{"id":6911,"date":"2019-03-22T15:22:43","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T22:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/?p=6911"},"modified":"2019-03-22T15:27:07","modified_gmt":"2019-03-22T22:27:07","slug":"bellydancehistory-part2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/2019\/03\/bellydancehistory-part2\/","title":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s History Month & Belly Dance History – Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

March is Women\u2019s History Month – Part 2<\/h2>\n

Hello there!\u00a0 Today I\u2019m doing something a bit different.\u00a0 In honor of International Woman\u2019s Day, which falls in Women\u2019s History Month, I\u2019m sharing a bit of belly dance history each day over on my FaceBook page. I\u2019ve decided to put up five posts this month that round up those entries for the week.\u00a0 This is post #2.\u00a0If you haven’t read the first post – check it out here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Facebook, the site we love and hate<\/h2>\n

As I’ve worked on this project over on Facebook, I ran into a few troubles. One day in March, Facebook and Instagram had a global outage.\u00a0 While it threw off my timing by a day, it was just a minor inconvenience.\u00a0 A bigger problem was Facebook removing two posts due to the illusion of nudity.\u00a0 While it was just an illusion, they are sticking to their guns and disallowing the images. Consequently, I had to change up some of my plans for later posts.\u00a0 History is broad and deep and there are many, many images and anecdotes to share, so I just had to change things up a bit.<\/p>\n

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Day 9 – Nai Bonet and Shirley MacLaine<\/h2>\n

Back in the 1950s and 60s, many popular films featured belly dancers either as important characters or as part of the backdrop for the flow of the story.<\/p>\n

Throughout the 1950s, belly dancing scenes appeared most often in quasi-historic “Sword and Sandal” flicks, spy films, or Orientalist Fantasy pictures. By the 1960s, belly dancers began appearing in more humor films.<\/p>\n

One of these more humor-focussed films was “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home” of 1965.\u00a0 <\/span>In this film, Shirley Maclaine appears in a scene with a group of belly dancers.<\/p>\n

To prepare for this film, she took some classes with then Las Vegas-based belly dancer Nai Bonet.\u00a0 <\/span>In this photo, you can see Shirley, an accomplished Broadway-style dancer, learning to do a classic belly dance move.<\/p>\n

Nai, however, is the star of the belly dance scene.\u00a0 <\/span>But if you follow this link and watch this entire clip, you can catch Shirley’s shimmy!<\/p>\n