Interview with Happy Hips founder Terri Allred by Maria Rowan

Sixteen dancers come on stage carrying gold canes and arrayed in reds, blues, purples and pinks with jingling coin hip scarfs. They are all races, shapes and sizes, but they are not all ages: the oldest is eleven and the youngest is four. This is Happy Hips Youth Oriental Dance Troupe, veteran belly dancers who have performed at benefits, museums and festivals as well as local and regional haflas, the term for belly dance parties or shows.

Happy Hips founder, Terri Allred did not set out to become Sadiya, professional belly dancer and instructor. At Vanderbilt University, she completed a theological studies masters in feminist theology with a focus on how people who experience trauma interpret it and give it meaning. Terri ran rape crisis centers and lectured internationally on the relationship between sexual violence and belief systems.

Just after the birth of her second son in 2002, Terri attended a professional women’s soccer match, during which a ball traveling at high speeds struck her head. For six months, she suffered severe headaches and dizzy spells that left her bedridden. More than a year later, the damage to her vestibular system still limited her driving and activities keeping her at home most days. When a physical therapist suggested dance classes as a possible therapy, Terri was looking to get out of the house once a week not for a new direction in life.

Maria: Terri, dance played an important part in your physical recovery. How did you choose belly dance classes and what shifts occurred after you discovered the form and the community?

Terri: I grew up dancing; ballet and modern for about 17 years, from the time I was 4 until college. I always gravitated to dance for healing throughout my life, but I had been away from it for a long time. I looked at the offerings in the local community and I knew I didn’t want to go back to ballet, so I saw belly dance and that looked like a lot of fun. It was close enough to my house that my partner could drive me if I couldn’t get there myself.

I went to my first class and I was so overwhelmed with the sense of well being I felt when I moved my hips in the way the teacher was showing me. And I initially was struck by the incredible diversity of women in the room; there were older women, there were younger women, there were all different sizes, all different shapes, professional women, students, women from all walks of lives and they were all in the room and they were all having fun. It was just a really incredible experience to see the female energy and power, so I knew immediately I was emotionally and psychologically drawn to it, but I didn’t know what an essential role it would play in my physical well being.

What ended up happening is the core movements of belly dance helped me to heal on an energy level and a physical level. At first there was a lot I couldn’t do. I had to sit out a lot because I didn’t have the strength or the stamina. I couldn’t do any of the turns. I got too dizzy. But I persevered until I could make it through a dance class.

I had spent my life - my life’s calling - helping women who were facing violence or were facing some kind of emotional or physical distress. I realized that although I could not do that in the same way, because I didn’t have the stamina to maintain any kind of professional position, I could help women in a very spiritual and physical way through this art form. I decided to start teaching, so I am now a belly dance instructor and performer and I used to do treatment for sex offenders and that’s a huge huge difference.

Maria: There are very few belly dance classes, let alone troupes, for girls under 18 in the US,. What compelled you to begin teaching not just adults and not just girls, but really little girls?

Terri: I am the mother of two fabulous boys, a 10 year old and a 6 year old, but that means between them and my partner there is a lot of testosterone in my household. One of the things I realized on my journey in adult belly dancing was how affirming it was. I thought it would be affirming for girls and for young children too. I looked around and saw there were no offerings in our community. I got online and I started researching across the country and there were only a handful of people teaching girls anywhere.

I spent a lot of time researching the origin of belly dance in Egypt to find out the roles that girls play in the dance, and in the countries of origin, it’s a dance that’s passed down from mothers and sisters and aunts to girls. In the west we make it into a performance dance, but it’s originally a women’s social dance. So what a way to introduce young girls into the society of women and into womanhood.

I got together a conceptual model and a teaching model and found two places that said let’s try it. At the same time, I was interested in the mother daughter relationship, so I offered a mother daughter dance class. Because also belly dance has a reputation of being sexualized or risque, and a lot of people don’t get that it’s appropriate for children, I thought a mother daughter class would allow mothers to be introduced with their daughters

I didn’t initially set out to have a belly dance troupe of children. What happened was the children were so excited and they were flocking to classes, so I thought, let’s go in the holiday parade and give the kids a chance to perform. (Happy Hips won the Most Original in the Chapel Hill Carrboro Parade that year.) And it snowballed from doing one holiday parade to being one of the most sought after troupes in the region.

Maria: Your niece and sister are active in Happy Hips, but your husband and boys are involved as well. The boys attend all the troupe parties and performances, and your eldest was the masters of ceremonies at a hafla. I can’t help but think ten years ago, when he was born, a world of coin studded bras and bare midriffs was not what you envisioned around him. What are your thoughts on raising boys not just in a woman-centered community but in a community that revolves around performance and display?

Terri: My partner keeps saying if you had asked me ten years ago, “would I have a belly dance studio in my house?“ I would have laughed and laughed. It was beyond our imagination; it was not even part of our experience at that time. And my boys have now grown up with it. That’s really all they remember. They don’t know anything but dance. The answer has two parts: first, the introduction of movement and music into our house and using music in parenting, and the other is belly dance itself.

We have an empty room in our house and I put mirrors in it and we play all kinds of music and we dance all the time Kids are drawn to that room. And they do all kinds of dancing - they break dance and we listen to rock and roll, we taught my oldest son - well really both - how to dance with a girl before a wedding. So there’s a lot of dancing that didn’t happen in my family or my husband’s family growing up.

And as for belly dance, what I’ve really taught my boys, and I’ve used children’s language to describe this, is that objectified images of female beauty are not realistic. We talk about what makes a woman look pretty when they say she’s pretty. We talk about very specific things, about what female beauty is about, and different sizes of women can be beautiful, so basically it’s taking theory into practice.

At my very first hafla, which is a belly dance party, there was a woman who was in her 50s, really grey hair and the body of your average fifty year old and she did this belly dance piece to a rock and roll song and it was very clever, very well done, but there were lots of very young dancers with very young bodies at that show too, and that was the boys’ favorite dance and that woman was their favorite dancer. And we talked about how she had been beautiful to them, so we were able to use belly dance as way for them to see how different women express themselves.

And bottom line, they like having all the girls around. They like being the only two boys around the Happy Hips.

Maria: When I was faced with my own brand new disability at age 19 I found that some of my young ideas of feminism were challenged by that. I was wondering if going from being in a professional career environment, traveling around the world, and then suddenly finding yourself in a position of being bed ridden, dependent and literally at home, with, from what I can tell whenever I was over, a house full of kids, were there things you had to rethink, did your vision change?

Terri: My whole paradigm shifted. I had been very driven from an early age to be a mother, but I had a strong professional drive and that took precedent. I had a strong calling - and mission would not be too strong a word - to eradicate sexual violence by changing the communities I lived in so that prevention of violence was a major function: so there was funding, and law enforcement and prosecutors and all the systems were working together to prevent and appropriately intervene in sexual violence. That had been the focus of my everything. And I felt that I was really living out my feminist principles, in action, by being a person actively engaged, every day, in social justice and I felt maybe a little morally superior for making that choice.

So, what happened when I could not work and tried several times and kept not succeeding, I had to completely reevaluate who I was as a person. It was an internal process, but also how that tied into my personal community and political self as a feminist: I knew academically but realized in an experiential way that raising children was an act of incredible feminist principle and incredible dedication, and every bit as legitimate and morally valuable and valid as the choices I had made in my much more public, professional life.

And what I found was that I was able to support those women, who were working around me, by keeping their children or helping out when somebody was sick. So what I did was community networking, by having children at my house, because all my friends were working and I made sure they had a support network in me, because I had to be home. Then it became a choice. I always wanted to be with my boys, but I also wanted to be there to be that support for other women who needed it.

The other thing is I have an incredible partner. My husband and I met at a professional conference. I went to his workshop and he went to my workshop. And he has been so incredibly supportive of this transition from his partner as professional mother to his partner as stay at home belly dancing mother. And I am a professional belly dancer, it’s not that I’m not still organizing events and doing fundraisers, but it’s really, very much, a part time business and I am not making a lot of money. He’s been key to helping me.

When you look at parenting, it‘s shifted my way of parenting - and we talked about my sons - but first it shifted his parenting in a dramatic way, because for a year or two, he became the primary parent. I had migraines or was dizzy or was in bed or was asleep, so it shifted all his relationships.

It’s been amazing to watch his transformation and acceptance. He’s a PhD psychologist and a former athlete, a very bright man, and yesterday, he was hula hooping in our neighbor’s yard and that would not have happened, if five years ago, dancing hadn’t become such a fabulous part of our family’s life. He comes to the shows and supports me and it’s enriched his life.

Maria: So that was all my questions. What did I miss?

The only other thing is I can not say enough about the value of dance, and in particular oriental dance, in young girls’ lives.

I have watched children transform because part of oriental dance is learning about self expression, about their own ability to be people expressing who they are, through art and through dance. I don’t tell them what to do when teaching them; I give them a set of tools and a set of dance moves and they take that and they create their dance and their personal style through that. Even the youngest dancers.

I think how my life would be different if I had been exposed to that kind of dance instruction. And not to say anything bad about ballet, but I was in a very regimented, very structured, very conformist dance instruction, where you did not think for yourself and you only did what your teacher told you. And it did help integrate my mind and body, but I would have never at 6, 7, 8 or 13, had the confidence to choreograph and perform my own piece, as your daughter just did at her school.

It’s phenomenal what girls can learn from this dance form, especially from a teacher committed to the values of self actualization and positive body image and girls creating a dance that is their own . It’s a very valuable tool. And not just for girls. I’ve had boys in my class too. They have to think a little outside the box to want to express themselves in that way and it’s good for them.

Maria: We’ll have to start learning all the sword dances to pass on to them.

Terri: There was just an interesting article in a belly dance magazine by a woman who had just given birth to a son. And everyone said, “Oh, a new little drummer”, instead of giving him the chance to choose - to drum or to dance. You know the boys who have danced with me, and I’ve taught men too, it’s been a powerful way to express themselves. Their path may not be as easy as the girl’s path, if they continue, but I hope just by taking a class they were able to spark a creative part of themselves and have it affirmed.

Terri Allred, Sadiya, teaches belly dance to all ages in Rochester, Minnesota , where she plans to start a sister troupe to Happy Hips. Her sister, Lisa Allred Draper, Shaiya, teaches in Cary and Carrboro, North Carolina and co-directs the North Carolina branch of Happy Hips Youth Oriental Dance Troupe. For more information: www.sadiyabellydancer.com

Maria Rowan is the mother of Emily, an original member of Happy Hips. At age 7, Emily proudly describes herself a professional belly dancer and plans to continue dancing even after she opens her own animal hospital. Maria enjoys a class or two, but prefers dancing in her kitchen.

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