As I sit at my computer this morning trying to learn how to make my website better, I wonder if someone born before 1965 is really capable of learning all this new, newer and newest technology. Or does it really matter? Sometimes I feel like I’m in a Jurassic Park theme park struggling for survival or I’m from “Planet of the Apes” trying to preserve precious relics of the past. I still like to write my obligations onto a physical calendar and in cursive with a ball point pen. I still pay my bills with checks. My email address ends with aol dot com. I still have and prefer to use a land line. I would rather speak on the phone than text. I like to read books made out of paper and if I find a great article online, I print it out to hard copy. And music and video? I think I personally keep the blank disc factories alive buying in bulk so I can record and preserve my media. And yes I do own and use records aka vinyl and cassettes besides the CDs and DVDs that are the mainstay of my dance classes that I use on my Hi Fi sound system. My digital amp is only there for others to use on occasion. I could go on and on. Photos? I guess I gave in to digital and the clouds, but use thumb drives, external hard drives and subscribe to drop box and other services to try to ensure that all these precious memories stay preserved and hope and pray that most are not lost forever. But it is overwhelming and I feel that I am drowning in the 21st century of too much information and too much media.
All of this brings me back to the point that the world is changing so fast and too fast. Too many people, too much technology, too much information and I’m wondering who I am and where I am. Do I belong in this world? Since I was born, so much has happened and changed. Life has moved too fast. I started school using pencils and ink pens with quills, ink wells and blotters. Television was not invented yet and music was played on the radio or if fortunate, on a phonograph player with 78 rpm records. We did addition and subtraction using our fingers and memorized the times tables - there were no calculators. Typewriters were used with carbon paper for copies and erasers when errors were made. Get the picture? This was a long time ago and so much has happened since then.
I was born June 1,1942 during World War II and two very popular wartime Hollywood actresses at the time were June Haver and June Allyson. They not only acted, but they also sang, danced and were well known for their tap dancing and their beauty. It was for those three reasons I was named June. So after my namesakes, at the age of 4 my mother enrolled me in dance school to study tap. This was the start of my life in dance and it’s never stopped. In grade school I took the requisite tap, ballet, acrobatics and added jazz in middle school. Then in high school I became a wannabe beatnik questioning existence, writing poetry, studying art, modern dance, African dance, Indian dance, and trying to teach myself to play my bongos and congas. Life was good and I was especially loving my African dancing and “beatnik” poetry and drumming. Then when I began studying other “ethnic” dance forms including Middle Eastern dance, life brought new meaning and inspirations. When I tried to find books on ethnic dance, I found only random paragraph here and there. So much has changed that now I can’t even keep up with the number of books on the subject.
In the mid 1960s when I began my life in belly dance, no one knew what I was talking about. “What’s a belly dancer?” There just weren’t that many dancers out there. And when I auditioned to work as a dancer, I was hired and I didn’t even know what a belly dancer was. I got the job basically because I was young and cute and moved ok and probably showed promise. But I certainly didn’t even know what I was doing. So much has changed since then. At the time we did Cabaret style belly dance. Cabaret a combination of what the musicians play…everything from Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Armenian, some Moroccan, some Egyptian, some Persian and of course some good old American style show business. Our musicians were from all over the globe including the U.S.A. I learned by watching the other dancers and asking the musicians a lot of questions. I got on the job training. I had no dancers to emulate other than my workmates because there were no ethnic teachers or dance workshops and video had not yet been invented. Fortunately many of the dancers and musicians I worked with were from the “old country,” and just being around them, copying them and learning by osmosis was more invaluable than any formal classes I took later in my dance life. But times change and belly dance styles changed and with it, so did I. But these early memories have remained and become an innate part of me… the essence of my dance and music traditions. So much has changed since those days and even though I understand the changes and maybe have changed with them, those early beginnings have never left me because there is so much culture and history attached.
Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur dancing in what “Planet of the Apes” would call the “forbidden zone.” And sometimes it feels like “Fahrenheit 451”where books (knowledge) have been outlawed by a government fearing an independent-thinking public.” When I was in my dinosaur heyday every dancer adhered to certain unwritten, unsaid rules about the dance taking into account the music and the culture; however each dancer’s unique style and personality was given freedom to innovate and express passion and emotion. Today I feel that the established dancers, maybe in order to get and keep work, are copycats, dancing robotically. It seems that today’s dancers feel a need to do and execute certain movements showing off skills as though the dance were a gymnastic sport working on a point system. Gone seems to be the individuality of expression. It seems to have started a number of years ago when, I believe, that Eastern European and Russian dancers looked to the U.S. cabaret dancers of the 1970’s and began imitating them, but tried to make it bigger, better, faster, more gymnastic. And like a virus it has grown.