by Jess Clarke / photos by Rebecca D’Angelo

Asheville belly dancer Lisa Zahiya.When Lisa Zahiya left a professional ballet training program at 12 because her body was already too curvy to fit the classic ballerina mold, she explored other types of dance. She embraced jazz, hip-hop and musical theater in junior high and high school. But when she took her first belly dancing class in college, she discovered the dance that truly fit. “I found my home. I fell in love with the movement,” Zahiya says. 

It’s a movement that accepts all comers. Whether taut or tubby, no belly is unsuited. And the Asheville area seems suited to belly dance, with Zahiya and a handful of others offering classes, workshops and performances. The Baraka Mundi belly dance company gives free lessons in summer months at Asheville’s Pritchard Park. Downtown restaurants like Mela and Jerusalem Garden have regular belly dancing performances, and festivals like TribOriginal, held in late September in Black Mountain, have helped put Asheville on the belly dancing map. “We now have a national reputation for belly dance,” says Onça O’Leary, 36, who founded Baraka Mundi. “There are a number of artists here with regional and national reputations.”  

While there are few physical prerequisites for belly dancing, it still takes lots of practice to do what Zahiya does. Twisting her torso, she shimmies her hips and shoulders, sinuously moving her arms and tracing figure eights with her hips. Dancing to an Arabic hand drum, her motions are so fluid she could be swimming. Her body becomes a rhythm instrument and absorbs the music’s accents—belly pulsing, hips quivering. “It’s such a beautiful thing when you can see a little bit of vibration in someone,” says Zahiya, who is 30 and uses Zahiya as a stage name (the word is Arabic for “smiling” and was given by a dance teacher). “More than jiggle, it’s a physical representation of the rhythm. When you throw a pebble into a pond, you can see the reverberation,” she says. 

Women take belly dancing classes for exercise or to learn about its Middle East origins. Believe it or not, belly dancing can also help with body-image problems. One Asheville mom who took Lisa Zahiya’s class said she felt self-conscious at first but got over her fear of exposing her midriff. Here, an Asheville student dance group called Banat al-Qamar.The rhythm resonates mostly with women, who do belly dancing for exercise or for a sense of community, joining groups to learn about its Middle East origins. “I don’t have any other girly time in my life,” says Sharina Wittenberg, who runs the international magazine Zaghareet, which focuses on belly dancing and Middle Eastern culture and is based in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. “Suddenly you’re dancing with a bunch of women,” she says. “There’s something really cool about that.” 

Styles of dance vary by country, with prominent techniques originating in Turkey and Egypt. Dancers often use finger cymbals or other hand instruments and props that include veils, swords and canes. Zahiya sometimes uses a traditional Egyptian prop, balancing a candelabrum and candles on a hat. Dance style influences a dancer’s attire, from flashy sequins to earthy wraps. To accentuate movements, dancers may wear fringe or a scarf, beads or coins around their hips. Headbands, anklets, arm pieces and other accessories complete the look. 

In her first belly dancing competition, Zahiya won the 2008 Tribal Fusion Belly Dancer of the Universe contest in California. The style blends ancient movements with urban dance elements. Not bad for a woman who was on a corporate career track with a degree in marketing and international business from the University of Maryland. After college, she took a job selling market research to Fortune 500 companies and then landed a handful of marketing gigs. She still spends about half her time doing freelance marketing for clients across the country, and a few years ago she had plans to attend law school. But for now, she’s happy to trade the suits and heels for sparse costumes and bare feet. Doing marketing part time gives her more time and energy to focus on belly dance. “I’ve called it the great love of my life,” she says. “I love the intellectual aspect of it. I like learning history. I love the connection with other women.” 

Zahiya moved to downtown Asheville from Baltimore in 2006, at first teaching belly dance in the River Arts District’s Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance studio. Earlier this year she opened her own Studio Zahiya, which offers classes, performances and workshops. She’s found that people interested in belly dancing often form a small but fascinating subculture. And yet the practice has also shimmied its way into the mainstream. O’Leary, the Baraka Mundi founder who moved to Asheville in 1994 and now tours and performs nationally, has seen attitudes change. “It went from being sort of shocking…to belly dance classes at the Y and in the public schools. We’ve worked very hard to help create awareness that it’s a family-friendly, folkloric art form,” she says.

Believe it or not, exposing your midriff can also help with body image. “It can look great on a really, really voluptuous woman,” says Zahiya, who has taught at events about eating disorders. “I’ve got hips and a chest, and I’m a curvier person,” she says. “I had body-image issues, and belly dance helped me immensely with that.” O’Leary now teaches a class on making movement fun and building self-esteem at Asheville’s Claxton Elementary School. “For young girls, the onslaught of not feeling good enough about their bodies starts really early,” she says. Adriana Adarve, 44, takes Zahiya’s class with her daughter, who is 13. “I did feel very self-conscious at the beginning. My belly was like putty, kind of bulgy,” she recalls. Zahiya reassured her. Now Adarve, who lives in Asheville, says, “I’m way, way over it.”

Belly dancing has had its own image problems to overcome. In Western cultures, some people associate the dance with strippers. “It’s sensual, but it’s not overly sexual,” Zahiya says in the dance’s defense. “It’s about female expression and form, but it’s not traditionally used as a seduction.” Still, at Jerusalem Garden Café in Asheville, where Zahiya and others shimmy near the tables several nights a week, sometimes diners are uncomfortable. “Some people will look at it and frown,” manager Nathan Walker says. “Some people won’t look at them at all.” But the nights with dancing are busiest, he notes, and most diners enjoy it.

O’Leary says she spent the first eight years of her belly dance career trying to communicate that the dance was empowering and not threatening. Some people have certainly gotten the message. Adarve, the Asheville mom who has taken Zahiya’s class now for five months, says belly dancing is a breath of fresh air for her. “I start dancing, and I’m happy,” she says. Exposed belly and all.