In a dance studio in White River Junction, Vermont, 10 women lace up thin-soled sandals and tie brightly colored sashes around their waists, the silver coins embroidered on their skirts shimmering and chiming as they move. In purple leggings and a matching sash, Gina Capossela ’87 calls “one-two-three, one-two-three.” The women step in a circle about the studio, finger cymbals sounding and sashes swaying, their wrists flicking in fluid motions. Capossela, who is wiry and strong, with a nimbus of dark, curly hair pulled back from her face, shimmies her hips and turns lightly on the ball of her foot.
Meet the Pied Piper of Middle Eastern dance in a corner of the world seemingly as far from the Middle East as one can get: the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire. An itinerant dance teacher, Capossela holds classes in town halls and elementary school cafeterias and community centers. And where she goes, students follow.
“She’s a dynamo,” says Julie Grant, a longtime student. “She inspires all of us. She’s more than just a dance teacher.”
Capossela grew up in Vermont in the ’70s and ’80s, graduated from Woodstock High School, and then went to Middlebury, where she studied art history and Italian. It wasn’t until after she graduated that she began studying dance seriously. At first, it was purely a hobby, one secondary to her career in social work and human services.
But in the early 2000s, after holding jobs ranging from volunteer gigs on crisis hotlines to executive directorships, Capossela assessed her career. “I had done everything,” she says. Her realization? “I was bored to tears by it.”
So in 2003 she quit her job and moved to Washington, D.C., to earn her master’s degree in dance from American University. During that time, she performed with the Silk Road Dance Company, dancing at the Egyptian and Uzbek embassies, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and before the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She went on to travel to Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey to study under other teachers.
Right from the outset in 2005, when Capossela began offering lessons, the would-be belly dancers of the Upper Valley were enthusiastic. “It wasn’t just me,” Capossela says. Middle Eastern dance was catching on across the nation. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the ensuing national fascination with the Middle East—may have played some part in the belly-dance craze, Capossela thinks.
Certainly Nicole Conte, whose husband had deployed to Iraq with the Vermont National Guard, was curious about anything having to do with the Middle East. She showed up at one of Capossela’s showcases in 2005. “I’ve never missed a term since,” Conte says.
Today, Capossela makes her living teaching full time: her classes range from American-style belly dance to classical, Bhangra, and Bollywood-style Indian dancing. In the Bhangra class, dancers ditch their hip scarves for workout gear and sneakers since the Punjabi folk dance brims with bouncing, spinning, high-energy moves.
Capossela suspects it’s how these forms of dance make women feel—more than the dance’s geographical origins—that keeps them coming back.
“This is an art form where adult women, who are shaped as average adult women are, can flourish and sparkle and radiate,” she says. Belly dancing as practiced in the West isn’t “a form of dance where you have to be under 25 and weigh 100 pounds. This is the dance of real women and real shapes and real lives and real stories.”
Along those lines, she believes she’s teaching more than footwork and choreography. “I’m helping women to connect with the divinity that they already have,” says Capossela. “That’s my real mission and calling.”