Wedding Party Belly-Dances Down the Aisle : Nuptials: The bride wears white, but her bridesmaids sport the chic of Araby in a Middle Eastern-themed ceremony.

With a wedding like this, who needs a bachelor party?

The bridesmaids were belly dancers, clad in Hollywood-glitzy versions of traditional Arabic costumes--brightly colored brocade caftans, gauzy harem pants and skirts, sashes, revealing Choli tops and chains and belts dripping with coins and semiprecious stones.

With their hands above their heads, clinking finger cymbals, they languidly danced down the aisle toward the gazebo where, on Saturday, Siegfried Heep, 31, married Denise Russo, 40. Russo herself is a belly dancer and has been a member of the Van Nuys-based dance group Perfumes of Araby for more than a decade. When she and Heep decided to marry, she asked him if the wedding could have an Arabian Nights theme.

“I didn’t want to do the same thing as everyone else,” Russo said after a minister performed a brief wedding ceremony at The Odyssey restaurant in Granada Hills.

Heep, a video engineer who met Russo when she was a student in a video class he taught at a community college, agreed to the request.

Heep, of Van Nuys, wore white pants, shirt and a turban evocative of Lawrence of Arabia, and Russo, also of Van Nuys, wore a traditional white dress that had a few touches reminiscent of the Middle East. But it was the bridesmaids--members of Russo’s dance troupe--who attracted much of the attention with their brightly colored, seductive garb.

Although some of Russo’s East Coast relatives were shocked at the idea of belly dancers in a wedding processional and incense burning during the ceremony, her sister Nadine Russo said the unconventional wedding fit the bride perfectly.

“I can’t see her having this any other way,” Nadine Russo said.

Nadine Russo said her sister has always been drawn to the mysterious allure of ancient Arabia, although the family’s heritage is half-Spanish and half-Italian. As a girl, Denise Russo decorated her room with red carpet, red velveteen wallpaper and a red bed. She also studied Arabic briefly, her sister said.

But it is belly-dancing that has captured her fancy and held her attention. Denise Russo said she began taking lessons nearly 15 years ago, after seeing Perfumes of Araby perform. She later joined the troupe.

After the ceremony, some of the guests joked good-naturedly about the irony of a Middle Eastern-themed wedding at a time when the prospect of a war with Iraq looms large.

“On behalf of OPEC, I’d like to welcome you,” Heep’s turbaned best man greeted one guest.

And despite the titillating costumes and the suggestive dancing of the bridesmaids, the best man admitted, “We still gave him a bachelor’s party.”