Recent Posts
Inspiration November 30, 2016
On an early morning in a gray conference room in the University of Miami student center, Portia Lange is a welcome burst of energy.
She walks back and forth across the stage, greeting every new face that enters the room. Her eyes are shining, hair swaying past her hips as she speaks. And she speaks a lot, her head bobbing emphatically at the crowd as if she is overjoyed to meet each and every person.
Featured speaker at the University of Miami’s 2016 Women’s Leadership Symposium, Portia Lange is a testament to self-affirmation and belief in oneself. She was born to a mother with a crack addiction and an absent father. During adolescence, her friends abused heroin and in college, she was mistreated by her boyfriend. After enrolling at the University of Florida and taking a belly dance class, however, the tide began to turn for Lange.
“I took a belly dance class and it basically changed my life,” Portia reflects, her voice soaring over the phone from her Miami studio, BellyMotions. Portia charges belly dance with empowering and turning her life around. With its flowery, sensual, liquid movements, belly dancing quite literally forced her to look herself in the mirror and understand her worth.
READ MORE: Rock That Invisible Crown: 6 Ways to Treat Yourself Like Royalty Every Day
“It changed me,” Portia says. “It made me realize that I was beautiful. That it was okay that I wasn’t a toothpick, that it was okay that I had hips, and to be voluptuous and be a woman, and it gave me a sense of self that I didn’t have.” It was this sense of self that compelled her to get out of her abusive relationship, overcome her eating disorder and revive her self-esteem. With a start, she realized, “My God, I want to be a belly dancer.”
Today, Portia Lange is a dance instructor, entrepreneur and CEO who has devoted her life to making every woman – including thousands of students – feel special, valuable and powerful through belly dancing.
What makes her feel the most empowered? “I’ve preformed all over the world, I’ve preformed on TV, I’ve done magazines, I’ve done a lot of stuff,” she says. “But that stuff’s very on the surface, [it’s] very superficial. But for me, I actually feel the most empowered when I’m teaching a class … and I see women light up, and little sparks fly. I can see them smiling and they feel happy.”
Portia’s voice is effervescent as she speaks about her passions. She tells me that she teaches women to feel empowered but also to empower others outside of belly dancing. It all comes down to affirming yourself and other women. “If someone is better than you, befriend them,” she recommends. “Help your sisters shine!”
READ MORE: Interview With Sophie Alpert, Inspirational Founder of Piece By Piece
Moreover, remember to help yourself shine. “Tell yourself ‘I’m smart. I can do this. I’m beautiful,’” Lange says. “You’ll eventually believe it, because the power of labeling is huge. If you label yourself ‘smart’, you’re going to make it happen.”
Portia explains she’s speaking from experience. Once she enrolled at the University of Florida, she found that there was a huge gap in knowledge between herself and her peers. A champion of the adage “Fake it til you make it,” Lange laughingly says, “I pretended.”
After achieving her degree in kinesiology, she went on to open her studio Belly Motions with no prior business experience. She taught herself accounting and everything she needed to know to operate her company. Lange compares her success to that of a viral video; although her technical knowledge of business was limited, her self-affirmation and uniquely powerful service drew a crowd of a hundred women who wanted to be inspired and shine.
Unfortunately, the women who may need Portia’s class the most may be the ones least likely to enroll. Portia explains that the Americanized, sexualized view of belly dancing is just that — Americanized. This falsity creates a stigma around the highly skilled art form.
“Every time I meet someone, I’m hesitant to tell them I’m a belly dancer,” Portia says. She typically receives one of two reactions when she divulges her profession and great love. The first is shock. The second is the assumption that she dances for the sake of the male gaze rather than for her own empowerment.
“It’s like I say, ‘Empowering women one hip at a time,” she says, paraphrasing the slogan of her belly dance studio. “[It’s also] educating people one hip at a damn time.”
READ MORE: ‘Quantico’ Actress, Tracy Ifeachor, on Being a Physical Badass
