11 minute read
BELLY DANCING FOR THE DOGS with Sascha Olivier Sampson
WITH SASCHA OLIVIER SAMPSON
BELLY DANCING FOR THE DOGS
Sascha Olivier Sampson is a belly dancer, the owner of Moon Goddess Dance Studio, a lecturer in performing arts at the University of Namibia and the founder of ‘Shimmy for Shelter’, an annual dance extravaganza that raises money for animal welfare. The Shimmy for Shelter 2019 shows successfully raised N$22 000 for Have a Heart Namibia.
For her entire life, Sascha has been a dancer, an actress, a performer and a singer. When a doctor broke the news that she had a heart condition that meant she would not be able to dance any more, her world was shattered. This is the story of how her passions had to change, and of the successes and joys in her life since that scary turn.
MYD: Please tell us about yourself.
SOS: The thing that I associate with most and that people always associate with me is dance. It’s been part of my life since I was five, and I grew up thinking I’d become a ballerina. I always say that the Dance Goddess heard me wrong and thought I said “bellyrina,” because I ended up discovering belly dance – and it has shaped my life. I was doing ballet, contemporary, African, Latin and ballroom dancing and I was preparing for a show when I started to feel ill. I ignored it, thinking it was just the flu, I’d see to it later. Performers are especially bad like that because the show must go on. So I pushed through, but just felt more and more ill. When the show was done, I had zero energy and I could hardly breath. The doctors discovered it was my heart. The heart is a muscle and I worked mine to an extreme when I was sick – so it just decided ‘no more’. It was only functioning at about fifty per cent, so I was booked off normal life for about a year. Even if I wanted to do something, I couldn’t really. Just getting up to go outside left me out of breath. I was on my doctor’s case about when I could go back to dancing, but he said, ‘No, you can’t. Your body can’t handle it.’
Eventually, though, he agreed that I could do something that was calm and relaxing. I couldn’t do any of the things I had done before and by chance in the mall I saw one of those notices where you tear the little number off – it was for belly dance classes. It wasn’t a style that had ever crossed my path before, but I thought okay, I’d give it a try. It wasn’t calm or relaxing – it was very high energy – but the first class was just incredible. There was only myself and two other ladies there, but I was hooked from then. That class grew to about sixty people. When our teacher stopped teaching at the end of that year, Minka Delport-Greeff, who has the other dance studio in Windhoek, and I started teaching the classes. I went for training with different teachers in South African and internationally to keep up the standard.
MYD: Being given the diagnosis and told, ‘No more dance’ when dance was your life – that must have been very difficult. How did you deal with that?
SOS: It was very difficult. In the beginning I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I was so used to all my time being taken up developing the skill and working towards a goal, and I would be at rehearsal till ten o’clock at night sometimes throughout high school.
I was that person who didn’t go out to friends and things because I was always rehearsing, so I didn’t really know what to do with myself and I didn’t really know how to identify myself. So much of who I was was about being a dancer.
But it’s a good thing to listen to your body when it’s saying something doesn’t feel right or you need to take a break. I had been very good at ignoring all of those things before, and now I’m very good at listening to what my body has to say. Also, I’m more sympathetic to others when they don’t feel well or are tired – I understand that it’s not just an excuse and people really are entitled to look after themselves.
MYD: So you haven’t had any complications with your heart as a result of belly dancing?
SOS: No, not at all. And one of the things that I really love about the style is that it is so welcoming of all different skill levels, fitness levels, body types. You don’t put yourself in harm’s way with belly dance. It works very well with the natural movement of your body and your own capabilities, and there is so much you can tweak to make it more friendly for your body.
MYD: You started Moon Goddess Studio in 2008 and then you initiated Shimmy for Shelter – tell us more about that?
SOS: I became aware of this international event called World Belly Dance Day – its main aim being to let people know what belly dancing really is about because there are often misconceptions about it. People think it’s very raunchy and promiscuous, but it’s not that at all. It’s very graceful, it’s very feminine. It was, in fact, created by women for other women – never for the entertainment of men.
Very important to me is raising awareness for charity, and animal welfare has always been a huge passion of mine. ‘Shimmy’ is one of the key movements in belly dancing, and ‘shelter’ referred to the protection of animals.
We started off raising funds for the SPCA and it just grew from there. In the beginning I didn’t know how people would take to it because belly dancing was still very new, and people were a bit conservative. So I ended up funding a lot of the show myself, and going on a prayer that people would come to the show and we would make something. I just wanted to be able to hand over something to the SPCA and I think in that year we made N$5 000 or N$7 000. I was so pleased about it. I wanted to keep people coming and interested, so we’ve had a different theme every year. We’ve tried to integrate different styles like fire spinning, poi acts; we’ve had contemporary dancers in our show. We’ve now extended it to two nights and we travel down to the coast with the show. Over the years the show has gained momentum and grown a following We’ve had dancers from Cape Town, from Zambia and one of the dancers came all the way from America. Starting Shimmy, I didn’t really have an end goal in mind – I just wanted to hand over some money to the SPCA. Now that it’s developed, I would really love for people to know exactly what Shimmy for Shelter stands for, to look forward to it, to know that the second Saturday in May every year is World Belly Dance Day and time for Shimmy for Shelter. It’s not just about entertainment – though entertainment is a huge part of it. It’s about supporting the arts and supporting good organisations that do fantastic work.
MYD: Tell us about some of the places that belly dance has taken you?
SOS: South Africa was where I started going for training and where I go every year for festivals and workshops. The wonderful thing about the Goddess Divine Festival in Johannesburg, for example, is that they bring in dancers from all around the world. I’ve had the opportunity to train with dancers and Middle Eastern musicians from Egypt, America and Turkey. It brings dancers from Southern Africa together but it also gets us in touch with what’s happening around the world, so Cape Town and Johannesburg have been amazing sources of knowledge and information and growth. I’ve also been to Sweden, thanks to the University of Namibia, which is where I work full time. They sent me as a lecturer to teach at one of the universities in Sweden. It was an amazing experience to see how the arts are taken up internationally and to have the opportunity to perform there. Then last year I was invited to teach and perform in Switzerland at the Orient Alp Festival – a beautiful, beautiful place. The atmosphere around an event like that, where everyone comes from literally all over the world for one goal – to perform and to learn and to network and to interact and to share – it’s just incredible. I competed in the Dance Championships in Spain recently and won a gold medal. I also competed at the World Championships of Performing Arts in Los Angeles, where I received a gold medal for belly dance, bronze for contemporary and was the overall category winner in the
folklore dance category for my belly dancing.
One of the things that I really love about belly dancing as opposed to some of the other genres I’ve done is the generosity amongst the dancers – the willingness to share information, to give opportunities
and not hold things for yourself. When you’re in an arts community that is small and not heavily supported, people think, ‘I’m not going to share what I know because then I lessen my opportunities.’ Actually, it’s the exact opposite. The more you share, the greater you make the whole community. I’ve really enjoyed being part of what they call the sisterhood of belly dancers because they are so generous with their time, their knowledge and their skills. They say knowledge is power, but so is kindness. You can have the most inspiring words for somebody but they’ll remember the time you took to teach them something.
FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT WWW.MOONGODDESSDANCE
STUDIO.WEEBLY.COM
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