You’ll have to forgive Shari Fields if she sounds a bit jaded. But after three years of working as a professional belly dancer, she’s just being practical. “A belly dancer’s career is very limited,” says Fields, who’s 32. “Once you start to age, there’s always younger belly dancers that’ll dance for less–that’ll undercut your prices. It’s just a fact.”
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Raised in northeast Iowa–where her father was a civil engineer, then a minister (“I didn’t grow up as a minister’s daughter, but I graduated from high school as one”)–she first saw a belly dancer at a U2 concert in 1992. Three years later she was driving from Chicago to Des Plaines for instruction. She started with just one class a week, but quickly signed up for two more. In 1996 she traveled to Turkey, where she saw other dancers and bought elaborate costumes. When she returned, she practiced with a band at the Alkhayam on Foster. Finally, she dropped off her business cards at several Arabic nightclubs. “The next week,” she says, “I had calls from two.”
Jamila has to put up with a lot. She’s been asked to stay the entire evening when she was only scheduled to dance a 15-minute set. She’s also been stiffed when not enough people showed up. “One nightclub owner didn’t want me to leave until ten minutes before closing time because he was afraid that I might go somewhere else,” she recalls. “They were half an hour from everywhere else. I had to say, ‘Well, what do I look like sitting by myself at a table? What does it look like I’m waiting for?’ You have to stand your ground.”
“Right now, I’m fading out of the nightclub scene,” Fields says. Her most regular gig is at A la Turka, 3134 N. Lincoln, where she dances on Saturday nights between 9 and 10 PM. “It’s a restaurant. I still like the dancing, but I just don’t know whether or not I’ll try and get back into the nightclubs.”
