Bellydancing in Dubai

On Thursday night a group of us went to watch Soirse (Soraya) dance at the Carlton Towers Hotel here in Dubai. Soirse and I worked for the same law firm in Australia, she was in the Melbourne office and I was in Sydney. The Maddocks Mafia strikes again! She’s a fabulous dancer, performing in restaurants and clubs in Melbourne but now she’s taken the plunge to come to the Middle East and work as a dancer here. So far she’s had contracts in Bahrain, Morocco and now in Dubai with another contract in Ras al Khaimah starting next month inshallah.

Soirse does 2-4 shows a night, seven nights a week at the Carlton Towers. Eeek, who drafted that Enterprise Agreement? As it was Thursday, the last day of our working week we decided go to her “early” show at 11:15pm in the hotel’s Arabic nightclub. There’s a band at the nightclub so it was an opportunity for my students to see a quality dancer working with live music. When we arrived at 10:15 the place was totally empty and even when she danced the place was only a quarter full. But at around midnight the crowds started flocking in and by 1am it was packed. Mostly locals in the audience, lots of groups of men but also mixed groups with the ladies in hijab and abaya. The strange thing (to me anyway) is that in the Gulf nobody gets up to dance. How anyone can stay sitting down while this fabulous music is playing just beats me. If you looked around the audience though, you’d see that everyone was grooving in their seats; the ladies were ‘getting down while in a seated position’ and even the local guys in dishdashes were doing the Gulf Head Nod and twirling their worry beads to the rhythm. (What can I say except that you should never believe anyone who tells you that expats are the only consumers of alcohol in the UAE , enough said.) The band at the club plays all night with 2 shows by Soirse and performances by a couple of singers. Soirse does her early show then does another performance at the club at around 2am.

We left the nightclub and moved on to catch Soirse’s 1:15am show at the Greek Taverna which is in the same hotel. A costume change and dancing to CD this time. Different vibe completely to the nightclub. The taverna was just like Scorpios in Annandale where I was the dancer for ages, or the Greek Typhoon in Sydney. The audience was made up of Greeks or people who were “Arabic other than Gulf”. It was great. The music started and within a nano-second there were guys on the floor dancing and before long everyone was up dancing and having a ball. The girl singer did a bracket of debke numbers which of course went down a treat with the Lebanese in the audience. There was also the obligatory drunk Russian woman in fur topped boots who insisted on doing a solo 'dance' performance right in front of the girl singer.

Great night, eventually arriving home sometime after 3am - its been a long time since I've done that. There are some photos here.