SHOWCASE TO EXPLORE ORIENTAL DANCING

Dancer Agelika Nemeth knows it is an uphill battle to persuade Americans to take Middle Eastern dance seriously.

“In the (United States), this dance has become connected with pure sex,” Nemeth said in a recent interview. “It has a lot of hootchy-kootchy connotations.

“But there’s so much more to it than sex. I’m glad I have this forum to educate people about this dance form.”

Nemeth’s forum is a program of Middle Eastern dance at 8 p.m. Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, where she has taught dance for the past 10 years.

Among the samplings that Nemeth, her students and guest professionals will perform will be dances from Lebanon, Egypt, Armenia, North Africa and other areas in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as a flamenco suite and magic acts. Middle Eastern cuisine will be available during intermission.

Reflecting on the varying impressions of the art form over the ages, Nemeth noted that “Middle Eastern dance seems to have gotten a lot of names throughout its long history.

“ ‘Belly dancing’ is its most current name--and perhaps the least accurate. Serious professionals don’t like to call it that. ‘Oriental’ or danse orientale is preferred. However, the term (belly dancing) has become so pervasive, even Egyptians call it that now.”

Nemeth conceded that “the pelvic area is of great importance in the dance form,” but the most important element, she said, is a dancer’s interpretation of the music.

“The dance is a beautiful interplay of rhythmic movements,” she said. “The dancer is interpreting the music with her body. Her ability and skill to interpret the music is what turns on the audience, besides her beauty and costuming.

“She doesn’t just get up there and do anything. She has this form, and within the form, she can improvise.”

Nemeth, who was born in Germany to Hungarian parents and came to California in 1969, began studying Middle Eastern dance in 1973 while teaching German and English. Encouraged by her dance teachers, she soon began making a career as a professional entertainer in Greek, Arab and Persian nightclubs in Hollywood and Long Beach and has continued to perform locally since a move to Irvine five years ago.

In addition to teaching dance at Orange Coast College, she also gives classes at Golden West College and for the community services department in Tustin.

Nemeth explained that in Middle Eastern dance, a dancer uses rotations and circular movements of all kinds, undulations, figure eights, shimmies or shivering movements of the shoulders, hips or whole torso. “And then there are also thrusting movements: hip thrusts, hip lifts and hip drops that correspond with the drum beats--the drum being a very important aspect of the dances,” she said.

“Some people believe it was the type of dance done during a matriarchal period of goddess worship and that it is a fertility dance because it focuses so much on the pelvic region.”

Nemeth said, however, that the circular head and neck movements derived from a different dance, the Zar, “a dance of exorcism.”

“To a certain extent, the Zar has been outlawed because it goes back to pagan forms before Islam,” she said. “But they can’t outlaw it entirely. In Egypt, people will hire dancers to come into the home of a sick person and dance the Zar to release the evil spirits.”

But danse orientale remains the social dance of the Middle East, with each country or region adding “its own interpretation and flavoring,” Nemeth said.

“Little girls learn it in their homes from their mothers, sisters and from each other. It is basic, and usually it is improvised in the home and at social gatherings. Women are allowed to perform this dance at weddings and at big (social) events.”

But when danse orientale moves into the nightclubs, it loses its social acceptability, and the dancer finds herself “on the fringes of (Moslem) society,” she said.

“She can be admired, she can become very rich and famous, but you wouldn’t want your son to marry her,” Nemeth explained.

Also, the emphasis on youthful dancers in the nightclubs creates still another misapprehension about the dance form, Nemeth said.

“This dance done by a young girl--yes, she has youth, innocence, her freshness. But at each stage of a woman’s life, she adds to this dance.

“I find it takes the knowledge and wisdom of maturity to really express the emotions of the music,” she said.

“The Middle East is a very emotional region, and that emotion is expressed in their music. And as a dancer, I really can’t do it justice until I know how to suffer, know birth, divorce or the joy of the seasons.”

In her show, Nemeth will be featuring a 71-year-old dancer, Dorothy Hefner, who began her professional dance career at the age of 12. “When she dances Oriental, you can see that experience,” Nemeth said.

But what Nemeth calls danse orientale is just one dance form from the Middle East on the program, she said.

Regional dances and a flamenco dance suite also will be presented to illustrate the similarities and influences between the Arab and Spanish cultures, due to the Arab domination of Spain from the 8th to the late 13th Century.

“This area is so rich that I get carried away when I talk about it,” Nemeth said. “The concert will have a lot of variety and creativity. It will be a visual delight.”