Welcome to Suhaila Unveiled, the official e-newsletter for Suhaila Salimpour, the Suhaila Salimpour School of Dance, and Suhaila Productions, LLC.

New Suhaila Salimpour School of Dance Schedule!!!

Greetings!

It is a new year and with all that comes reflection and new goals.  I know that one of your top “New Years Resolutions” is to take more classes, create more time and space for your art, and/or get certified…. right?  For me it is also a time for looking forward and all that has to mean in terms of dreams and goals.  I am now reading the “Artists Way” for the 3rd time and this time as a 40 year old woman.  I have chosen to read the book (not knowing of course) at the beginning of each new decade of my life.  Are you doing your morning pages?

We are in high gear for Rakkasah.  Rehearsals are fun and I look forward to working with this group.  Having such a large part of the cast being from all over the United States I am happy to share in how large our family has gotten.  It also makes me really happy to think that this next weeklong workshop will be filled with so many new sisters that we made during my tour in Europe this last summer.  Now having certified students in Europe will make the boarders even smaller and community even larger.  Asia is next. 

So Happy New Year everyone and let’s make this year even more productive and full of energy so we can look back and feel we accomplished even more than last year.  Is that possible?  Of course it is…..   look how far you have come.

Editorial by Suhaila®

If you weren’t 10 minutes early, you were late.  Dress code in place, hair back and properly placed.  Gum, jewelry,  tattoos (fake or otherwise), and  nail polish were strictly prohibited. You could only miss 2 rehearsals ,a written notice was required and had to be authorized and excused by the instructor . Friends or family members were not allowed to watch or distract the student. If the instructor felt that the student was not ready for the performance, they could be asked to leave at anytime. (even if they were trying their best).  It was explained and expected to be understood that this was not a recital, but a professional performance in which the students were allowed to dance along side the professional company.  Even though the students were still the students and the company was the company, everyone was expected to act, perform, and respond professionally.  Students were expected to keep up their dance classes (and maybe even take more), plus pay dues for being allowed to be part of this performance and all the extra administrative work it took.  Even if you were an 8 year old mouse.

The audition process was not easy. Many combinations and techniques were asked from the students, and each had to wear a number on their leotard.  The panel was behind a table and a variety of judges were watching to see who could not only execute the movements, but who could follow orders quickly and respectfully.  The director, instructors, choreographers, and wardrobe all watched with full attention as each line of dancers came in to the room.  Isabella was focused and had a goal in mind that was not going to be distracted.  I knew Isabella was used to discipline, being my daughter and having taken the level 1 certification (and passing I might add) prepared her, but this was different since it was not personal and the room was filled with very talented young girls. 

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Me and Peter Max Magazine                   

My mother’s student and friend had just had a new baby.  It was the early 70’s and belly dancing mothers were not the fashion.  She was just home from the hospital and we had made some food to bring to the new mother.  Rhea had been a student of my mom’s for years and it was my mom that first put a sword on her head, which became a staple in her dance life.  Rhea had a daughter already about my age, and this was now her second child. 

When my mother got to the door she almost pushed over Rhea to see the new baby.  It meant so much to my mother that Rhea kept the baby since my mother had begged her to do so.  The baby was in the bottom drawer of Rhea’s dresser and a little bed was decorated out of that drawer. 

Piper and I ran upstairs to play and I mother and Rhea had a meal and talked about the birth.  After that I will never forget Rhea sitting down to put on her stage make up (false eyelashes and all) and the baby slept in the bottom drawer.  We were all staring at new baby Melissa. 

I feel very close to Rhea and her two daughters since we all came from the same generation.  But baby Melissa holds a close place in both my mother and my heart.  Seeing that little face in the bottom drawer made it all worthwhile.  I know it was hard for Rhea do decide between career and family…..  But it was all worth it.

-Suhaila

                                        -Photograph by Robert Altman

Me and Peter Max Magazine

      by Melinda Lou

The story goes that I was conceived on a beach in Northern California in 1968 while my mom was tripping on acid and my dad was under the influence of cannabis. Unsurprisingly my parents’ “pull out” method of contraception did not work that starry night, and the cosmic forces of the universe conspired to create me, ultimate love child of the 60s. I was born in the summer of ’69, and went unnamed for 3 months. My first nickname was a testament to my parents’ favorite pastime: I was called Doubie, which is the smallest, cutest little stub of a mostly-smoked joint. Ten months later, when my parents amicably parted ways and I was equally shared between them, I was called The Little Suitcase -- just put a handle on my back and I was ready to go! My birth certificate was finally filled in with the name Melinda Lou, and I was included in all aspects of my parents bohemian performance life, sleeping on piles of coats behind the speakers at my dad’s Berkeley rock n roll gigs, turning cartwheels in the circus ring when he was bandleader of the Pickle Family Circus, and playing behind tapestry curtains at the Renaissance fairs where my mom belly danced and balanced swords on her head as part of Jamila Salimpour’s Troupe Bal Anat. My early childhood was full of love, 2nd hand smoke, communes and creative people. Even after putting in way too much time in the Ivory Tower – Ivy League college and a PhD in medieval French literature -- my parents’ enduring hippy values and the primal drive (encoded in my DNA?) to lead an authentic, independent-minded, out-of-the-box life turned me from the academy and I now live a full-blown creative life, making ends meet by working gig to gig just like I was born and bred to do.
The first photo that I have of myself belly dancing is in utero I am in my mother’s rounded belly, and that belly is dancing. It is a black and white picture from 1969 taken at the Berkeley Fiddler’s Convention in California. My mom is six months pregnant with me, belly dancing with a smile and arms outstretched in a coin costume, surrounded by a beaming outdoor audience full of hippies. My older sister Piper, then 6, sits on our mom’s shoulders, her little hands reaching out to match mom’s. Mom is musically accompanied by my dad’s folk band , the Pittsburgh Pirates, playing “Little Egypt.” Piper, Mom and the as yet unborn I form a unique belly dancing triumverate, a reconstituted Pieta for the first dance of matriarchy. When I finally emerged into the world, three months later, I was primed for belly dance rhythms, impromptu performances, folk music and rock n roll.
I keep the original photo in a silver frame in my home dance studio and meditate on it frequently. The image captures exactly where I come from: the time, the place, the womb. It speaks to all the powerful themes that inform my life today: dance, performance, community, independent thinking, and the primal power of mother and daughters.
So here we are at the crux of the story: Last night after teaching my Thursday night belly dance classes, my student Regan came up to me with a magazine. “My father just died the week before Thanksgiving,” she said. “I was going through his things –he was a major packrat and collected lots of magazines - and I found this. It was the only one he had of its kind.” She looked at me with sweaty, trembling anticipation. I felt a tingling, emotional from Regan’s loss and from what she had found. I was leafing through Peter Max magazine, volume 2 from 1970 and came on the page….”LOOK” She said.
There it was, the second of a series of black and white hippy portraits --people raving, a woman blissfully breastfeeding, couples hugging, dogs leaping -- THE SEMINAL PHOTO OF MY LIFE – only, I was cut out! The focus of the photo was on the coin bra, the smiling hippy mother belly dancing with daughter on the shoulders. The belly button, Mom’s rounded belly with ME in it wasn’t in the frame. But it didn’t diminish the amazement, the tingling sensation, the incredible cosmic coincidence of the whole thing. If Regan hadn’t been my student for all these years and had opportunities to come to my home studio to dance, she would never have seen the original photo in its frame, she would never have known the significance of her father’s single copy of Peter Max magazine from 1970. And I would never have known the photo was ever in the seminal hippy magazine of the 1960s, now a collector’s item, and I would never have googled “Robert Altman, Photographer, Peter Max” and found the website of the original photographer, and searched for belly dancer on his site and found myself again.
So there you have it.
Thank you Robert Altman for taking the very first picture of me belly dancing. You don’t know me but I’m honored to be an in-utero subject of your beautiful body of work.
Thanks Mom and Dad for never selling out because my hippy inheritance is worth more than money.
Thank you Regan for belly dancing with me, for sharing your story and for giving me the issue of Peter Max magazine (that is worth $88 bucks on ebay but way more to me!)
Thank you Regan’s Dad, who was fascinated with hippies but was never one himself.
This is a pretty far-out and groovy story that I totally dig.
As it says on the last page of Peter Max magazine: Volume 2 from 1970:
Man is one. God is one. Love is one.
We are all the fruits of one tree
And the leaves of one branch.
Everyone is God in the process of evolution.
Identify yourself with everything that lives.
Love all God’s creation.
Love even the leaf;
Love the animals, love the plants,
Love everything.
Feel that the one power
Of God works through all hands,
Sees through all eyes,
Hears through all ears.