Scenes From Turkey:
Oriental Dance Outside of Istanbul

The next show we went to was at the Kervansaray Hotel in Kusadasi on July 18, 2000, and it was much more rewarding than the ones at Yasar Baba and the Colossea Hotel to watch. It featured three dance acts.

Here is the first dancer we saw in Kusadasi. Her costume was in the rather classic belly dancing style of beaded bra & belt with a coordinating skirt. The slits in the skirt were positioned such that we had much more of a view of her well-toned rump than we might have wanted.

One thing I particularly noticed about her performance was that she did frequent backbends, apparently with ease. She did some from a standing position, and others from a kneeling position.

She did these backbends very quickly--so quickly that it was difficult for me to catch any on film. However, I persevered and managed to get a couple of good shots!

The photo to the left is another shot that shows just how skimpy her skirt was. Oh my!

Here is a good side view of her costume. Her bra/belt set was really quite lovely, and she was cute even if she did show me more of her well-toned body than I wanted to see!

The second act at the Kervansaray Hotel in Kusadasi was a trio of dancers. Their performance was... interesting. VERY interesting! Highly entertaining, and definitely unique. Throughout the performance, I kept murmuring, "Oh my!!!!!"

The face veil shown here in close-up along with the overall costume style resemble those used on the covers of a series of music CD's titled "Mezdeke".

This photo shows the three dancers together. Throughout their entire act, I kept trying to get the three into a single picture, and I just couldn't manage it because they danced so far apart. It was only at the very end that I was able to snap this and a couple of additional pictures of them.

The one in black was the "alpha dancer". They did most of their show in a triangle, with the dancer in black positioned in center front, and the other two forming a back row. Note that the costume for the dancer in black is a somewhat different style from what the other two were wearing. This will become more apparent as you look at some of the other pictures I've posted.

Their headdresses and face veils (shown in the above photos) deserved to be seen in close-up. Feathers! What fun! I kept wondering how they could draw in enough breath through/around those face veils to support the highly aerobic dance they were doing. Oh my!

Unfortunately, the black feather in this dancer's headdress doesn't show very much in this photo because of the dark background and mood lighting.

The dancers frequently did these high kicks. Oh my! I was jealous of their flexibility, and at the same time thinking it might be fun to put some of these kicks into my comedy choreography.

As you can see from the photo to the right, the skirts for the two "supporting dancers" were basically ankle-length loincloths that revealed much whenever they spun--which they did frequently! Oh my!

This picture is the best shot I could get of the front of this dancer's costume. It was hard to get a good picture of it, since her costume is black, her hair is black, and the room was darkened. Plus, she was so busy leaping and kicking to the choreography that she didn't stand still long enough to get a clear picture.

Note that she is wearing black bell bottoms made of a mesh fabric that is much more revealing than chiffon. Sequins were attached to the mesh at intervals to give it sparkle, and a border of sequins at the bottom brightened it up a bit. Her face veil and sleeves were made of the same fabric, and similarly decorated with sequins. On her feet, she was wearing boots that came just above the ankle. Her beaded belt was the only thing that prevented us from getting a clear view of what my grandmother used to call "the bird's nest", and when the fringe swayed, well... Oh my! In the back she wore a half skirt: a rectangular panel of a beautiful sparkly fabric.

The trio seemed to be in perpetual motion. This made it hard to get good shots of poses, but made for some great action shots. 

At the end of the performance, the threesome finally got close enough to each other for me to snap a couple of pictures of them all together.

The slits in the skirts were adjusted to give frequent views of their l-o-n-g bare legs.

The picture with the lifted legs is tempting me to use a similar pose at the end of one of my comedy troupe's dances! Oh my!

In comparing the dancer from Kusadasi on this page with the dancer in the white costume with silver spots at Yasar Baba (who also had a somewhat plainly-styled costume with no glittery stuff), I found it interesting to note that the one in Kusadasi wearing this coral-colored costume seemed to exude elegant simplicity while the other dancer just came across as not putting much care into what she looked like.

After reflecting on why I thought one looked lovely while the other looked more like a student than a professional dancer, I think it was because:

• The dancer in Kusadasi took care with her grooming. Her hair style was cute, and her makeup was flattering. This was not true of the dancer at Yasar Baba.
• The draping effect in the front of the Kusadasi dancer's skirt provided an elegant line. In contrast, the dancer at Yasar Baba had just a plainly cut skirt wrapped around her hips, sort of like a sausage casing.
• The fabric of the Kusadasi dancer's costume, as shown on this page, shimmered beautifully with every move she made. The Yasar Baba dancer's costume was a plain lycra white fabric with silver-colored spots that didn't sparkle very much.
• The Kusadasi dancer carried herself well. She had good posture, and moved gracefully. The Yasar Baba dancer had slumped shoulders, and wasn't nearly so graceful. Plus, her continuous attempts to get the audience to clap along with her music was sooooo annoying!

As demonstrated in the two side views (above and to the left), this skirt rides waist-high in the back, and then dips to a drape below the navel in the center front.  

As the front-view picture to the right shows, the V-shaped effect in the front was flattering to her figure.

This picture, a rear view, shows the waist-high top edge of the skirt in the back. It's also interesting to note that the style in the back is rather plain--no draping effect there. 

At the end of her performance, this dancer got about 3-4 audience members (including me) up on stage to dance with her. She started playing follow-the-leader with us, using various dance moves. Since most of her "guinea pigs" were from our party (and most of us were Oriental dance artists), we kept pace with her quite well.

Finally, she had us all kneel facing the audience, and then she went into a backbend, with her knees (and therefore her crotch) facing toward the audience. Even though I can easily do those backbends, and I often perform them in public with a sword on my head, I'm always careful to not aim my crotch directly at audience members. Especially when (as I did at the show that night) I'm wearing a straight skirt. No, no, no. Uh uh. So that's when I let her think she'd finally hit upon something I couldn't do. In retrospect, I wish I would have turned my back to the audience and done it that way, just to put her in her place. Oh well!

For more photo galleries from Shira's July 2000 trip to Turkey, explore these other pages on this web site:

Scenes From Turkey: Oriental Dance at Orient House. Photos of dancers who performed at Orient House, an Istanbul nightclub, on July 11, 2000. Scenes From Turkey: Oriental Dance at Gar Gazinosu. Photos of dancers who performed at Gar Gazinosu, an Istanbul nightclub, on July 12, 2000. Scenes From Turkey: Oriental Dance at Kervansaray. Photos of dancers who performed at Kervansaray, an Istanbul nightclub, on July 13, 2000. Scenes From Turkey: Other Oriental Dance Performances. Photos of three dancers who appeared at various places in Turkey in July, 2000.

Scenes From Turkey: The Real Turkish "Belly" Dance. Photos of the Turkish folk dance named "gobek tansi", or "belly dance". Scenes From Turkey: Whirling Dervishes. Information about Turkish whirling dervishes of the Mevlâna order and photos. Shira's Turkish Costume Collection. Shira models costumes she purchased in Istanbul on her trip to Turkey in July 2000.

This article originally appeared on the Suite101 web site, in the Middle Eastern Dance category on September 1, 2000.

I'd very much like to thank Morocco for organizing her "Tantalizing Turkey" tour, which gave me the opportunity to see all these fascinating dancers!

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