Last year I applied to do a Winter Residency at Watershed to build a belly dancing robot! Why? Some of you may already know my Belly Dancing Drag act Dancing Queer. As an Egyptian, I grew up with bellydance being simply called “dance”. The term “bellydance” is a Western-coined name that isn’t even descriptive of the authentic practice - we don’t use our bellies to dance, it is performed by everyone, for everyone (not just by women for men’s entertainment), and the original Egyptian costume even covered the stomach and arms. On Google, nearly everybody in image search is white, western, female, and looks nothing like me. It often feels like I have been wiped out of my own culture. 

Some of you may also know me as an award winning electronics engineer. Through my Winter Residency, I brought my art and engineering skills together to create a gender non-conforming bellydancing robot as something that brings joy for all and starts important conversations. 

One of the most important things I wanted to do is to be able to teach how to make your very own robot to my refugee community and people who may not see themselves as capable of creating a robot. I wanted to show them that not only they can, but that their art and creativity makes them into an even more wonderful invincible engineer. I wanted to use things that people can find around their house like lollipop sticks, exercise ball, paper, and a dog cone collar. I wanted to combine these with some motors, wigs, and beautiful fabrics to make a customisable robot.

 

I started with using a microcontroller called “Arduino”. A microcontroller is basically a small computer that you can program to do things like turn a light on or move a motor. I picked this because it’s one of the easiest microcontrollers out there and they have tonnes of documentation and easy to follow getting started guides.

 

I had the idea that the microcontroller would be connected to a lollipop stick that's connected to the top of the robot’s skirt (the dog cone collar!) and that is then the basic hip movement of a belly dancer. BUT I wanted it to react to music, rather than be pre-programmed to dance a certain way. The robot feels and dances to the beat on its own. So I took inspiration from the light that reacts to the music (you’ve seen those, right?). First, I thought if I replicate the lights reacting to light using a sound sensor, then I can easily swap the light to a movement servo motor afterwards.

When I did connect the motor however, the results weren’t good. At all. The motor made a big enough sound that it kept on re-triggering itself with its own sound in a never ending loop. So instead of it reacting to sound, I connected it to a switch that I manually pressed and to its mechanical structure to replicate that hip movement.

I wanted to try and fix the reaction to music issue with the servo motors, but I needed a break from it! So I concentrated on the rest of the mechanical structure. Behold - The Dancing Queer head: made from an exercise ball, a wig, and a fake beard. The idea is, when people recreate this they can totally customise it to suit themselves. Long purple hair? Glittery beard? Googly eyes? You got it! Your very own Dancing Queer robot can look however you want 😃

I wanted my robot to have breasts, but yours doesn’t have to! I started making mine with paper attached to lollipop sticks to attach to the rest of the mechanical structure. It doesn’t matter if they don’t look great now, because everything will be covered in very beautiful fabric!

My next steps as part of my residency are:

  • Fix the servo motors reacting to music issue 😭😭😭
  • Drape the robot in the prettiest fabrics! 🤩
  • Build + program the moving wheels 😎
  • Have an army of mini Dancing Queer robots! 🤖🤖🕺🏽🕺🏽🕺🏽