“Takka-tak, takka-tak, takka-tak-tak-tak.”
Johanna Krynytzky orchestrates the shrill of a dozen zills — finger cymbals her students wear. Inside the St. Petersburg, Fla., dance studio, a dozen women test their dexterity.
“Move your hips like this,” Krynytzky says. “Move like you’re holding a bag of groceries and closing a car door at the same time.”
Krynytzky’s rotating hips freeze for an instant, then she throws it into reverse. Her feet move, too, and her arms are constantly afloat. Each movement –- the flip of a wrist, the turn of a heel, the clench of a glute -– is graceful.
Belly dancing is the art of multitasking. It is complete coordination of the body, yet all the parts are moving independently.
Every weekend, the women are drawn from their day jobs to the small, dimly lit studio at 517 Martin Luther King Jr. St. N in St. Petersburg. Stacy Reyer is a librarian, Kimberly Freed is a manager at a temp agency, Dawn Cecil a criminology professor. Together, they revel in a dance they find liberating.
At the center is 32-year-old Krynytzky, who has been dancing since her college days. She directs the women in a dance troupe they call Loud Zoo, which performs all over the Tampa Bay area.
On this day, they are preparing for a show in Gulfport, where Krynytzky lives, at the city’s twice-monthly Art Walk. After class, the troupe members scarf burritos and coffee before rehearsing for another two hours.
“Keeping eight girls together is hard,” Krynytzky says. “It’s like shepherding squirrels.”
Belly dancing is sexy. It’s sensual. And when Krynytzky first encountered it, she wasn’t sure how to react.
She saw her first performance at age 21, during a visit to Turkey with her grandmother. It was not what she expected.
“I was aware of belly dancing before that, but only in an I-Dream-of-Jeannie sense,” she said.
The women she saw were not the rail-thin Hollywood version of belly dancers, dressed in sequin-studded bikini tops. “Not all of them were skinny. And they were sensual without being rude about it.”
After returning to Illinois, where she studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, she joined an on-campus belly dancing class. Within two years she was teaching classes all over the city and, as an employee of the Field Museum of Natural History, hiring performers for special events.
She felt caged. Her work required her to hire performers without being able to perform herself. Eventually, she quit her job to pursue dancing full time.
In 2000, she set out on a new path, dancing across the country on a road trip, visiting friends and dance festivals that led her through Seattle, down the West Coast, to New Mexico, back to Chicago, over to New York, up to Boston, and down the East Coast. She moved to Seminole, Fla., with an aunt before settling in Gulfport.
“We have a new move we’d like to submit to Loud Zoo,” says Freed, 38, the temp agency manager. She’s been belly dancing for seven years.
Back at the studio, the troop breaks out the drums. Krynytzky stops blowing into her zurna, a wooden instrument that sounds like a nasal ambulance siren.
Freed along with Reyer, 31, perform the SunRay Slink, a move named for the studio’s other belly dance teacher, Karen SunRay. The girls roll their abdomens and move their arms in a synchronized pattern. When they finish, they ask Krynytzky what she thinks.
“It would look cool if you did a Traveling Camel and then turned toward the audience,” she says. A Traveling Camel is when a dancer rolls her abdomen while pivoting to the left or right. “Get comfortable with these moves because we’re probably going to do them tonight.”
Before Reyer sits down, a splinter –- a shard of glass or wood from outside -– begins to irritate her foot. She limps to a table in the back and props her foot on the table.
Krynytzky takes a pair tweezers to the arch. It hurts.
“Do you still have that vodka?” Reyer asks.
Krynytzky puts a warm bottle of Smirnoff on the table, and then digs into Reyer’s foot.
Three minutes, three swigs and one bloody napkin later the splinter is still there. Reyer is determined to perform. She is one of the group’s more versatile musicians. For the rest of the two-hour practice, she rests her foot and resigns herself to a drum.
Shortly after moving to Gulfport in 2000, Krynytzky began teaching belly dancing at gyms while performing in restaurants, which she loathed. She calls fulfilling someone’s preconceived notions of belly dancing doing the “monkey dance.”
“There wasn’t a lot going on here, dance-wise,” she said.
For her private performances, usually for corporate events or scheduled live performances, she used live bands. As members of the band left, she replaced them with her belly-dancing friends until it slowly evolved into the current Loud Zoo line up. All the women in the troupe take turns playing instruments and dancing.
Gulfport is a good place for belly dancing, she says. Krynytzky said she has run into problems in St. Petersburg, such as not being welcomed at the Saturday Morning Market on Central Avenue and the student organization fair at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
“The misconceptions about belly dancing are huge,” she said. “I can only assume they’ve seen a cabaret belly dancer.”
Cabaret-style belly dancing differs from Loud Zoo’s style, which derives its moves and outfits from a tradition called American trial style, known as ATS. The difference is a matter of taste, with American tribal dance combining elements of traditional belly dancing and the glitzy cabaret dancing.
Loud Zoo also adds its own message.
“We’re about women power, femininity,” Krynytzky said. “We’re out there shaking our hips, our boobs -– the things that make us women. We dance for ourselves, and make eye contact with the women in the audience. You have to engage with them so they can understand. It breaks my heart when they turn away.”
Before the show Saturday night, Loud Zoo gathers at Krynytzky’s house to spin their hair into buns and coat their eyelashes with mascara. Reyer never dislodged the splinter from her foot, so she bandages it tight enough to dance on.
She’s not the only one with a pre-show injury. Working in her yard a few hours earlier, Denise Glueck, 42, sliced open a toe.
The women crowd around a pair of floor-length mirrors in the living room. Their bodies are all shapes and sizes. Amy Newton, 36, is thin, as is Krynytzky. Reyer and Freed are both full-figured. All of them are unabashed about their appearance, at least when they’re dancing.
“When I’m in my outfit, I’m hot,” Freed says. “For me it’s an expression of what I feel inside even if I can’t say it. When I hear someone make a comment about my body, I think, ‘Can you belly dance? Let’s see you balance a sword on your head.’”
The seven members converge on Beach Boulevard South just as the traffic from the Art Walk thickens. They perform together, then separately, making their precise movements look easy. The crowds are polite, but appreciative. No one gets too close.
After the show, a young girl, no older than 5, wanders into the circle of women. She stares, entranced, at the their gauzy blue outfits, their bare bellies, their decorative swords.
