Dance Yourself Happy!

The Solace of the Zaar

The Zaar is a community healing ritual of drumming and dancing, primarily involving women and led by women.  It was said to have originated in East Africa and has been practised in Egypt since pre-Islamic times. 

While the oldest academic references to the Egyptian Zaar date back to 1862, archaeological remains show that this type of ritual played in part in the lives of Ancient Egyptians.

Whereas the Tanoura dance is done as a means of connecting with God or a higher being, the aim of the Zaar is to pacify everyday spirits. It also serves to harmonize the inner lives of the participants and provide a space in which women can 'work out the tensions and frustrations of social constraints which limit their movements, their dress, their voices and even their dreams.'  Little wonder that it is viewed with suspicion and even hostility in many quarters.

Because it has a marginal status in Egypt and is part of the underground culture, Zaar music and songs have survived with little interference from outside influences.  The downside is that many of the songs have been lost and at present there are only 25 people in the whole of Egypt who carry its musical legacy.

One of the highlights of our trip to Cairo was a performance of Mazaher, a Zaar ensemble, at the Makan Egyptian Centre for Culture and Art (ECCA).  Crammed into a small, dark room, in close proximity to the singers and musicians, it was a truly unforgettable experience.

Ahlan Wa Sahlan Pt 4 - The Power of Randa, Sufi Spinning and the Closing Gala

At the beginning of the week, we registered and booked the workshops we wanted to do.  It's fortunate that the dollar is so weak against the pound because it certainly didn't come cheap!   Three-hour 'Super master classes' with the likes of Randa, Dina and Soraya were $80, three-hour master classes were $60, and two-hour classes were $40.  Add in the cost of the opening and closing galas and registration, and it's one expensive holiday.

Now that more and more Egyptian teachers are coming to the UK, and there are tailor-made tours such as those organised by Farida Dance, it seems sensible to choose master classes or two-hour classes with the non-Egyptian teachers.  Firstly, there were fewer people so you actually got to learn something, and secondly, the subject matter was often more interesting. 

For example, I really loved the Tanoura workshop I took with Madrid-based teacher, Mohamed El Sayed. He seemed a gentle, joyful kind of person and it was wonderful to work with live music too; he brought along a singer, req, nay and darbuka players.  Mohamed obviously has a big following in Spain and South America as the majority of people in the class were Spanish speakers.  This was a big advantage as he didn't speak any English, and I found his translator's English  far less comprehensible than Mohamed's Spanish, which fortunately I more or less managed to follow.

After getting used to turning by changing direction and varying arm positions, we all got to spin as a group.  Sufis spin only to the left, and this takes some getting used to. Every few minutes there was a dull 'thud' as another person keeled over. 

After the break we got to spin in the big Tanoura and Sufi skirts. They really are magnificent. The Tanoura ones are made for performance, much more colourful and weighted with a thick band of rubber, while the Sufi ones are hemmed with very thick rope. Apparently there is only one person in Egypt who makes them. (I was momentarily tempted to buy one for some home spinning but then remembered the excess bagage we'd already accumulated over the previous few days and thought better of it!)

The music has a haunting, meditative quality with an insistent rhythm that builds up in speed. It's a very special feeling having that weight to ground you when you feel that otherwise you are spinning so fast that you might take off.  I find sitting still to meditate extremely difficult, but spinning is a great way of clearing the mind.

Maja, a Russian-born dancer based in Miami, gave another interesting class in Gypsy Tribal Fusion. I loved the combination of Arabic, Flamenco and Romany Gypsy movements.  At one point she taught us how to use silk fans.  We had to make do with plastic plates, which made me smile until Jo pointed out that it was no more ridiculous than making people put a shoe on their head as a candelabrum substitute (which, yes, I have been known to do).

Having said that I felt I learned more from the non-Egyptian teachers, I really enjoyed the piece of choreography we learned at Randa's masterclass. 

The Ahlan Wa Sahlan Festival Pt 3 - The Magnificence of Mona and Catching up with Keti Sharif

It's curious being here with a VIP.  As organiser of the Bellydance Congress, Jo is very much in demand. Other international teachers, who previously didn't show much interest in the UK scene, are falling over themselves to say 'hello'.  As Jo admits, it makes her life much easier.

I'm enjoying meeting new people - and bumping into dancers I have met at other workshops, such as Bernard from Paris and Raja, from Lille - a truly wonderful dancer, full of passion and flair, who I first met at a Horatio and Beata Intensive and then performed with in a show in Biarritz when a Parisian dancer fell ill.  (My abiding memory is of her stunning finale - and of getting locked out of the theatre with my friend Yvonne during rehearsals and having to scale a wall to get in, only to find that there was no time for me to practise with the orchestra, or even mark through what I was going to do to somebody else's music in front of an audience of 500 people.)

That ranks as one of my scariest experiences, but the masterclass with Mona el Said wasn't far behind. My God, she's the ultimate maa’lima (boss woman). She gave short shrift to anyone wishing to sit down, telling them that they should go back to their room if they were tired, and told the people on the door to shut it in no uncertain terms.

But she danced with such passion that she made me cry.  She doesn’t teach as such, you just follow her dancing to a piece of music, which keeps you on your toes as the choreography changes each time she dances.  She used all the signature moves I have seen in videos of her over the years.  I’m not sure how the younger dancers felt about her, some looked rather bemused. I was interested to see that there were (only!) about 80 students in the workshop, compared with 150 for Soraya and nearly 200 for Randa. But Jo and I agreed that she’s a legend and has to be respected as such.  It was dancers like her and Fifi Abdou that made me fall in love with this dance.

Ahlan Wa Sahlan Pt 2 - From Brazilian shimmies to the Nubian Village

Sunday 29th June

We learned some of Soraya’s techniques at a three-hour master class today.  She had a male translator with her who was almost as tiny as she was (especially as she taught without the mega heels she wore to perform) and focused on a variety of different shimmies, from Egyptian to Vibration and also the ‘Knife’ shimmy, where you imagine you have your knees tied together, your back against the wall and are pinned to it by a knife in the middle of your forehead, just under the belly button and between the knees.  You move your knees backwards and forwards rubbing them together.  I’m not really sure what the purpose of the analogy was – but apparently that was how she was taught the move. 

Soraya did her best to manage such a vast group of women, sometimes leaping off stage and hurtling around the room to demonstrate a movement, but it was still a challenge to see her – not least because some women were hell-bent on standing so close to the stage that they formed an inpenetrable wall.  Soraya’s class was fun though, and she did use some interesting imagery, which sometimes her translator was reluctant to translate.  They seemed to involve buttocks and pencils.

It was a novel experience being in a room of about 150 women, many of whom would have killed their granny (if not their entire family) to get a place at the front, refused to move when the lines were rotated – and crowded round Soraya in a scrum to get a picture with her at the end of the workshop.   I really don’t understand this desire to get your picture taken with the ‘star’, but I appear to be in a minority.

It was then off to the disco, for a Bollywood workshop...

The Ahlan Wa Sahlan Festival - Our Arrival and the Opening Gala

Friday 27th June

And so to Cairo for the Ahlan Wa Sahlan Festival, organised by Raqia Hassan.  I’m here with Josephine Wise, who’s teaching at the festival, and we’re lucky enough to have a room at the Mena House Hotel where the activities are all taking place – and a view of the Pyramids.   Every so often as I write this I look up, and there they are, in all their glory.  It’s heaven.

I came to the very first festival, which was held in Sharm El Sheik, but haven’t been back since.  It’s certainly grown in size in the intervening years.  There are a number of big names from Cairo teaching, including Dina, Randa, Soraya and Mona El Said. And the British, Europeans and North Americans are definitely outnumbered by the Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans, Brazilians and Venezualans.

The first person we saw when we arrived at the Mena House was Zaza Hassan, who’s now something of a mega star, being a judge on the Lebanese Star Academy (for dancers). 

In the course of the next few hours, at the opening gala,  we bumped into Leila Haddad, Jillina (Belly Dance Superstars), Nabila (from Berlin), Yasmina, Morocco and, of course, Raqia herself (pictured here with Jo.  I realised just how long I had been doing this dance, thinking back of the number of workshops I had taken with them, many of which I had helped organise, either independently or for MADN.   I suddenly felt very old.  At the time there was no Ahlan Wa Sahlan, nor many other international festivals.  It seems like a lifetime ago now.