On a Thursday evening in a converted grain-elevator office on Letts City's east side, twelve women in yoga pants and coin scarves circle their hips to a zaghrouta recorded on a phone speaker. Three of them drove more than forty miles. They are students at The Shimmy Shack, which opened eighteen months ago and already has a waitlist for its beginner class.
This is Letts City, Iowa: population 384, surrounded by corn and soybean fields, now home to three dedicated belly dance academies and a rotating roster of weekend workshops. The math puzzles even the people who live here.
An Unlikely Hub
Letts City sits in Louisa County, roughly midway between Muscatine and Burlington. It has no stoplight, no coffee shop, and no movie theater. What it does have, as of 2023, is The Shimmy Shack, Desert Dancers Academy, and Tribal Temptations—plus a handful of instructors who teach out of church basements and borrowed studio space.
"Mohannad Omar opened the first class here in 2017," says Delia Voss, 44, who directs Desert Dancers Academy from a refurbished storefront on Main Street. Omar, an Egyptian-American percussionist who relocated to Iowa for a manufacturing job, taught a weekly community education class at the Letts City library. Six people showed up the first week. Within a year, Voss says, the waiting list hit twenty names. Omar now teaches at Desert Dancers and commutes to Chicago for monthly gigs. "Nobody expected this," Voss says. "He sure didn't."
The Shimmy Shack followed in late 2022, founded by Janelle Okonkwo, a former Des Moines social worker who discovered belly dance during physical therapy for a back injury. Tribal Temptations opened six months later, run by a collective of three instructors who had studied together in Iowa City and wanted a rural venue with lower overhead.
City records show two additional dance-related business licenses filed in Letts City since 2022—one for a mobile hafla catering service, another for an online costume retailer operating out of a local basement.
Who Shows Up, and Why
Ask the students why they make the drive, and the answers circle back to what they cannot find closer to home.
"There's no gym culture here that fits me," says Brenda Hsu, 61, a retired nurse from Wapello who has studied at The Shimmy Shack for fourteen months. "I tried Zumba in Muscatine. It felt like work. This feels like remembering something." Hsu, who is Chinese-American, says she was initially self-conscious about joining a dance form associated with cultures not her own. "Janelle talked to us about it—where the movements come from, what they mean, how not to be a tourist in your own body. That mattered."
Okonkwo, 38, makes that negotiation explicit in her beginner curriculum. Students spend the first three weeks on regional history—Egyptian raqs sharqi, Turkish Oryantal, the American Tribal Style pioneered in California—before they strap on a hip scarf. "I am not Egyptian," Okonkwo says. "I am not Turkish. I am a Black woman from Iowa teaching a form that has been commodified, colonized, and caricatured. My job is to send students toward the source material with respect, not to sell them a fantasy."
That stance has not pleased everyone. Okonkwo says two prospective students left reviews calling her classes "too political" and "not fun enough." She posted the reviews on The Shimmy Shack's Instagram account with a caption that now serves as an informal motto: "We do the reading here."
Rival Lineages, Shared Space
The three academies operate in uneasy proximity. Desert Dancers emphasizes performance and professional training, with a company that books regional festivals and nursing-home gigs. Tribal Temptations leans into fusion—blending belly dance vocabulary with hip-hop, Butoh, and contact improv. The Shimmy Shack occupies the middle ground, marketing itself to beginners and older adults seeking community and low-impact movement.
"We are not friends," says Marisol Vega, 29, a co-founder of Tribal Temptations, laughing. "We are colleagues in a very small pond." Vega notes that all three studios collaborated on a single hafla last October, held in the Letts City Community Center gymnasium, which drew roughly 120 attendees—nearly a third of the town's population. "That night, we were not rivals. We were proof that this place can hold something unexpected."
Still, tensions surface. Omar's departure from Desert Dancers in 2021 to guest-teach at The Shimmy Shack briefly fractured the small community, according to four students interviewed for this article
