The girls and women stood behind the audience in the partial dark, their outfits sparkling in the dim light as they nervously clapped small brass cymbals, or zills, between their fingers. The audience members shifted in their chairs and watched the belly dancers fidget. A few mothers waved at their daughters, beside them their husbands slouching cross-armed or with hands clasped. The dancers strode onto the wood floor, their billowy, sequin-studded outfits susurrating with their strides. They raised their arms above their heads and the music began.

It was the first student salon for Pomegranate dance studio's 2008-2009 SEEDs program, and for many of its participants, about 25 girls ages 15-18, it was their first time dancing before an audience.

But with the music coaxing the air and the older girls shouting zaghareet, the Arabic tongue ululation, they began to forget their nerves, undulating their bellies and stamping their feet, twisting their hips with expressions of total focus on their faces, a smile breaking out now and again.

In its eight years of life, the SEEDs (Self Esteem, Empowerment and Education Through Dance) program and its founder Myra Krien has instilled in teenage girls the unique medium of its message: belly dance.

Angelique Roybal, 18, a recent program graduate, had no idea how much she needed SEEDS and belly dancing until after she enrolled. A self-described "loser" and "Plaza rat" before the program, she had little interest in high school, ditching nearly everyday to get high and "be numb — to do nothing and care about nothing," she described with even frankness.

Raised by her grandparents, her relationship with her parents strained almost to absence, and lacking any role model to mold her own life around, Roybal listed. One day on the Plaza she saw a belly dancer. "It was refreshing," Roybal said, sipping coffee. "I recognized it. Like I had done it before, like my body had been wanting to do it my whole life."

Referred to SEEDs by her friends, she overcame her fear of trusting other girls and threw herself into the dance. "I found my thing," she said. "It will be part of me for the rest of my life."

Even girls from what might be considered normal and unremarkable childhoods have thrived in ways they did not expect.

Jade McLellan, 19, had never thought about dance before she heard about SEEDs. "I was a mess, selfish and self-destructive," she said. "I did OK in school, but I didn't do much else. I had no real idea about being part of a community."

One of the greatest parts of SEEDs, McLellan said, was the way that it taught her to relate to other girls. "Everyone was all so different," she said of her class. "Everyone had different backgrounds. It felt like a natural variety of life, and made it easier to participate.

"We were encouraged to find our voice," McLellan went on. "Girls are taught to be hostile to each other, to compete over relationships or who's prettier. I learned we didn't have to be so judgmental of each other."

McLellan described standing in the studio with all the other girls staring at their bellies trying to make one tiny group of muscles shimmy. After all the hours together with their stomachs bare, she found a new comfort. She began to make friends with girls she would otherwise never talk to.

With the help of the program's talk circles and journaling components, the young women began discovering how each one of them felt, discovering too that they often all felt the same things, and instead of competing, the girls began to cooperate. Part of this is also owed to the improvisational tribal style of belly dance used in the SEEDs program, McLellan said.

Rather than relying on choreographed movements, tribal dancers must reply on subtle physical cues from each other.

"In tribal, you need to make eye contact, you need to pay attention to each other and communicate and build a sense of community," McLellan said.

McLellan's friends thought SEEDs was "weird," and McLellan worked extra hard to prove to herself and to her friends that she could go through with the program. Now, she said, her friends comment on the new confidence and grace that she exudes.

"I have no problem being myself," she said. "Belly dancing makes you feel incredibly good about yourself. It's making a sculpture with your body, turning your body physically into art."

Even in liberal, arts-obsessed Santa Fe, some (almost entirely men) have trouble dealing with the intensely sensual nature of belly dance and the stereotypes that surround it.

"There is this preconception in America as belly dance being oversexed," said Runa Muller, who was 15 when she began the program five years ago.

"We are raised to think belly dance is somehow lesser than ballet or modern dance," said Muller, who came to SEEDs with a prior background in ballet, modern and jazz dance. "It's a serious bias, and it's hard to overcome. People sometimes say horrible things to us, and we're blatantly disrespected."

To Muller, however, the ignorant flak that she and her fellow dancers have constantly weathered has had unintended positive consequences.

"It makes you understand your own beliefs," Muller said. "You become less concerned about what others think. It helps your self-esteem; you let go of what society wants you to be. In belly dance, there's no expectations, no perfect size. It's so accepting of personal uniqueness. There's so much pressure on young girls, and people who criticize us don't know what it's like to be a young girl in this country."

Celebrating and loving their bodies, inhabiting them in a way they had never before done has been a common and cherished experienced for many of SEEDs' young women. Muller attributed it to the nature of belly dance and its emphasis on muscle isolation and disciplined control
of the body.