A PARTIAL FAREWELL FROM BELLY DANCE NY
As of the end of November, 2007 Belly Dance NY is ceasing to publish events listings. I'm not going to do one of those big dramatic vanishing acts this time, pulling the website site down in the middle of the night because I'm fed up with the way things are. No, this time I've given lots of notice and the removal is of the labor intensive, time consuming parts of the site that no longer are as useful as they once were. The Cat Page will stay up as will the Do Good list and Aunt Isis and a few other features. I've moved the Blog over to a new service, Google's Blogger having gotten on my last nerve for the last time. The few remaining features will gradually be joined by new items...CONTINUED...

...I'm pleased of what I did with Belly Dance NY. In its heyday, which peaked about four years ago, it was the very best regional website in the country and maybe in the world, a complete resource for anyone with questions about the where to find just about anything relating to middle eastern dance in the Metro NY region and a bit beyond. It also featured enrichment and educational links for users to follow and a raft of public service announcement. And of course, there were the Swap Pages, a virtual flea market for dancers from anywhere and everywhere Beyond these features, hidden away in corners and cubbies, were amusing oddities and quirky bits for the adventurous, my personal little jokes and gifts to users. It was one helluva website, if I say so myself.

The original BDNY was a largely hand-coded labor of love designed to fill an information gap. When it first appeared, there was nothing around except a noble effort by a woman named Devon Schuyler on which she listed the most visible of the Manhattan teachers and their doings and a few of the local nightspots. I spoke with Devon before planting a new site on her hyper-turf about the need for completeness and the potential for doing inadvertent commercial harm through omission. She agreed with me that something more was needed adding that she didn't have the time for constant updating or tracking down teachers, venues and presenters --if I wanted to take over, I should go for it.

So I did. After searching the Yellow Pages, Arabesque, Caravan, Habibi, Jareeda and (maybe) Zaghareet magazines as well as a suburban mailing list, I contacted as many local people as I could find and then quizzed them about what and who they knew. Anything I found out went up on the web.
For me the web was an solution to a hitherto unsolvable puzzle. For years I'd been looking for an efficient, low cost way to disseminate information about the dance scene to insiders and outsiders alike. When I'd entered the scene the only information sources for a would be newcomer were either word of mouth or the phonebook. Bobby Farrah and Serena were in the Yellow Pages with sufficient information attached to their listings for an outsider to realize they were teaching "Near Eastern" (Bobby) or "Belly" (Serena) dance. Anahid Sofian was in there, too, but with no indication what kind of dance she was offering. I'm pretty sure Morocco had a listing, perhaps as Casbah Dance, but there again, one had to make a cognitive leap from nomenclature to instance. For all I know, there might have been others hidden in the phonebook, visible only to those who already knew who they were. You had to be a dancer to know how to find dancers; you had to be already involved in the scene in order to learn what was around to be involved in. It was quite circular.

And before the internet, nearly impenetrable. I know because I'd tried earlier in print to make information available. A dancer friend named Joan Engel had been publishing a newsletter as corresponding secretary to a group of suburban dance enthusiasts. Joan, an organizational dynamo and untiring dance devotee, was finally forced to admit defeat after months of attempting to get people to send her events notices and news. She said she couldn't understand why people refused to act in their own self interests when all they had to do was simply send her a note or call her with information. Every time a self-imposed deadline loomed, Joan had to round up the usual suspects and beg them for information. To make the sad story of this newsletter short, Joan finally got fed up. She been publishing out of pocket and was finally out of patience when she told me about her problems. We wondered if it might be easier to gather news if the location of the newsletter were shifted to New York City. So we tried. And we failed.

Joan and I did hang on a little longer, getting out another issue or two. When we gave up, I promised myself that it was temporary set back, that eventually I'd find a way to get news out...someday, somehow. That day arrived about two years later, in 1996, when the internet started to spread and the World Wide Web began to become accessible to ordinary folks.

TO BE CONTINUED...