At Lunch with Safira Zeki

A Conversation with Safira Zeki, Director of Safira’s Center for World Dance

A little-known fact: Wichita’s intriguing and somewhat mysterious Middle Eastern dance instructor, Safira Zeki, was once a freelance writer who worked for hospitals, advertising agencies and city magazines. “Freelancing for magazines sounded so glamorous,” she says.

WSU’s Master of Fine Arts program taught Zeki much about creative writing, including perseverance. From Professor Phil Schneider she learned to own her personal authority, giving her the ability as a dancer to command a stage. “There may only be thirty to forty feet of stage,” she explains, “but you have to fill the space all the way back to the wall of the theatre.”

Her plan was to write in the morning and teach dance in the evening, but when her dance business “exploded,” there was simply no time to write.

Safira is not her real name, it’s the persona she developed to help convey her art form, otherwise known as belly dancing. Over the years Zeki has imbued herself with the region’s culture, listening to Middle Eastern music, watching old movies with subtitles and reading books and magazine articles. When she gets the chance, she also enjoys cooking Indian and Arabic foods.

She says that Middle Eastern dance especially gives one the sense of what it’s like to live in another culture. “Dance is made out of gestures, and you learn how the people feel and think based on how they move.”

Dancing is something she’s compelled to do. For the brief span it wasn’t a part of her life, she says she was unhappy. “The movements say what I want to say, what I want to share. If you’ve grown used to dancing and love to dance, it’s painful not to be able to express it.” For fun, she takes dance classes in other forms: jazz, ballet, flamenco and Mexican folklorico, which, she explains is something like flamenco with a very happy attitude. “I can’t give them up, even when I’m tired.”

As we talk over Nouvelle Café’s impressive Lebanese combination plate of falafel, kibbi, grape leaves, cabbage rolls, hummus and tabouleh, Zeki tells me she’s just returned from a workshop in Dallas, where she solo-danced in front of an audience and five guest artists, including an Egyptian movie star. All of the instructors had traveled from Egypt. Their compliments afterward affirmed the authenticity of her performance.

She will never forget watching her own teacher, Amira (Alice Castillo), dance at a nightclub. “Amira had been studying in New York. She was just magic. Her beauty and grace was far beyond this little club. And I was so inspired that I went and found Elena Lentini, the teacher she’d been studying with.” Zeki returns to New York each year to study with Lentini, famous in New York and with Middle Eastern dancers around the world.

Anyone, she says, can learn to dance. And in her opinion, the only thing holding people back is self-doubt. “Middle Eastern dance has so many movements that I think are about what it feels like to be a woman in any culture—universal movements about human understanding. They’re all inside women.”

To help her students grow in confidence, she works hard to create a supportive and encouraging studio and class atmosphere. “It’s a huge benefit to the soul, being able to get away from the housekeeping, family and job to become someone else and do something outside yourself that’s expressive.” She also encourages them to create their own personas and identities. “This reminds us that when we perform, we are not ourselves; we’re creating a character, and that character brings to life and enlarges what is in the women in the audience.”

Zeki has been married to Tim Seitz for twenty-seven years. He is “tango-izing” Wichita with dance lessons and events that parallel an upswing in a global trend. Their son, Dan, grew up videotaping belly dances and attending performances.

And to think it all started with a radio ad that prompted Zeki to sign up for dance classes with the local park board. Now, Zeki and her protégés put on monthly Baila World Dance shows. (The next two are scheduled for 9 p.m. on November 18 and December 16.)
She’s taught about four hundred people to dance since opening her classical Middle Eastern dance studio downtown six years ago. In June 2005, she moved to a new location on East Kellogg and expanded the offerings to include the hula, ballet, ballroom, jazz, gypsy fusion, flamenco, Latin, folklorico and an Indian style called Bharatha Natyam.
Zeki, along with forty dancers and fifteen support staff, will put on the studio’s annual large performance in January at Century II’s Mary Jane Teall Theatre. Guest artist Dalia Carella will travel from New York to perform Danse Orientale, the Dunyavi gypsy dance and El Mundo, a fusion of Middle Eastern, Latin American-Caribbean and flamenco dance movements.

Aside from teaching others how to express themselves through graceful movement, Zeki’s goal is to enhance the quality of dance in the community, and beyond. “I would like for Middle Eastern dance to achieve the level of respect in the United States that’s currently afforded to modern dance and ballet.”

For more information about Safira’s Center for World Dance, go to dancewichita.com or call 821.9042.