In this study, it revealed the historical changes and characteristics of belly dance, and identified the development direction in terms of leisure sports, school education, and the mass media since belly dance has been introduced to South Korea in 199...
In this study, it revealed the historical changes and characteristics of belly dance, and identified the development direction in terms of leisure sports, school education, and the mass media since belly dance has been introduced to South Korea in 1998 for the first time. Also this study aims to reveal the values of belly dance in healthy effects, educational effects, and public art-oriented effects. Further, its purpose is to investigate the challenges belly dance is currently facing. This paper selected liberal arts research method to utilize the literature, the previous studies, the author’s experiences and several interview data.
Belly dance has been existed in the Islamic world from West Asia to the north shore of Africa, that is, it’s a dance of Arab cultures. The ancient ritual dance was the origin of belly dance and it had been distributed to the Mediterranean region by gypsies. In the Ottoman era, professional dancers had been appeared in Turkey. Afterwards, from the late 18th century to the early 19th century, it had attracted huge interests from the US and Europe regions. The beginning of 20th century in Egypt, belly dance movement elements became more abundant. Currently, it has widely propagated to the world as leisure sports and public art revealing various personalities that suit unique characteristics of each country. The dance implies aesthetic features such as sensuality, vibrant beauty, improvisatorial beauty, amusable beauty and harmonic beauty. Belly dance is practiced with bare foot and the basic dance moves include hip-push, hip-lift, hip-drop, maya, hiproll, undulation, shimmy and etc. Basic costumes are a bra, long skirts or pants and hip-scarf. Often tassels or studs are decorated bra or hip to offer auditory and visual stimuli while revealing a belly. It also uses diverse props such as veil, cane, sword, fan, and wing including Arabic music and rhythms. Performances of a live band mainly use traditional instruments of Arab such as darbuka, nay, oud, bandir, and so on.
In South Korea, the belly dance has been introduced in 1998 for the first time when pop cultures were ripening. Leading dancers started to be produced since 2002. From 2002 to 2005, it had been offered and spread over the whole country as one of leisure sports. After 2005, it has been selected by elementary school, middle school, and high school as a special ability aptitude education. And this education has become a major in universities, even its boundary has widening into the performing arts field.
The healthy effects of belly dance are as follows. First, it is an exercise let both aerobic exercise and strength training done at the same time. The dance improves physical strength and increases energy metabolism by age. In terms of mental health, it raises self-esteem and has dance meditation effects. Second, physical, intellectual, and psychological developments are supported by the dance and, it develops social skills and creativity. Third, belly dance aspires toward popular arts in the artistic side.
However, though today requires globalization and professionalism, belly dance has extremely poor in the foundation of academic system and only the fragmentary appearance as a pop art culture has been emphasized. In order to overcome these issues, the author should have targets to development challenges such as systematization of belly dance teaching, academic education system establishment, ensuring independence and marketing strategy as a performing art organization, cooperation structure between belly dance organizations and desperate needs for the branded Korean belly dance as the cultural businesses.