The increased popularity of zenne dancing has been a boon for dancers like Segah, who has been performing at Chanta for two years, and been featured on television programs across Turkey and in Cyprus. It's no longer just Oriental belly dancing. The sort of male belly dancing we see in contemporary clubs has actually evolved. When we used to Google zenne, we'd find a few people – now there are like hundreds. “Zenne dancers were on the verge of extinction,” says Alper, “but now they're back again. Male belly dancing was something the past.”īut in the past half-decade, zenne dancing in Istanbul has gone mainstream: bolstered by the media attention paid to Binay and Alper's film as well as the success of gay crossover clubs like Chanta: which cater their zenne shows to a largely heterosexual, female clientele. Even among Istanbul's sizable gay community, for whom zenne dancing might have particular resonance, “people would rather watch drag shows or go-go boys.
“Oriental” dance is no longer as popular in Turkey as it once was. “We are very much under the influence of Western entertainment and culture and show business,” says Binay. “We all belly dance at some point – even straight men – at least, we used to.”īack when Binay and his collaborator Caner Alper started researching zenne in 2006, they saw it as a “vanishing culture” – found only in rural areas and in a few underground gay clubs in Istanbul. Participating in traditional Eastern dance, he says, was something done by men and women alike. It would happen in a closed house, ten, 12 men sitting around drinking and a male dancer,” says Binay. “ would not happen in a restaurant, would not happen in a wedding. There, zennes frequently perform (without a sexual element) for straight-identified male audiences says filmmaker Mehmet Binay, whose 2012 feature Zenne Dancer explores the friendship between an Istanbul zenne dancer, a German photographer, and a gay “bear” from the conservative Urfa province. Regardless of whether or not sexual relations between dancers and their spectators took place, however, zenne dancing (and the watching thereof) was considered part of “mainstream” masculine culture.īut after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the secularist Ataturk government – which saw it as its mission to “Westernize” Turkey – zenne dancing, and its often-complicated sexual politics, fell out of favor.Īnd so zenne lingered, mostly surviving in rural areas, including Turkey's more religiously conservative Eastern provinces of Turkey. A higher-ranking nobleman would as a matter of course define himself as an active or penetrative sexual partner, one who would under other circumstances sleep with women a zenne dancer would be expected to take on a more so-caled “feminine” sexual and social role. Sexuality was more customarily defined as a matter of status/rank and sexual role. In traditional Ottoman practice, the terminology of “gay” and “straight” was largely absence from discourse, as explained by scholar Serkan Görkemli. Much as how boys would play women’s parts in Elizabethan Shakespeare, young men – generally ethnic Greeks, Armenians, or Romani, drawn, often unwillingly, from the Empire's non-Muslim population – would be trained as dancers, adopt androgynous or feminine attire and makeup, and – in many cases – moonlight as paid courtesans to noblemen. Most zenne dancers date the practice back to the Sultan's court in the final centuries of the Ottoman Empire, when women were largely prohibited from performing onstage. Male belly dancing is hardly a new phenomenon in Turkey.
Segah – who performs under his first name only – is a self-described zenne, one of several male dancers in Turkey's largest city to earn his living performing what Turks refer to as “Oriental dance,” adopting traditionally female costume, roles and postures and adapting them to the tastes of an urban, socially liberal audience.
Here at Chanta Music, a gaudy, velvet-lined nightclub off Istanbul's high-octane Istiklal Street, belly dancing – and the adulation its admirers confer – is not limited to women.
The glitter on his chest and the gold band around his neck catch the spotlight, reflecting its glare back to the hundreds of audience members – men and women alike – craning their necks to the stage. His hips slope then shake the muscles on his stomach vibrate with the coin belt across his loins. Segah, a male belly dancer, performs in a gaudy nightclub off Istanbul's Istiklal Street