What is the MED-Dance List?
The OG online belly dance community
Long before Substack and Bhuz, even before tribe.net, there was MED-dance. It was the original online community for all things bellydance. For many of us who were studying and performing belly dance in the ‘90s and early 2000s, it was our first exposure to people, topics, and ideas beyond our own community. It was a place where you could learn about aspects of the dance you didn’t know existed. For many list members, including me, reading list emails was one of the highlights of our day.
MED-dance began in the early 90s. We used dial-up modems to connect online. Things we do and take for granted now—file transfer and download, for example—required separate software tools. The Web was in its infancy. But most early Internet users had email, and that was all you needed to be a member of MED-dance. Even though subsequent online communities were developed on more polished and easier-to-use platforms, for many of us “seasoned” dancers, nothing will ever quite match those heady feelings of discovery and connection.
For this article, I sought out several well-known and well-respected members of the dance community, all of whom I first encountered on MED-dance, for their memories about this early online community. A cautionary note: we’re talking about a time thirty years ago! Our memories, at best, will be a bit fuzzy.
The technology behind MED-dance is that of a list server, or listserv. It was like having a community forum that takes place in your inbox. Listservs enabled users to communicate with a group of people via email on a specific topic. You would send a message to the group email address, and that message was then distributed to each person on the list. List members could create conversations, known as threads, around a shared interest, and comments were visible to all. You usually had the option to receive each email as it was sent to the list or receive a digest of the day’s emails and comment threads. If you didn’t stay on top of it, MED-dance emails could easily blow up your inbox. Eileen Bauer—who ran and moderated MED-dance—says that too much email was one of the main reasons people left the list.
A ballroom dancer herself, Eileen loves dance in general and is also a career techie. When I asked her about why she created MED-dance, Eileen said, “I looked around the internet and discovered there weren’t mailing lists for a whole lot of dance types, and I started them. I think I started it [MED-dance] in 1990, but I’m not sure.” The list quickly began to grow in membership and popularity. Jalilah Zamora, of Jalilah's Raks Sharki CD series, said, “I literally got my first email address so I could subscribe to the MED-Dance list.”
List members could ask questions, answer them, and share information. Former MED-dance member Tedi Thomas told me, “It was a wonderful thing to connect with so many people (from beginners to our larger personalities/elders in the dance), though things were also a bit rocky at times (as it often is with such ‘gatherings’ of so many personalities and backgrounds).”
The list of “elders” included, but was not limited to: Morocco (who, according to Eileen, was one of the earliest members), Andrea Deagon, Laurel Victoria Grey, Aisha Azhar, Jeanette Cool, Tarik Sultan, Shira, Morwena Assaf, Shakira (Elizabeth Fannin), and Sedonia Sipes. And of course, the list members interviewed for this article!
Popular topics included playing finger cymbals, costuming, dance styles, teaching dance, folkloric origins of the dance, and dance history. Advertising was not allowed on the list, so you didn’t see class and event information (with the possible exception of Rakkasah, once one of the largest festivals in the United States). But even back then, there was considerable interest in dance history and origins.
Woodrow Jarvis Hill, known to the list as Asim, said, “I aggressively consumed historical information on this dance. I was (and still am) obsessed with having a solid, credible history—herstory, too!—for this dance, for better and worse, and centering the many people from the regions that birthed what we call raqs sharqi. I don’t always get that right, but that’s what I tried to learn—and, sometimes, debate—more than anything.”
Community behavior even back then, was, in the words of the Talking Heads, “same as it ever was.” Discussions could and often escalated into heated debates. However, what could be seen as a tiresome listserv feature—asynchronous mail threads—actually helped make such debates and arguments more thought-out and informative. Unlike Facebook, where people can just pile on the comments, MED-dance users would have to email their comments to MED-dance and wait for them to appear on the list (and in people’s inboxes). People who wanted to respond had to email their comments to the list, and so on. To advance an argument in a reasonable amount of time, people had to be clear and detailed in their posts and comments. As Saqra Raybuck put it succinctly, “List members would spout out a whole ton of stuff, instead of a quick off-the-cuff comment and then telling you to F yourself.”
Jalilah had this to say about discussion topics: “The main discussions … I remember were about respecting the cultures the dance comes from, including using the names the people of the cultures used. This was all before the term cultural appropriation came into use. There were people who believed the dance we were doing was from the MENA region and should be approached as a cultural dance, and there were others who believed it was a universal art form, and as a Westerner they had the right to do whatever they wanted with the dance. There were lots of debates about the name. I probably sounded pretty hardcore back then! From the start I had learned from Arabs and was told raqs sharqi was the correct term, so I was shocked to find out many people didn’t agree. I’ve gotten used to it since then!”
Saqra Raybuck added, “It was the same as Bhuz or Tribe or the various Facebook groups. It was a very bossy place, and nobody liked it if you argued with them. We had a few ultra-argumentative people. But, you figured out who’s who, and what their weighted value [was] for actual information, and then you go with information from the ones that you know to listen to. A lot of the really, really good information came out when someone got really cheesed. They would provide attributions and credits. So it (controversy) was really worth it, because you would get even more information.”
Interestingly, Eileen has different memories: “I think things were a bit calmer then. It helped that many of the dancers knew each other. Also, I believe that was one of the reasons people left—that they knew too many people.”
On the brighter side, many people formed long-term friendships through MED-dance. Tedi Thomas told me, “The listserv was instrumental in bringing so many people together ... making what was a small community that was very scattered across the map so much closer to each other. Sharing information, answering questions, and helping each other to grow ... and to find community when moving to new places. I had one particular friendship that unexpectedly grew out of me cautioning a relative newbie regarding her interaction with [a well-known dancer and list member]. Something along the lines of ‘I'm not sure you know who you are talking to, but you might be interested in knowing her background and her history in our dance before questioning her response to your question/statement.’ This particular dancer contacted me some time later to let me know that the job market was bringing her to my location. She moved here, we began a friendship, and we became dance partners. Helping dancers who were relocating became (to me) one of the very many positives that the MED-dance list provided to our community.”
MED-dance closed up shop in the early 2000s, no doubt because other discussion platforms based on newer technologies were starting to come online. But many dancers of a certain age—including me—look back on MED-dance fondly. Despite its unwieldy format and inbox-bloating potential, we learned so much about our craft and the greater belly dance community, and formed friendships that, for most of us, still endure.
As Saqra said, “It was the best game in town.”
Postscript
Sadly, there is no central archive for MED-dance content. The servers that hosted the listserv are long gone and backups lost. However, there is a community effort to recover MED-dance content. If you were a member of MED-dance, and happened to archive your list emails or digests, please email me at info@flamingcheeseproductions.com. And thank you!
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The author would like to thank Eileen Bauer, Woodrow Jarvis Hill, Jalilah, Saqra Raybuck, and Tedi Thomas for their contributions to this article, and to MED-dance!
Editor’s Note: Interview responses have been edited for house style.