About Us

The North American Middle Eastern Dance Association (NAMEDA) is a member-based organization comprised of Middle Eastern Dance practitioners – bellydancers, instructors, and performers – residing in North America. The goals of NAMEDA are to facilitate effective communication, resource-sharing, and information distribution throughout the North American Middle Eastern Dance community. Membership can be purchased on a group or individual basis. Our current membership includes over 70 dance troupes and 600 individual dancers, and is expanding rapidly.

In consultation with the Council of Bellydancing Regulators and Advisors (COBRA), an international working group of recognized Middle Eastern Dance experts, NAMEDA is working to establish a set of guidelines and standards for Middle Eastern Dance practice and performance in North America. We anticipate that the draft standards document will be ready in late 2002.

One of the challenges of the standards development process is the grassroots nature of Middle Eastern Dance in North America. From the beginning, Middle Eastern Dance has been an art form passed on from person to person, with teachers and performers forming close bonds with their students. The teachers, coming from extremely diverse backgrounds, have thus engendered a wide variety of very different dance styles. This has been further complicated by the more recent popularity of “fusion” styles, which meld bellydancing with other folk and classical dance, for example African, flamenco, ballet, and modern dance.

Correspondingly, the documentation of this evolution of dance has been haphazard, lacking in direction and standardization. Information about dance steps, costume patterns and ideas, dance philosophies and other things has customarily been distributed in the form of photocopied info sheets, small self-published booklets, music on cassette tapes, instructional or performance videos, and more recently, individual and group web pages.

Because word of mouth is the primary means of communication within the community, and documentation is severely lacking, there has been no cause for agreement over the years as to standard spellings and meanings of common bellydancing terms and concepts. While NAMEDA has been working on the broader standards document, an active and dedicated interest group within NAMEDA, the League of Bellydancing Librarians, Indexers and Archivists (LoBeLIA), have been addressing the problem of the language used to describe Middle Eastern Dance. As a pilot project, LoBeLIA has focused on the language used to describe bellydancing costume items and accessories. This beta version serves as the first module of a planned online Thesaurus of Bellydancing (ThoBe), which contains roughly 85 preferred terms. Future versions of ThoBe will expand to include other bellydancing-related terms such as dance steps and dance and musical styles.

We anticipate that the ThoBe user group will come from a variety of backgrounds and from all segments of the bellydancing community. Beginning dancers will use the thesaurus to get a sense of the costume options they have when performing. Instructors or group leaders will use the language to educate their students/group members about the different parts of the costume and, where applicable, specific costume styles. Online retailers of belly dancing apparel and costume items will use the language to standardize the organization and language of their websites, enabling dancers to find what they are looking for quickly. As the thesaurus will be online, both members of NAMEDA and the general public will be able to access this resource. It is hoped that ThoBe will provide exposure for bellydancing in North America, and will also serve as an educational tool.