You are a female composer in a male-dominated world. Your work is played by some of the best musicians of your time, Emanuel Ax, Ani Kavafian, Peter Serkin, Andre-Michel Schub and Richard Goode. Yet contemporary music seems too hard-edged, too intellectual, without soul. Your femininity is somehow . . . unacknowledged. So what do you do?
You become a belly dancer, naturally.
Which is what Christine Berl did. After the commissions and the praise from several reviewers, including those of The Los Angeles Times, which called her music “lyrical and melodious,” and The New York Times, which called it “affectionately pianistic and yet dignified in its bare outlines and austere tones,” Berl threw it all over to become a belly dancer in Arab nightclubs in New York, Morocco, Barcelona and Milan.
There, Berl’s professional name is Touta, which is derived from the Arab word “raspberry.” She took it as a favor to one of her teachers who suggested it, she said. She dons the belly dancer’s costume, a heavily beaded bra and belt, a skirt and a veil. Beginning to dance, she casts the veil aside. She contracts her stomach, vibrates her hips, undulates her arms in snakelike motions and gives her posterior a subtle quiver. But there is nothing kitschy about her performance. Berl, who is in her mid-50s, is a practitioner of classical belly dancing, which at its best has the grace and dignity of ballet. Her style is somewhat restrained, Berl said, “but with a call toward a deeper eroticism.”
Sometimes, when she is in New York, Berl runs into colleagues from the music world, prestigious figures who have championed her, but she deliberately does not say hello. And neither do they, she said. “I see them all the time, Manny, Schub, Peter, on Broadway,” she said of Ax, Schub and Serkin. “It’s as if we’ve reached an agreement. We pass each other on the street without acknowledgment.”
Odd as Berl’s transition from composer to belly dancer might seem, some of her friends see it as a logical development. “Here is a highly intelligent, sophisticated woman who was a very good composer,” said her friend Noa Ain, also a composer. “She had something to say in an original voice.”
But in the end, “the frustration, the hours alone, the stillness of the occupation” and the lack of appreciation defeated her friend, she said. “In her case, she had danced for years,” Ain said. “She had studied ballet, she was interested in ethnic music.” Belly dancing was not such a strange choice, she said.
Berl started out as a pianist, something of a child prodigy. By the time she was 9, she was studying counterpoint and harmony. Among her teachers were Hugo Weisgall, George Perle, Yehudi Wyner and her father, Paul Berl.
As a child, Berl was pushed by her parents to study the piano, but she also took ballet lessons and loved them. Eventually she won a full scholarship to Mannes College of Music in piano.
Berl began her career doing freelance work as a pianist giving recitals and teaching. “But I was not going anywhere,” she said. She decided to become a composer. “I thought if I wrote it myself, I would be more involved.”
She married three times, she said. Her third husband is Martino Rizzotti, a novelist, journalist and one of the founders of the Italian-American newspaper, America Oggi. Berl has two sons, Paul, 21, from her second marriage, and Tommaso, 16.
It was through Rizzotti, she said, that she became interested in belly dancing. In 1981 he brought home a tape of Arab music. She was so drawn to the music, to its vibrancy and sensuality, she said, that she began studying belly dancing in her free time from composing, finding much in common between it and ballet.
As she found herself more involved, she also seemed to be coming into her own as a composer. In 1988 Ax played her piece “Elegy” at a festival in Italy.
“I thought it was very beautiful, very sad,” Ax said in a telephone interview. He compared its style to “one of Schoenberg’s early pieces, Opus 11, maybe.”
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center commissioned a composition from Berl, which she called “Dark Summer,” with words from Louise Bogan’s poem “The Blue Estuaries.” It had its premiere in 1989, at Alice Tully Hall, with mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade singing.
But all along, Berl said, her music was different from the cool minimalism that prevailed among young composers. She was composing in the tradition of Debussy and Bartok: delicate, lyrical work filled with emotion. “It was highly decorative,” she said. “It made use of internal cycles. It was very much oriented to non-Western Indian music.” In “Dark Summer,” for instance, she used Japanese music.
“I cared about beauty,” Berl said. But the problem was “the notion of beauty has been removed from the esthetic realm.”
In 1988 Serkin commissioned 11 composers to write pieces for him. Berl was the only woman. He performed them at the 92nd Street Y. In 1990 the Y devoted an evening to Berl’s work.
Allan Kozinn, writing in The Times, praised the “well-developed compositional imagination.” Still, he criticized some of the pieces for a “grim earnestness.” But, despite the favorable reviews, Berl said she felt she was swimming upstream. “There were few other men that have had five premieres at the 92nd Street Y by world-famous artists. Yet I was not getting performances, grants or commissions,” Berl said. Indeed, it was a time when there were few women even composing at all. “I felt they didn’t know what to do with me,” she said of the music establishment. “I was ignored.”
The problem? “Modern, western music has very serious problems acknowledging the expressivity of the body,” she said. “It’s hard for women to disassociate from the body.”
In 1992 came an epiphany. Pierre Amoyal and Jeremy Menuhin commissioned her to write a violin sonata. The Palestinian violinist and oud player Simon Shaheen was also planning to play it, she said. Berl called the piece, “Masmoudi,” and based it on an Arabic rhythm. “I thought, `I don’t want to write this,’ ” she said. `I want to dance it.”‘
She stopped composing and began belly dancing in clubs in Southern Europe and Morocco, studying with Sohar Zaki, a female Egyptian belly dancer in Cairo, and a teacher, Yousry Sharif, a male, in New York.
“I could be an artist and enjoy being a woman,” she said. “I just wanted to be a belly dancer.”
She has destroyed most of the artifacts from her career as a composer, including most of the reviews, keeping only a few tapes. Some of her music has been published in Italy and a CD has been issued there, she said, but nothing in the U.S. “I felt so good,” she said of destroying her files. “And I had more closet space too.”
She is setting up a belly dancing school in Milan. She insists that age is not a problem, at least in the Middle East. “Belly dancing, to really be exquisite, is about the sexuality of a mature woman and not of a girl,” she said. “In order for it really to have depth it has to be backed up by a lot of experience.” Indeed, in the Arab world, dancers like Nagwa Fouad, who is believed to be well over 50, and Fifi Abdou, thought to be over 40, draw large crowds.
Berl says she also likes being a Jew in an Arab culture. She says that when she performs in Morocco, she does not hide the fact that she is Jewish, unless she is dancing in an area where there is a strong fundamentalist presence. Her father’s family was originally from Palestine, she noted. “It’s all Semitic. It’s all the same. It’s terrible we’re not brothers.” Belly dancing, Berl said, is “my little gesture of peace.”
