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São Paulo – São Paulo’s Nina Ingrid Caputo Paschoal is working to provide Brazilians with improved access to belly dancing history. A dancer and a History degree holder, she focused on dancing for her master’s research project at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) in São Paulo. She began her studies in 2017 and will complete them at the end of this year.
Paschoal completed her graduate studies at PUC in 2015, around the time she started taking belly dancing lessons at a São Paulo school. She had wanted to learn it since childhood. “It was a watershed,” she tells ANBA. Encouraged by her teacher to create and devote her thoughts to dancing, she tells that she fell in love with it.
In 2016, she delved deeper into the subject. Last year, upon beginning her master’s studies in History, she presented her project on belly dancing. “I realized that written information on belly dancing was lacking,” she says.
With a background working at museums and art shows, Paschoal chose to narrow down her studies to Orientalist paintings. “I selected European Orientalist-era paintings,” Paschoal says. The period goes from the late 18th to the early 20th century. At that time, European painters would take trips to Arab countries and portray local dancing in their work.
Paschoal intends to recount how those images ultimately fed into the knowledge that spread around the world regarding belly dancing, which she calls Arab dance. Belly dancing was a term coined by Europeans, she explains. Based on the analysis of paintings, Paschoal plans on tracing back the entire history of dance.
She also intends to eventually work her master’s research into a book. She believes the information will be a useful source of knowledge for dancers, as well as address the fact that the subject is underexplored by history. Paschoal’s master’s thesis supervisor is professor Amailton Magno Azevedo.
Paschoal still dances, now at Escola Luxor, the São Paulo school where she also teaches. She has performed at festivals throughout Brazil. July will see her join other Luxor teachers and art director Amara Saadeh at Egypt’s Cairo Khan Festival.
Paschoal and her colleagues will perform solo as well as sit in on workshops. Devoted to dancing professionals and students, the Festival will run from July 16 to 23 in Cairo. This will be Paschoal’s first time in an Arab country. She believes the experience will contribute to her research.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
