as well. We do all of this with language and actions that embrace the concept of body love, leaving judgment of self and others at the door. And finally, but most certainly, there is joy, a sense of levity that helps you embrace the movement, smile and breathe! Keep up with us daily on Facebook, “like” our page, Your Body Raks! Add Comment Dance At Every Size by Etang Inyang 02/20/2012
 All bodies deserve love and acceptance. Your Body Raks encourages love and acceptance for bodies of all sizes and shapes. So many of us, of all sizes, have been impacted by body image deterioration. In Your Body Raks classes and workshops, we do not promote an “us” vs. “them” value system. The often-promoted language of “real women” is false, harmful and divisive. All of us, with all of our unique experiences, are “real women” with “real bodies”. We acknowledge the self-image struggles that women and girls of all sizes face. We do not erase anyone’s truth. Our intention is to build a community, a movement of women of all sizes embracing who they are through bellydance. The dance movements will look different on different bodies. When we work with beginner bellydancers, it is necessary that the dancer learn to feel and experience the movements for herself. We prefer not to teach in spaces with mirrors. It is so easy to get caught up in the mirror reflection and how we look as we are practicing a new movement. As a baby dancer, when I took classes with mirrors I was taken with my image. I was mesmerized with myself. It’s a noteworthy change because for so long I avoided mirrors and my image. At that time, I could not get out of the mirror--I looked at myself and everyone else. I was inwardly critical of myself and compared myself to others. I was in my head and not in my body. I connected to what I looked like rather than to what I felt. “My shimmy does not look like your shimmy”. And I know now, that is ok--our bodies are different sizes, and we are shaped differently. There’s no way we would have the same shimmy. Now, when I practice, the mirror is there, but I look beyond the mirror. I project and emote my own story and the story of the music. We encourage women of all shapes and sizes to join us for body love. Dance at every size! Keep up with us daily on Facebook, "like" our page Your Body Raks! A Beginner’s Bellydance Journey 02/15/2012
 I didn’t even own a hip scarf, let alone one with those pretty, jingly coins on them. So I took a deep breath, put on some sweats and a t-shirt, wrapped a scrunchy in my hair, and headed out to my first bellydance class. I had watched a friend dance for a while and longed for the sense of liberation that she carried with every step. But that longing didn’t quiet the voices in my head that screamed “Run and hide!” every time I went to a gym. Will I look silly, clumsy and laughably uncoordinated? Am I wearing the right thing? Will I pick up the routine easily or be the odd one out? Will my body be able to do those things? Will this be fun or another ego blow? Then something big happened. This was not another 1, 2, 3 & 4 workout drill. This was something else. One class led to two, a week, then a month. It’s a decade later, and I’m still dancing. What happened? I liked bellydancing, but more importantly, my body loved it. Yes, there were times that I got tripped up by the steps. And truth be told, it still happens on occasion. But those challenges taught me to be patient with myself, to appreciate my body’s own rhyme and reason. Eventually, my body would make those moves its own. I just had to remember to be patient, breathe and have fun.  Tammy as a baby bellydancer in her 1st solo And, yes, it was fun! The music had an undeniable beat that dared me to stand still. So, along with the other women in the class—some younger, some older, of all sizes, races and backgrounds—I moved. We became a community of women, sometimes dancing in unison and at other times taking our turn at a solo. Listening to the music, we flirted, smoldered and laughed to the story that it told. We cheered each other’s dance triumphs and encouraged each other to take that next tricky but satisfying step. All of this comes back to me as I reflect on the first week of Your Body Raks classes. After months of dreaming, planning and hoping for the best, the women arrived. Together we stretched, shimmied, walked like an Egyptian and yes, laughed. But how did they feel? R. wrote in her survey, “I felt supported and accepted, with so much ease and grace. It was fun. I felt like the goddess I had forgotten I was.” Yes! That is what Your Body Raks is about: bellydance, body justice and joy. Etang and I feel so honored that these women have chosen to us as their guides through the wonderful world of bellydance. See you next week! Keep up with us daily on Facebook, “like” our page, Your Body Raks! Dancing at the Intersection by Etang Inyang 02/13/2012
 I have been thinking a lot about the different intersecting identities I claim and the communities I belong to. For so long, I have felt compelled to divide up the pieces of myself. And others have seen me as compartmentalized, parts of a whole. Censored, and even silenced. I am the sparkly bellydancer, the third generation educator, the documentary filmmaker, the queer fat femme of African descent, the survivor, my mother’s daughter, the shy girl with uncontrollable giggles. I am all of these things and more, but seldom have these identities been fully integrated. I have lived with a disconnect. The me that surfaces often depends on which community I am with and where I am. One part of my identity quieted for the spotlight of another piece of myself. As we are building Your Body Raks, it has struck me that this work is encouraging me to be my whole self. I am at the intersection of myself. I no longer have to choose just one street to dance down. Now, I am shimmying with entire communities. I no longer have to choose between bellydancer or educator, bellydancer or queer, bellydancer or fat, bellydancer or my mother’s daughter. All of these pieces of myself intersect with Your Body Raks. At our launch party last week and again when we receive e-mails, phone calls, and meet new people, I pause to observe the many intersecting communities who support us and want to dance with us. As we launch Your Body Raks, Tammy and I want to acknowledge and appreciate the different communities that we are a part of and that have shown support for us over the years. Thank you so much for your love. We love you back. Keep up with us daily on Facebook, “like” our page Your Body Raks! The Launch of Liberation by Tammy Johnson 02/08/2012
 In a traditional Egyptian bellydance performance, the band may play for a minute or more before the audience even sees the dancer. When she finally appears, she makes you wait a bit longer, circling the stage with her veil, showing off her elaborately beaded costume and her brilliant smile that hints, “Look at me. I’m beautiful and am about to dazzle you right out of your seat.” After a few twirls, she discards the veil, and the magic begins. She proceeds to captivate you with her soulful taqsim, rouses you with a Saidi cane dance, does a whimsical call and response drum solo with the tabla player, and leaves you wanting more at her finale. This is why I love bellydance. The dance tells a story, one full of drama, elegance, angst and joy. It mirrors my own. For years I waited in the wings while the music played. For a while, I cheered on others, with a secret desire to join them. Afraid to step out on my own, solo opportunities were rare, but liberating. And having sampled a taste of what the dance could offer, I was then told to wait. Wait for the right time, the right body or somebody else’s right moment. Would anyone hire someone who looked like me, who doesn’t reflect the clichéd Hollywood ingénue in age, weight or manner? Then it happened. In January 2011, a revolution was sparked in Egypt, the home of bellydance. The decades of tyranny and suppression of rights were being met by the voices and bodies of millions who drew a line in the sand. The country’s future was uncertain, but liberation from the status quo was not. It was a time of reckoning for me, as well. As I was planning a transition of my own, I watched the protest with a sense of awe and urgency. It was time for me, too, to break away from the rules of others and chart my own course. Today, the people of Egypt are still in the streets fighting to be totally free. And so am I. Today, I can proudly lay claim to something that I was taught to doubt. I am a bellydancer. What’s more, I am a professional bellydancer. When the time is right, and not a moment sooner, I enter the stage with a brilliant smile. And as I discard my veil and prepare to wow you with my dance, I think to myself, “Yes. This is where I belong.” So join me on this journey full of drama, elegance, angst and joy. This Thursday’s Your Body Raks launch party is just the beginning of our own revolution. It’s going to be liberating. See you there! Keep up with us daily on Facebook, "like" our page Your Body Raks. Baltimore's Shems with the Sahara Band led by DJKimo at Ya Salaam! November 2009 at the Balitmore Museum of Art Auditorium, Baltimore, MD.  I did not grow up with dance. In fact, I grew up self-conscious of the way I moved in the world. I was a fat biracial black girl raised in a white family. I took up too much space and not enough space. I grew up receiving a lot of unwanted attention for my full, developed body. I thought I was just a body. I tried to hide in oversized clothing. Though I was a big girl, I tried to move like I was tiny. Visible invisibility or was it invisible visibility? From my teen years through most of my twenties, dance for me consisted of bopping my head to music and shuffling my feet back and forth in an awkward two-step. The musicality gene did not make its way to me. I was generally off beat and forever behind the music. I was so not a dancer. You know that saying, “dance like no one is watching”? Well, for me everyone was watching, and I was watching. I could not let go and enjoy movement. I could not release what I thought I looked like to other people. I envied women who danced. They closed their eyes grooving to an internal rhythm. They were attractive to me. I wanted to be them. I thought they possessed a powerful secret that was out of my reach. I wanted to know their secret.  Etang as a baby dancer in her 2nd solo In 2001, when I was 29, I stumbled upon a bellydance class taught by Asata Iman. I never sought out bellydance, bellydance found me. I was interested in North African history and culture, but I had very little knowledge of the dance. I just knew that I was not the stereotypical image of a bellydancer at all. A woman on a local e-mail list announced that Asata was teaching a class in Albany geared for full-figured women. I went and tried it out only because I felt safe knowing there would be other women like me. I took that step. I don’t know if I would have stepped into the class without that comfort. In the routine of the class, something sparked for me. I looked forward to going each week and signed up for an additional class. I had spent my entire life disconnecting from my body. Here I was forced to feel the music and feel the movements of my body. At 29, I was a baby dancer. Learning choreography was over my head, and I often got my left and right mixed up and just forget about spins. But those things did not matter. I was learning to connect to myself and unlock my own power, my own secret. I found myself when I relaxed into a tuck, opened my arms and raised my chest. I found myself when I sunk into a hip drop framing my hip. I found myself when my hips swayed and rotated in an unending figure 8. I found myself when I grounded into a strong, powerful shimmy. There’s nothing invisible here. I took my space to account for my whole luscious self. In the eleven years that have passed since I walked into my first bellydance class, I have claimed the identity of dancer for myself. I am still conscious of an audience when I dance, but it is totally flipped. When I dance now, I perform. I play to the audience, connect, share my joy, tease and flirt. I see them, and they see me. I embrace my visibility. When I tell people that I am a bellydancer, I see their wonder and curiosity. I think they want to know my secret. We invite you to take that step and join us in our classes. We are working intentionally to create a warm, welcoming community of women. We want to dance with you! Join us and discover your own secret. Keep up with us daily on Facebook, “like” our page Your Body Raks! It's About Bellydance by Tammy Johnson 02/01/2012
 Tammy Johnson I’m currently working on a solo routine to Tarek El Sheikh’s Shaabi song, Meya Meya. It’s a fun, upbeat tune that I have seen performed by one of my dance heroes, Tito Seif. It has taken some doing to get to the point where I’m bold enough to go beyond daydreaming about dancing, to actually turning the iPod on and piecing together a shimmy here and a hip drop there into a full choreography. My journey from activist to bellydancer to businesswoman was not an easy or natural transition. How did I get to this place in my life? Bellydance was the key. Before bellydance, I lived my life very much in my head. I leaned heavily on my ability to maneuver around heated debates about race or to engage an audience of five or five hundred in solution-based thinking. What kept me going were the flashes of hope and the knowledge that there were meaningful local victories that never made the front page of the New York Times. But eventually, the years spent as a community organizer, policy analyst, racial justice trainer and writer left me heavy-hearted and soul-weary. As fulfilling as the work could be, there was clearly something missing. An important piece of me was being left out. Then I discovered bellydancing. I would walk into class bone-tired and mentally drained from a day doing battle with data and dogma, and walk out with a smile on my hips called a shimmy. And in the decade that followed, dance helped me rediscover poetry, music, culture, painting and many old loves I had left for dead in my school girl journals. Bellydance introduced Tammy to Tammy. “These are your hips that do this and your tummy that does that. And that’s a good thing.” said bellydance. And I agreed! This was a body that craved to move so much that I started sitting on a yoga ball at work, because being immobile for hours was no longer an acceptable option. Bellydance got me out of my head, into my body, and eventually completely captured my heart. The more I dance, the more I want to dance. Oh yes, the girly girl in me loves the bling, the makeup and the costumes. The applause is validating. I love how this dance makes me feel and how I have made others feel through it. That only happens because bellydance allows me to be fully present in my body, bringing my whole self (full chest, ample hips, wide smile and all) to the dance. Now there is a growing balance among the mystical forces that dictate what I think, how I feel and what I do. So as I weave together this new routine, I do it with an awareness of the culture and the people who created the dance and the music. Muscle memory and musical sensibility tell my body what steps to take. And the dance would not be complete without the expression of joy that it gives me. Finally the head, heart and body are grooving to the same drumbeat. This is what my life’s work, Your Body Raks, is about. The YBR purpose statement makes it clear: "Through bellydance we strive to inspire women and girls to live lives directed by a sense of agency about their health, well being and community." I am all about living a life fully present in my body so that I can mindfully engage the world around me. I want that for myself and for others. Together, we can make that happen. And we can start by celebrating the launch of Your Body Raks on Thursday, February 9th. I hope to see you there!  The Birth of Your Body Raks by Etang Inyang 01/30/2012
 Etang Inyang We are so very excited to launch our dream, Your Body Raks, an Oakland-based business that introduces bellydance to women and girls with a Health At Every Size® perspective through classes, workshops and retreats. As we’re days away from the opening, we thought it would be helpful to understand our history and how we got from there to here. Why Your Body Raks? Tammy and I both found our way to bellydance classes as a way to add movement to our lives. In 2001, I began to attend group classes at the Albany Community Center taught by Asata Iman. There were women of every size and shape in those classes. There were no mirrors. I looked inward, listened and felt the way my body responded to the movements and the music. I could turn off the judgment and the shaming, and turn on the joy that was filling me. This felt new and scary and liberating all at the same time. I connected to myself, and the bellydance bug captured me.  Asata with Troupe Raks Al Tasneem After almost a year of classes, I joined Asata’s student troupe, Raks Al Tasneem. I met Tammy in 2002. She attended all of our performances and claimed her spot as the “troupe roadie.” Helpful with a safety pin here and an encouraging word there, Tammy wanted some of the sparkle for herself and started classes with Asata and soon joined the troupe. In 2006, we decided to form a duet as a means of mutual support and to celebrate dance at every size. We named our duet Raks Africa after the first song we choreographed together, “Raks Africa” by Paul Dinletir, and as an intentional claiming of bellydance as African dance. As a duet, we had more visibility and less of a safety net. We found that very few dancers looked like us or represented our identities. We embraced our visibility and dubbed ourselves Big Bellied Girls Doing Big Things. At the time, we had no idea exactly what big ideas would later bubble up to the surface for us.  Nanna Candelaria As we started together, we took loads of drop-in classes with teachers in the East Bay in search of a mentor who spoke to our sensibilities. We knew that we wanted to be so much more than the spectacle of big-bellied Black girls dancing. We wanted strong technique along with being dynamic entertainers. We decided to study privately with a Bay Area treasure, Nanna Candelaria. We found ourselves as newbies in the dance again, trying to find our individual dancer voices and our collective identity as Raks Africa. Over the years, we have had a shift. Bellydance has become so much more than a hobby. Our shift in identity is in seeing ourselves as professional dancers. This dance has emerged as a core passion in my life. I cannot imagine my life without earth-shaking shimmies and sensual full-body figure 8s. I have discovered hidden, buried pieces of myself through bellydance. In 2009, we started to have an increase in non-dance meetings. We did a lot of brainstorming and visioning about how to give back to our communities through bellydance. We decided that we wanted to work with and mentor young women with bellydance as our tool. As a high school teacher, I was on the front line of witnessing the body image deterioration that so many of our girls are struggling with every day. We had an understanding that it was not enough to just teach girls some bellydance movements and choreography. We had to develop a curriculum that was beyond bellydance. Before the girls could even begin to engage with the dance, they required some “head and heart” time to have some tangible tools to resist the negative messaging about their bodies. How can we dance freely and confidently when we are listening to voices that shame and police our bodies? In our program, an intentional framing of a positive self-image before dancing supports the students’ musicality and technique. We are now in our third year of the growing Girls Raks Bellydance and Body Image Program, a fiscally sponsored project supported by the Dancers’ Group.  Girls Raks students, 2010 Two years of directing Girls Raks has been fulfilling. To witness the positive self-image and growth in young women has been amazing. Then something interesting happened. As Girls Raks grew, many women told us that they wished we taught a similar program for them. Somehow the gyms and fitness programs that they experienced didn’t speak to the need for self-definition. What they got instead were barking orders and a wagging finger of disapproval about who they are and what they look like. These women wanted to have the final say about their bodies. And they wanted to move, to have fun and to bellydance just like we did when we discovered the dance for ourselves. Your Body Raks is the response to this need. Our philosophy states it clearly: "We believe that Your Body Raks is a necessary intervention for confronting body shaming and size policing of women and girls. Because of its history and culture, bellydance is the perfect tool for addressing these issues. Through our work with the Girls Raks Bellydance and Body Image Program for teens, we have witnessed the power of body image transformation and positive self-definition. We share identities with the communities we work with, and we have a calling to interrupt the institutional, interpersonal and internalized oppression of women and girls through conscious media resistance. Nutrition professor Dr. Linda Bacon counters this with a new approach: “Health at Every Size® is based on the simple premise that the best way to improve health is to honor your body. It supports people in adopting health habits for the sake of health and well-being.” We believe in dance at every size. Your Body Raks is inclusive, serving women of all shapes and sizes."  Etang & Tammy, YBR Directors We hope to see you in a class in the next few days. We want to shimmy with you! Remember…Your Body Raks! Classes start February 13th and February 15th! | Your Body raks Blog
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