Walladah With this article I want to invite you to a world of oriental dance that is not
niche and segregated from other dances and dancers but a world based on
communities where there is no monoculture of dance styles.
Don’t take me wrong, I love all dance events of all types, whether it is a typical
hafla or show, or a traditional πανηγύρι 1 somewhere in Greece. I also like our
festivals very much, not only for the chance to admire and learn from brilliant
artists, but also for the camaraderie and the dedication to our dance. You
know that the person who is there is committed to the art of oriental dance
and loves it.
Moreover, I also love the systematic organisation of our dance events. I am
humbled by the hard work the organisers do and their immense efforts to keep
the community together and to allow us to share our love for dance and
become better dancers.
However, the last years that I live consecutively in the UK I observed that our
events and our dance communities are quite far from the communities of the
cultures of the dance. Might be my longing for the Mediterranean, or the
discussion we had at Raks Dünya festival https://www.raksdunya.com/ . At the
final panel of the event, we were discussing how community dancers can be
equally good or better than the school-trained ones and that we miss the
communal dance as learning process. While we were discussing with the other
teachers and dancers, I decided that I need to write about community dancing
as a learning environment.
I have previously written about baltering and how just moving together in an
event allows us to become better dancers and have more fun at the same
time.
1 πανηγύρι, panegyri, means: gathering of everyone, and it comprises food feast, live music, dance of the
community, market stalls, and other parallel events, which can be of religious, secular, commemoration or
cultural character. This is a dancing excerpt from a Thracian gathering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaMHTC2yd5s Yet, we don’t have many chances for this and I cherish the efforts of our sister
dancers in the UK to organise dance parties for this purpose exactly: balter
together, move silly, have fun, groove as a community. Still, there are not
many dancers of the cultures in most events and the more the event is away
from a usual social gathering, the less people of the cultures we see attending.
The consequence is that as dancers of cultural dances we don’t connect with
the dance as it is.
And how is the dance?
If you ever attended an event organised by people from a country of the
origins of the dance, whether it is a private party or an arts festival, you know
that the event is dedicated to a broader spectrum of activities than dance and
to a broader variety of dances than oriental dance. Indeed, for the
communities of the cultures of the dance, oriental dance is one dance among the many they will dance at a celebration.
When we attend such a festival, or a wedding or a private party, we see that
our dance has many kinesiological commonalities with other dances that we
usually don’t learn in our dance training. Or, they are labelled “folklore” and
are kept distanced from our dance as different dances that one does not need
to know, although oriental dance styles are very much both traditional and folk
like those styles. We don’t see them as such because we learn oriental dance
as separate from the other dances of the same communities who dance
oriental dance. We need more exposure to the comprehensive dance practices
of the communities of the cultures and we need to appreciate those dance
practices in their connections to oriental dance.
Another thing that we see in a celebratory event of a community of the
cultures is that people from the same culture dance the same music
differently. Or, when they replicate movement together, it is done at specific
moments, or dances, or sections of the party. Even then, differences in styles
and personalities are striking.
We don’t see this in choreographies. And, a lineup of oriental solos does not
allow us to perceive the variety and versatility of the dance, which is danced at
the same moment, with the same music.
Therefore, one thing is that we miss variety: variety of kinesiological traditions
that are connected to our dance; and variety of how the people of the cultures
handle, individually and collectively, the movement flows that create the
dances for some centuries now.
Another thing that we don’t get to see and learn if we don’t dance around and
with dancers of the cultures is the social manners that connect us to others
and to the dance, whether we dance or we watch others dancing. Each culture
has its own ways of allowing people to relate to each other, to exclamate
beauty and joy, show appreciation without being offending, or demonstrate
emotions and respect to others without bringing anyone in an awkward
situation.
In the dance school we usually learn the dance movements but not their
appropriate manners and symbolisms within the community. We learn a lot
about what is unacceptable and what might put us in trouble and hence we
must avoid. However, cabaret styles or choreographed folklore routines are
not the same as a social dance at a party or in the wedding of one’s cousin. You
cannot dance all cabaret tricks in that case, not only because you might not
want to dance the style, but also because you prefer to dance in ways that will
underline how much you are part of the group who dances together.
Same in all social settings: in our communities in Greece we dance τσιφτετέλι 2
among our relatives, in-laws, work colleagues, neighbours, strangers, people
we like and people we dislike. Dance in this setting is not a performance but a
social statement. Even if we dance solo, we are navigating not only limitations,
but also the permissions we have. At the same time, we strive to fulfil
expectations that are not individualistic success stories, but mostly family,
community and culture histories that are bigger than “is my figure eight good
enough?”.
The dance communities who rely too much on dance schooling, miss the deep
embeddedness of the dance to culture with all that might mean: history,
politics, patriarchy, non-patriarchy, gender perceptions, aesthetics, competing
mentalities and categorisations (the “modern”, the “old”, the “provocative”,
the “reserved”, the “secular”, the “ritual”), and mostly inspirations,
ambivalence of meaning, and inner-culture jokes and statements that exist in
the music and often on the outfits produced by dancers of the culture, but not
in the dance of the culturally unaware dancer. 2 tsifteteli, a vernacular name for oriental dance in Greece. We also miss the spiritual part of the dancing practices, or at least, the respect
to spiritual traditions that need to be protected from the commodification
propensity of our societies. Oriental dance is well preserved in the
communities of origin as non-spiritual and non-religious, although a lot of
music styles and kinesiologies of our dance are directly connected to ritual
dances of various traditions.
I am very much wary of some western dancers’ propensity to mix up spiritual
practices and theories with the dance, and to represent the mixing as
historically eternal or accurate, in order to make our dance more acceptable
and attractive. Or, with the purpose to soothe the guilt of colonial puritanism
that projects its fantasies on the colonised and their descendants.
Nevertheless, if the community celebration is at the yard of a temple to
honour a saint, or by the occasion of a major religious holiday, you cannot miss
the common joy and the licence to have fun as part of the spiritual agenda of
the day. This is very much missed not only in the studio learning but also in the
approaches that emerged in the West trying to attribute to the dance a
spirituality that is not of the culture.
No matter how good intentions some dancers might have, they cannot and
should not replace the original communities of the dance. Particularly about
spirituality, it is a form of social, political and spiritual hubris to think that you
know about the other worlds of another community better than the
communities themselves.
In a community setting people learn humility about what is spiritual and what
is not and what is acceptable to be brought to the unaware public or to
become a commodity and what should be kept away from the market and
from the people who will not respect the spiritual tradition. You might see
religious souvenirs sold on stalls around temples, but many religious people
will tell you this is a desecration. Yet, they will not complain for the vernacular
dance. Obviously, it is not done in parallel with a religious ritual and it is done
only in designated spaces, not everywhere.
Therefore, we miss all those social nuances in the dance school and the
opportunity to dance oriental dance within a culturally rich, multifaceted
context.
There is still one more aspect of the communal dance we will never have in our
formal training communities that stay away from the communities of the
cultures:
If we could go to a panegyri or to a big private party of the people of the
cultures, we would experience the dance in a context so meaningful, that it
relieves us from the quest for perfection; or for filling all the beats of the
music; or for showing off all the things we know. The culture is a communal
activity where all the people know the meanings so well that they can forget
about them. Therefore, the collective culture transmits information and
emotion even with our mere presence there. When we dance there with
others, culturally it is like a feast of fireworks with every step with take.
That means, we don’t need to impress anyone (although we can, if we want
to). We can be perfect dancers, not because we are the best (communal
events are full of excellent dancers, competition has no meaning there), but
because we allow ourselves and others to dance their best by being together.
This we miss in our studio-based niche-oriental events. As a dancer of the
culture, I feel that I am not making justice to other dancers, who did not have
my long history of communal dancing where I learned the dance. If we all
dancers could have been exposed to this type of communal dancing, we could
easily see our dance in its complexity and cultural meanings and have an
experience as full as the full persons that we are.
How to do this?
We need to be more active in working with communities and dancers of the
cultures for events. It is important to remember that communities have events
that do not cater to oriental dances and they should not cater to them/us.
However, we need to attend the events anyway because learning the culture
means we will also understand the dance part of it.
Moreover, the cultures of our dance are creations of communities that have
suffered and still suffer a lot because of colonialism. We cannot see the
community as entertainers for outsiders or as exotic artists and forget about
them when their countries of origin are facing any type of problem and their
people in the West have no ability to organise celebrations that fit our dance
teachable moments. Same when these communities who also exist in the
West, are attacked by racists mobs: we cannot stay silent and wait until the
turbulence fades out without wondering how the people who make our art
fend under such terror.
Obviously, if we dancers want to get involved with the communities, we
cannot pretend we are interested only in maqamat and sparkly necklaces. The
access to and the enjoyment of the cultural wealth and inspiration of another
community comes with responsibilities. Some dancers don’t want the latter
and quite honestly stay away from the former without claiming any
authenticity or cultural knowledge. They at least don’t start competing as
apolitical shallow performers with the cultures out of which they take
kinesiology and ideas of styling. Other dancers are not so honest although they
are educated enough to know that this art has an enormous and complex
cultural and historical context around and underneath it.
However, my focus here is on the dancers who had never had the choice of
experiencing the dance in its cultural context. They have not attended enough
events, like festivals, private parties, holiday celebrations of the cultures, and
they don’t even know what they are missing. Yes, at a festival family day you
might not be able to put on a sparkly bedlah, but you can wear this at your
teacher’s hafla. What about watching dancers of the culture dancing
gorgeously in their everyday outfit? How good can they be so that they dance
like that?
They can be really really good. Because they draw from the collective
intelligence of the people around them and the people that danced the dance
for generations before them. There is no way to learn with this collective
intelligence if you don’t bother to meaningfully and respectfully engage with it.
Despise the collective and your individual intelligence will end up thirsty,
hungry and alone.
Practically, think about organising nights or days out to spaces run by peoples
of the culture. Support artists of the cultures in general, not only the musicians
who know to play the music that you are most familiar with. Learn about
artistic associations of the peoples of the cultures and support their events.
Attend events that are not danceable but will give you an understanding of the
culture you take joy from. Study with dancers of the culture and pay attention
to how they speak, move or socially represent the dance, their culture and
themselves as dancers. If you can visit the countries of origin of the dance,
please do and try to be more than the western middle class consumer dancer.
Be a person with a full personality that owes this dance to entire peoples.
Learn the culture not only from translations of songs, but also try to learn
about the symbolisms and underlying meanings that exist behind words and
inside musical notes, pauses and silence. Learn not only what might make you
an “inappropriate” dancer but also what will make you a dancer that is
beautifully speaking to the community with words and movement.
We need to recognise that this is not an individual quest. It is the sector as a
resource holder who must do it and the artists who make the sector are those
who can do it. Collective learning requires collective humility and
collaborations.
It is not that the style of festivals and events we have are not good enough. We
can have all types of events. Literally, an event with fellow dancers is a family
gathering, cannot be replaced either. But we also need to open up, invite
communities to our events and make those events interesting enough for the
community dancers to attend. Equally important: when we go to community
events of the people of the culture, we need to be respectful and not expect to
be centred or attract attention there while there are so many good dancers
around.
Whether we are from the cultures or not, we are not more important as
individuals than the cultures and the peoples who make the cultures. On the
collective level we will never be better than them and we never wanted to be
better than any community. By choosing communal, cultural dances, we
created a connection to the communities and their cultures and we are now
expected to cultivate that connection as best as we can.
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