Great Shakes : The Perfumes of Araby Hold Sway Over Audiences, Some of Which Admire Their Skills a Bit Too Much

Ah, the travails of a belly dancer! Giant snakes getting stuck under bra straps, bras that come unhinged, pants that plummet earthward in mid-shimmy, headaches from balancing a 10-pound candelabra on one’s head, touchy-feely old men, drunken lechers, jealous wives. . . .

It’s a tough job, but somebelly’s gotta do it.

“There were these two drunk guys,” said MaryAnn Cappa-Rotunno, a librarian-cum-belly dancer from Sepulveda. “I didn’t realize how drunk one of them was. He just lunged at me real fast, grabbed me and stuck his face in my belly! And I’m going, ‘Yech! What a slime!’ ”

Instinct took over.

“You know what? You’re wearing weapons ,” Cappa-Rotunno said, a trace of relish in her tone. “You’re wearing finger cymbals-- metal discs --on your hands, right? I didn’t even think . I grabbed him and I pushed my fingers into his throat and I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, you can’t do that.’ And he’s going, ‘Eerrrkkkk, all right,’ and he just flopped down. And that happened in one of the most expensive restaurants in the city!”

Cappa-Rotunno is director of the Perfumes of Araby, a troupe of women usually engaged in gentler aspects of the art of the belly dance (who will appear Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Middle East Connection restaurant in Burbank). Of course, the Perfumes (whose name comes from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” in which guilt-ridden Lady Macbeth says, “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”) all hail from dreamy, exotic oases in faraway, quasi-mythical settings--places with such other-worldly names as Van Nuys, Sepulveda, Sunland, Palmdale, Arleta, Canoga Park.

“A lot of times people will come up to you and say, ‘Oh, you must have some Arabic blood!’ ” said Denise Heep, a Perfume since 1975. “Like they want to believe that you can’t belly dance unless you have some natural blood type. And you have to say, ‘No, just from down home! Just Americans!’ ”

Indeed, the San Fernando Valley-based Perfumes--not one of whose ancestors comes from anywhere near the Middle East--claim to be the longest-running professional belly-dance troupe in the United States.

Founded in 1961 at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire by Diane Webber, now a belly-dancing teacher at Everywoman’s Village in Van Nuys (where Cappa-Rotunno also teaches), the troupe performs an annual revue each October (this year on the 13th at the Starlight Dinner Theater in Agoura) and lesser private shows, solo and collective, throughout the year. Webber, who remains consulting artistic director, left in the mid-’70s to raise horses and Cappa-Rotunno, a member since 1972, succeeded her.

On stage, the Perfumes are a minor palette of pastels, what with swirling, silky, handmade costumes adorned with all manner of gold and silver baubles and coins (some of the members make their own, others are sewn by costume designer Kathy Sanders). Accompanied by John Bilezikjian on the oud --an ancient mandolin-like instrument--they whirl about, yip-yipping with swords or candelabras balanced on their heads, veils orbiting arms that gesture gracefully and hips that twitch, gyrate, slowly grind. . . . Yes, there is even a python dance--done by fearless Heep and her 6-foot pet, Wally. (“He bit me once. But I’ve had him 16 years. I think that’s pretty good. My cat bites me about eight times a day.”)

It’s as if all the women have secret identities. Meek secretary by day--wild belly dancer by night! Heep is a student. Cappa-Rotunno, who works for a Valley branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, has an master’s degree in library science. Annie Kent is a mother of four. Marta Inda and Bobbi Orndorff are computer operators for Chatsworth firms. Gloria Ameigeiras is a licensed medical technologist who analyzes hair samples for signs of drug abuse. Sioux Ashe is a jewelry maker. Melodie Clark sells missile parts for an aerospace firm. Sherry Dariotes books reservations for cruise ships. But after-hours, they--and the other, just-joined Perfumes, Joanne Ro and Carrie Caldwell--drop their workaday personas and . . . bare their midriffs.

“As a rule, people--at least Americans--can have somewhat of a prejudicial view of belly-dancing and associate it with hoochie-coochie dancing, Little Egypt, things like that,” Cappa-Rotunno said during a break from rehearsal in the decidedly unexotic Van Nuys Multipurpose Center. “That’s real different from the European point of view. I haven’t taken a great survey, but my experience in talking to European dancers is that they view it as another form of art. And it is an art.

“What American dancers are up against is that a lot of audiences immediately think striptease or sideshow when they think of belly-dancing. And more recently, business was real slow for us during the war. A lot of Middle Eastern people who normally have big parties, big weddings, huge events, just kept a low profile. But things are picking up now.”

True belly-dancing, Cappa-Rotunno said, is “seductive, but not sexy”--and may not even have its origins in the stereotypical harem, where dancers vied for the favor of fat sultans. Although that indeed could be the genesis of the dance, Cappa-Rotunno said other possibilities include: harem women who were “bored to death” and danced for each other; women who did “sympathetic magic” for pregnant friends, “helping” the childbirth by standing around a woman in labor undulating their bellies (the “belly roll” maneuver that is the staple of modern belly-dancing does, Cappa-Rotunno also pointed out, exercise muscles important in childbirth); women who danced for dowry money (hence the traditional adornment of belly-dancing garb with coins), or that the whole thing evolved from sacred dancing from India that was imported to the courts of Egyptian Pharaohs.

“With our dance, like with other art forms, it takes years of study, lots of work, practice--hours and hours that go into maybe 20 minutes of audience viewing,” she said. “And the audience goes, ‘Oh, wasn’t that pretty and colorful!’ Well, it made ‘em feel good and that’s OK--I’ve communicated! . . . When I see a dance, I don’t necessarily have to be a ballerina to appreciate ballet or a modern dancer to appreciate modern dance. If you are an audience that is educated, you’re going to get a higher level of appreciation, but the goal of art is to be appreciated.

“We don’t pretend to reproduce a dance that was done in the Pharaohs’ day--we can’t do that. But like Spanish dancing or other forms of interpretive dance, there are certain idioms that you follow, and they do set belly-dancing off from other forms of dance--from jazz, from modern, from ballet. It makes our dance unique.”

Lofty stuff aside, it’s just plain hard to do.

“It may look real easy,” said Annie Kent, “but it’s really difficult to do all those isolated muscle movements. It’s hard to isolate parts of your body and do all the movements and get into that really seductive mood. And sometimes you have to work for a really cold audience and that’s really hard.”

And then there are those travails. Asked to dance for returning troops at Edwards Air Force Base, Kent encountered bellicose wives. “They had grouped all the single men up front because of jealous wives,” said Kent, who credits dancing, in part, for a physique that remains firm and fit despite four pregnancies.

“They didn’t want me to go out into the audience, and I just felt terrible. Being there was awful! I was just trying to dance for these guys and I was hearing all these remarks like, ‘Well, she shouldn’t be here’ and ‘We’ve got kids here and stuff.’ You know, I’ve got kids of my own, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.”

Then there was the time 15-year Perfume Marta Inda was dancing solo at a formal dinner party when a drunken, admiring male sought to place a long-stemmed flower in a convenient cleavage gap. The ever-smiling Inda neither missed a shimmy nor lost a beat as she snatched the posy from his grasp, whirled around and gave it to the man’s wife with the comment, “Here, lady, I think you must deserve this.”

Then there was the bellyful of teasing Inda suffered from certain colleagues at work after she revealed her avocation. “So I danced at a company picnic,” Inda said, “and they never teased me again. After they saw me dancing, some of them said, ‘Oh God, I didn’t realize you have a lot of skill.’ Some of the men who teased me couldn’t look me in the eye after that.”

The snake-in-the-bra episode happened to a former Perfume who suddenly, in mid-routine, found that her enormous slithering partner was wriggling under a shoulder strap. She turned her back to the audience, unhitched, pulled the reptile through, rehitched and continued performing (with no further hitches).

Another ex-Perfume turned her back to the crowd to repair a bra that had snapped open, not realizing that the wall behind her was mirrored (which prompted rousing applause). Orndorff had a pair of harem pants drop to her ankles (she was wearing tights underneath), but managed to keep dancing. Inda sometimes gets headaches from practicing with a nine-candle candelabra. Dariotes was once pawed and kissed by a group of elderly not-so-gentlemen at a bachelor party (which, in part, led to the Perfumes’ no-bachelor party policy). For the most part, though, the Perfumes insist that “most people are nice.”

Especially, as it turns out, the women in the audience. The Perfumes, who go out of their way to put women at ease, insist that women end up enjoying the dancing more than men.

“I think they do,” Cappa-Rotunno said. “Women can get past some of their prejudices. Men are a little bit stuck in the sexy stereotype. A lot of them get past it, but I think it just pushes their buttons real fast.”

As was the case with one particularly devoted admirer who actually followed Perfume Gloria Ameigeiras backstage, relentless in his pursuit of a kiss.

“I was in the ladies’ room, changing, and this lady came by and said her son just loved me. It was his 7th birthday, and he just really wanted a kiss from a belly dancer,” Ameigeiras said. “So I gave him a kiss and I said happy birthday. And I probably got a bigger kick out of it than he did.”

Ah, the travails of a belly dancer.

The Perfumes of Araby will appear Wednesday at the Middle East Connection restaurant, 916-A Burbank Blvd., Burbank. Admission is $10 for dinner and the show. Reservations can be made by calling (818) 843-8339 or (818) 893-9019.

Rense is a frequent contributor to Valley Calendar.