Dancing Queens

Rosie Ortiz stood tall alongside five other members of the Reinas de Seba belly-dancing group and hoisted a twenty-pound sword over her head.

Then she joined three of the other dancers in a circle, popping their bangled hips and slowly moving counter-clockwise. The blades of the swords formed equidistant rays from the center, and the women created a shimmering, rotating sun.

Maryluz Chapa, who learned the art of belly dance, also called Oriental dance or Middle Eastern dance, when she was growing up in Nuevo Laredo, joined the group of queens.

“I was the rebel child,” Chapa said, who, surrounded by her tribe of dancers, had an involuntarily smile painted between the apples of her cheeks. “My sister is a nun.”

In her Brownsville home, Chapa has created a studio lined with scarves, feathered amulets, and rows of costumes packed into a deep closet. She teaches belly dance to anyone who wants to learn and asks only for donations for her time.

“Anytime they want to come, on a weekend or a weekday I’m always available,” she said. “It doesn’t matter because I love it.”

Changing out of their street clothes, painting their eyes with slanted strokes of thick eyeliner, readying their “zills” or finger symbols, and layering their bodies with silk and silver can take up to three hours from start to finish.

Once dressed in the traditional costume of the Middle Eastern dancers, who performed the hip flexions in female social settings long ago, the women embody their name; beyond aesthetics, they take on the elegance and confidence of queens.

“We turn into completely different people,” said Ortiz, who works as a graphic designer at a print shop by day. “We’re more confident, stronger, empowered.”

“It has nothing to do with sexuality,” said Crystal Peña, a member of Chapa’s group. “Most people have the idea that it’s about sex. You don’t have to be thin or look a certain way, and it’s still sensual.”

The women cringe when belly-dancing stereotypes are brought up. No, this is nothing like stripping. Their husbands and boyfriends have no reason to feel jealous. They dance not as individuals, but as a team.

“You have to see what Mary does with the wings,” Chapa said of Mary Zuniga’s deftly controlled butterfly- like wings she used in one dance.

“We don’t perform by level,” said Ortiz. “No one is featured because they are more experienced.”

Though it may seen that the women have transformed the commercial practice of belly dance into something new, they’ve actually taken it back to its origins.

After enduring a degrading stint as a slightly less sleazy stripper alternative at bachelor parties, belly dancing has recently entered the exercise mainstream with workout videos and gym classes used to create stomach tone in combination with a moderate cardiovascular workout.

But while the Reinas de Seba say that the dance is physically beneficial, the main joy they derive is one of the dance’s original customary traits — as a bond between women.

Though the exact origins of the dance are murky, it is believed to be have been a fertility dance in a female only setting.

Seeing the costumes embolden their bodies and faces is nothing compared to watching the women use those bodies as collections of freely moving parts, hips and shoulders popping and the usually even planes of stomachs waving up and down with local contractions.

Chapa’s husband left during the demonstration of the dances, but there was a soft knock heard a while later.

“Would you like some water ladies?” he asked the group of queens.

“Yes, thank you,” they said, and withdrew the swords from their heads.

Reinas de Seba

Maryluz Chapas can be contacted at los4chapas@hotmail.com for dance lessons and to book performances by Reinas de Seba.