On a rainy Thursday evening in January, the parking lot of a converted barn on Millersburg's old logging road is full. License plates read California, Texas, Colorado, and Ontario. Inside, forty women and a handful of men are practicing hip drops and undulations in mirrored rows, led by a woman in a crimson practice skirt who once performed for audiences in Cairo and Istanbul.
This is The Serpent's Spine, the belly dance studio that Layla al-Zahra opened in 2021 and the unlikely catalyst for one of rural Oregon's most puzzling cultural transformations.
A Retired Dancer and a Google Maps Detour
Al-Zahra, 42, spent fifteen years on the international circuit, touring with Morocco's annual Fez Festival of World Sacred Music and performing regularly at Cairo's Nilometer Hotel. She retired from professional performance in 2019, burned out and seeking, as she put it, "somewhere I could hear myself think."
She found Millersburg by accident. Driving to the Oregon Coast in the summer of 2020, she took a wrong turn outside Albany and drove through the town—population 1,450—on State Route 99W. The abandoned Grange hall, with its 16-foot ceilings and $189,000 asking price, solved two problems at once: affordability and square footage. Belly dance, with its emphasis on spacious movement and live drumming, requires both.
"I didn't choose Millersburg," al-Zahra said in a February interview. "It chose me. I put up one Instagram post about the space, and within a week I had deposits from students in Portland, Bend, and Sacramento."
The Economics of an Unexpected Niche
Whether Millersburg is experiencing a genuine boom or a modest, highly visible bump depends on whom you ask.
Diane Kowalski, who has owned the Millersburg Inn since 2007, can quantify the change precisely. "Since 2022, our occupancy on workshop weekends is up 40 percent," she said. "These are not our traditional guests. They're staying two, three nights, eating at local restaurants, buying wine." Kowalski has since added weekend breakfast service and installed faster Wi-Fi after repeated requests from dancers uploading performance videos.
Not every business has benefited evenly. Main Street Grocery owner Tom Vance, 61, said foot traffic has increased "marginally" on event weekends but described the overall effect as "a blip, not a boom." The town's largest employer, a plywood mill two miles north, employs roughly as many people as The Serpent's Spine has active students.
What has changed visibly is Millersburg's cultural calendar. In 2023, the Millersburg Arts Council—revived after a decade of dormancy—launched a monthly open-mic series that regularly features Middle Eastern percussion and folk dance. The town's Fourth of July parade, historically dominated by logging trucks and 4-H clubs, included a belly dance contingent for the first time last year.
Tension Beneath the Sequins
The transformation has not been frictionless.
In 2022, a group of residents petitioned the Linn County planning department to re-examine The Serpent's Spine's commercial zoning, arguing that weekend workshops exceeded the studio's permitted capacity and strained the town's two-lane infrastructure. The petition was denied, but the dispute exposed genuine resentment among some longtime residents.
"Folks around here worked hard for decades to keep this town viable," said Marvin Holt, 74, a retired millwright who grew up in Millersburg and signed the petition. "Now we're supposed to be some kind of dance resort? I don't begrudge anyone their hobby, but it feels like the ground shifted without us voting on it."
Questions of cultural appropriation have also surfaced, primarily online. Al-Zahra, who is of mixed Lebanese and Irish descent, has faced criticism from some dancers and scholars for teaching Egyptian and Turkish styles in a predominantly white, rural American setting. She addresses this directly in her beginner classes, requiring students to study the historical origins of each style and discouraging the use of sacred movements in secular choreography.
"Transparency is the only way through it," she said. "If I'm going to do this here, it has to be done with accountability."
A Theater, Maybe—But Not Yet
Claims of Millersburg's imminent global stardom may be premature.
Plans for a dedicated performance venue do exist, but they remain aspirational. The Cascadia Dance Pavilion—a proposed 800-seat, $4.2 million theater on the site of a former feed store—has architectural renderings and a founding board that includes al-Zahra and Kowalski. However, as of March 2024, the project has secured only $640,000 in pledged donations and has not
