Ayse Cerami was a belly dancer, and a very good one. She danced with the She’enedra troupe in Southern California, and I photographed her at dozens of shows over those years without ever once having a real conversation with her. That’s the truest thing I can tell you about her.
She died of cancer. I found out the next day, from a Facebook post that tagged me. Somebody in that old crowd still had me on a list, twelve years and three thousand miles later, and thought I’d want to know. They were right.
How we met
My wife Claudia died in 2005. We’d been married twelve and a half years. I’d spent my whole life to that point as an introvert and something close to a hermit, and after she was gone I made a decision that still surprises me. I decided to go out and live.
So I went. Renaissance faires first, because a faire is a place where being odd is the entry requirement and not a problem. Then national parks, all silence and distance, the exact opposite. Then belly dance shows. Those were the ones that stuck, and I kept going to them for years.
The camera made it possible. An introvert alone in a crowded room is a man with nothing to do and nowhere to put his hands. An introvert with a camera has a job. Nobody wonders why he’s standing off to the side. Nobody expects him to make small talk, because he’s working, and the people he’s pointing the lens at are pleased he showed up. I didn’t understand that at first. I worked it out somewhere in the middle of those years, and by then it had already saved me.
I met Ayse at one of those shows in 2006 or 2007, dancing with She’enedra. She was beautiful. Everybody who saw her noticed that first, and it’s the least interesting thing about her.
She talked with her body
Ayse was quiet. Not shy, not awkward. Quiet, with a bubbliness underneath that came out in flashes. I never got to know her well because she didn’t say much, and after a while I understood she didn’t need to. She said everything in the dance. Tribal style suited her exactly, and the name tells you nothing useful, so let me explain it.
American Tribal Style came out of California, built by Jamila Salimpour and then codified by Carolena Nericcio and Fat Chance Bellydance. What separates it from the solo cabaret tradition is that it’s improvised as a group. There’s no choreography.
A leader signals the next movement with a cue, a turn of the head or a lift of the hand, and the dancers behind her pick it up and move as one. It looks rehearsed. It isn’t. It’s four or six women reading each other in real time.
So which dancer does a form like that reward? The one paying the closest attention beats the showiest woman in the room. Somebody who watches, reads what’s coming, and answers with her whole body before she’s consciously decided to. A woman who communicates better without words than with them is built for this.
Ayse was unmistakable in a line of dancers. Look at the group photograph below. There are four women on that stage doing the same movement at the same moment, and your eye goes where it goes. I didn’t arrange that. I wasn’t directing anybody. I pointed the camera at the stage and that’s what came back.
There was a joy in it you can’t fake and can’t teach, and she brought it every time she performed, whether the audience was two hundred people or thirty.
What those nights really looked like
Belly dance photographs suggest something exotic. The reality was a hotel conference room. Look past the dancers in these frames and you can see it. Burgundy striped wallpaper. A drop ceiling with fluorescent panels. A lit exit sign on the back wall.
Somebody had hung black and white sailcloth panels behind the stage to give the place some drama, rigged a truss with a few colored lights, and set down a low platform to dance on. That was the production. A rented room, a sound system, a volunteer at the light board, and a dozen women who’d driven an hour with their costumes in the back seat.
The costumes were the real production, and they were made by hand.
Ayse wore a black choli top with a blue and purple tie-dyed bra over it, a stack of silver neck rings, heavy metal cuffs on both wrists, black pants, and a coin belt with long grey fringe that moved half a beat behind her hips. A blue flower in her hair and a bindi at her forehead. Barefoot, always, on a platform that’d been somebody’s dance floor an hour earlier.
That’s what tribal style looked like in a Southern California function room in 2007, and nobody was making money at it. They did it because they wanted to dance and this was where dancing happened.
Photographing a dark room
These were hard photographs to make, and the difficulty explains what I have and what I don’t.
The light in a room like that is terrible and it’s also moving. Colored gels swing across a dancer’s face and change her skin tone from frame to frame. The ceiling is low and the walls are close, so everything bounces.
Flash was out of the question. You don’t fire a strobe at a woman spinning on a raised platform in bare feet, and even if it were safe it’d kill the whole look of the room. That look is the only thing making the picture interesting.
So you shoot wide open, push the film speed until the grain shows, and accept that most of what you take will be blurred past use. Tribal is a fast form full of sharp isolations and shimmies, and the moment worth having lasts a fraction of a second. I shot a great deal to get a little. For every frame on this page there are dozens I threw away.
That’s also why the video matters.
Watch her dance
Photographs of a dancer are a compromise and every photographer knows it.
You get a shape, a moment, a hand caught in the air. You don’t get the dance. So here’s the dance, three clips of She’enedra from those nights. The footage is rough. It was shot on a small camera in bad light before any of us were thinking about archives, and shooting it was worth the trouble.
What I have
I photographed her at show after show across those California years. Tribal Cafe, festivals, hafla nights, and places I’d have to dig through the archive to name. Stills and video both. I have more images of Ayse Cerami than I have of most people I knew far better.
I moved to Florida in 2013 and lost touch with everybody from that part of my life. Not deliberately. I’d started over, and starting over has a cost you don’t calculate at the time. Ayse was one of dozens of people I stopped seeing, and I assumed they were all out there carrying on.
The archive is the only thing that survived the move intact. Not the friendships, not the standing invitations, not the knowledge of which restaurant in which town had dancing on a Thursday. Those all evaporated. The photographs are all available at renaissancefaire.net.
Take any of them you want. Anybody who danced with She’enedra, anybody who knew her, anybody who just wants a picture of her dancing. Use them wherever you like, as long as the logo stays on the image.
The part I want on the record
She was a small part of my life. We weren’t close. I can’t tell you about her family or her work or what she wanted out of the years she didn’t get.
I came out of the worst thing that ever happened to me by pointing a camera at people who were doing something joyful in public, and Ayse Cerami was one of those people. She was part of the reason it worked. Every show she danced at was a night I was out in the world instead of alone in a house, and a night I had something worth photographing, and there were a lot of those nights.
She never knew that. It’d never have occurred to her that the guy with the long lens was rebuilding a life out there in the dark. She was working. I was working. We nodded at each other across a function room for six or seven years and that was the whole relationship.
It was enough, and that’s the thing I didn’t expect to learn from any of this. You don’t need to be close to somebody for them to matter to how your life turned out. A woman who danced well, on a low stage in a rented room, once or twice a month, for years, while I stood in the dark and worked out how to be a person again.
Rest in peace
So that’s the debt, and this is the only way I know to pay it. The photographs exist. The videos exist. A woman who communicated by dancing is still dancing, decades later, for anybody who wants to look.
She would have liked that the dancing is what lasted. Rest in peace, Ayse. Thank you for all the dances, and for being one of the reasons I kept showing up with my camera.
