INSIDE THE WORLD OF ISTANBUL’S MALE BELLY DANCERS
The nation’s shifting views toward homosexuality have opened the
market for a centuries-old tradition
By Tara Isabella Burton SMITHSONIAN.COM DECEMBER 9, 2014 10:05AM
When Segah dances, everybody cheers. His hips slope then shake;
the muscles on his stomach vibrate with the coin belt across his loins.
The drumbeat speeds up. The glitter on his chest and the gold band
around his neck catch the spotlight, reflecting its glare back to the
hundreds of audience members – men and women alike – craning their
necks to the stage.
The lights dim. He blows a kiss. He puts his hand on his heart. He
bows.
Here at Chanta Music, a gaudy, velvet-lined nightclub off Istanbul’s
high-octane Istiklal Street, belly dancing – and the adulation its
admirers confer – is not limited to women. Segah – who performs under
his first name only – is a self-described zenne, one of several male
dancers in Turkey’s largest city to earn his living performing what
Turks refer to as “Oriental dance,” adopting traditionally female
costume, roles and postures and adapting them to the tastes of an
urban, socially liberal audience.
Male belly dancing is hardly a new phenomenon in Turkey. Most zenne
dancers date the practice back to the Sultan’s court in the final
centuries of the Ottoman Empire, when women were largely prohibited
from performing onstage. Much as how boys would play women’s parts
in Elizabethan Shakespeare, young men – generally ethnic Greeks,
Armenians, or Romani, drawn, often unwillingly, from the Empire’s
non-Muslim population – would be trained as dancers, adopt androgynous
or feminine attire and makeup, and – in many cases – moonlight as
paid courtesans to noblemen.
In traditional Ottoman practice, the terminology of “gay” and
“straight” was largely absence from discourse, as explained by scholar
Serkan Gorkemli. Sexuality was more customarily defined as a matter
of status/rank and sexual role. A higher-ranking nobleman would
as a matter of course define himself as an active or penetrative
sexual partner, one who would under other circumstances sleep with
women; a zenne dancer would be expected to take on a more so-caled
“feminine” sexual and social role. Regardless of whether or not sexual
relations between dancers and their spectators took place, however,
zenne dancing (and the watching thereof) was considered part of
“mainstream” masculine culture..
But after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the secularist
Ataturk government – which saw it as its mission to “Westernize”
Turkey – zenne dancing, and its often-complicated sexual politics,
fell out of favor.
And so zenne lingered, mostly surviving in rural areas, including
Turkey’s more religiously conservative Eastern provinces of Turkey.
There, zennes frequently perform (without a sexual element) for
straight-identified male audiences says filmmaker Mehmet Binay,
whose 2012 feature Zenne Dancer explores the friendship between an
Istanbul zenne dancer, a German photographer, and a gay “bear” from
the conservative Urfa province.
“[In the East, zenne dancing] would not happen in a restaurant, would
not happen in a wedding. It would happen in a closed house, [with]
ten, 12 men sitting around drinking and [watching] a male dancer,”
says Binay. Participating in traditional Eastern dance, he says,
was something done by men and women alike. “We all belly dance at
some point – even straight men – at least, we used to.”
Back when Binay and his collaborator Caner Alper started researching
zenne in 2006, they saw it as a “vanishing culture” – found only in
rural areas and in a few underground gay clubs in Istanbul.
“We are very much under the influence of Western entertainment and
culture and show business,” says Binay. “Oriental” dance is no longer
as popular in Turkey as it once was. Even among Istanbul’s sizable gay
community, for whom zenne dancing might have particular resonance,
“people would rather watch drag shows or go-go boys. Male belly
dancing was something [from] the past.”
But in the past half-decade, zenne dancing in Istanbul has gone
mainstream: bolstered by the media attention paid to Binay and Alper’s
film as well as the success of gay crossover clubs like Chanta: which
cater their zenne shows to a largely heterosexual, female clientele.
“Zenne dancers were on the verge of extinction,” says Alper, “but
now they’re back again. When we used to Google zenne, we’d find a
few people – now there are like hundreds. Then, [the word zenne]
was an insult, now it’s…”
“Fashionable,” Binay chimes in.
“Yes, fashionable. The sort of male belly dancing we see in
contemporary clubs has actually evolved. It’s no longer just Oriental
belly dancing. It’s become something else.”
The increased popularity of zenne dancing has been a boon for dancers
like Segah, who has been performing at Chanta for two years, and been
featured on television programs across Turkey and in Cyprus.
Like many zenne dancers, Segah learned his art in a family setting,
rather than from a formal teacher. “[Growing up], whenever my sister
was doing housework she’d have music on in the background and she’d
be dancing. Dancing was part of our daily routine.”
His mother was a cabaret singer, and when he went to Istanbul
nightclubs to watch her, he’d often witness female belly dancers
performing. “I always imagined myself dancing like them – wondering
what it would be like to dance like that,” he says. When he was 15 or
16, a friend encouraged him to start dancing publicly, but the only
work he could find was in a seedy gay nightclub in Istanbul’s Aksaray
district. “I was dancing with nothing but a coin belt on,” he says,
“but once they paid me, I used that money to buy my first costume.”
Like many gay Turkish men, Segah found a degree of freedom in Istanbul
– with its active, out gay community – that does not necessarily
exist outside the city. While the Turkish government does not
criminalize homosexuality – nor does it provide LGBT individuals with
any formal protection from discrimination – cultural attitudes toward
homosexuality are largely negative; according to a 2011 poll conducted
as part of the World Values Survey, a full 84 percent of Turks
identified gays and lesbians among their least desirable neighbors.
Such disdain can all too frequently spill over into violence; Binay
and Alper’s film Zenne Dancer deals with a slightly fictionalized
version of one of Turkey’s most publicized cases: the 2007 “honor
killing” of Ahmet Yildiz – a close friend of with both filmmakers –
believed to have been carried out by his father.
And although Istanbul in particular has becoming increasingly welcoming
to gays – Istanbul’s annual Gay Pride parade is the largest in any
majority-Muslim country — the rising thread of Islamism in the
Turkish government is slowing progress for LGBT rights. In 2013,
Turkey’s prime minister at the time, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, criticizing
the adoption of a Turko-Dutch boy by a Dutch lesbian couple, publicly
called homosexuality a “sexual preference, which is contrary to the
culture of Islam.”
The Turkish military’s approach to homosexuality reflects this cultural
ambivalence. Out gay men are considered exempt from mandatory military
service on the grounds of mental illness. In practice, they are often
forced to provide degrading pornographic images of themselves or be
subject to a rectal examination to “prove” their homosexuality.
Segah himself served in the military for eight months. He’d intended
to get an exemption, he says, but he was not comfortable being out to
his father, who accompanied him to the military recruitment office,
and so remained in the military for eight months before being able
to quietly secure his release. “I didn’t mind,” he says. “I had more
lovers there than anywhere else.”
Now, Segah performs nightly at Chanta, as well as at private functions
like bachelorette parties, appearing on television next to some of
Turkey’s biggest stars.
Still, Segah’s family has been less than welcoming of his career. When
they first found out about his zenne dancing – by seeing him on
television – they called him up immediately and begged him to stop,
telling him his work was “morally shameful.” “I’m from a traditional
Turkish family,” Segah says, “I’m basically cross-dressing – imagine
my father and my father’s friends seeing me in this cross-dressing
costume and dancing like like? It’s not really easy to accept.”
While his family has grudgingly accepted his career choice, they’ve
never been to see him perform. His brother came to Chanta once to
watch Segah’s opening act – a singer he admired – but Segah sent him
away before his performance.
And, says Segah, he’s never formally come out to his parents. “They
realize [that I’m gay]”, he says but it’s not something they ever
openly talk about.
Within liberal Istanbul, however, Segah’s negative experiences have
been minimal. He recalls only once being heckled with slurs by a
homophobic audience member.
“I heard it and turned and said, ‘Thank you, sir,'” Segah laughs. “He
was so surprised – he tipped me almost 200 lira!”
Segah takes pride in his ability to push audience members out of their
comfort zones. Unlike the traditional Ottoman zenne, he says, whose
stylized movements were slower, stiffer, than that of their female
contemporaries, Segah prefers to perform exactly the same movements as
female belly-dancers. “Mostly, zenne don’t get to affect people. But
when I dance, I create a kind of ‘gender confusion’. I am a man –
with a beard! – but I’m dancing just like a woman [would]. And that
really shocks people. They’re shocked into enjoying it.”
Read more:
From: A. Papazian
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/inside-world-istanbuls-male-belly-dancers-180953539/#EcISCmSbWlc1OzGe.99