Dance Yourself Happy!

Barbies gone Bad, the Egyptian hornpipe and strains of Aida

I know, I know, it's been a long time since my last blog. You may have wondered if I'd fallen down a black hole, been abducted by aliens or downsized to a yurt in deepest Peru. (All of which I have to admit do seem preferable to the endless discussions about the bad weather and the credit crunch.)

But no, I've actually had a very busy summer - even if it does seem a very long time ago now.  The JWAAD Summer School was as hectic as ever - in fact, more so, as the Diploma course was running throughout the week and I was teaching a number of modules.  But there was plenty of time for playing too - not least at the Thursday night party.  Each year has a different theme which fires up people's creativity in a quite extraordinary way.  And this year's theme ' Barbies gone Bad' was no different.  Seeing Jim Boz and the 'Angels' (ie Summer School helpers) dancing to 'I'm a Barbie Girl' made an indelible impression...

After a week at Summer School, it was off to Verona for five days with my mother to go to the opera.  I was a little apprehensive about this one as it was organised by Saga, and I'm still too young to be eligible (hooray!) so I had to be enrolled as my mother's 'carer'!  But in fact we had a great time and the other people on the holiday were great.  Jean had done VSO with sexually abused children in Russia following her retirement from teaching and Nick was a mine of musical information having been a musician and director with the Royal Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras.  And the music was quite magical; I shall never forget the sheer grandeur of the Triumphal March in Aida, as 150 extras  - including dancers, singers and horses - paraded around the stage. Equally memorable was the poignancy of Rigoletto - and wild enthusiasm with which the Veronese audiences applauded the performers, who seem to enjoy an almost superstar status.

Then it was back home, in time to organise the first JWAAD Foundation Course weekend in Stroud.  The women on the group were great and Beatrice Curtis, Jan Piggott and I had great fun teaching them.  This autumn is jam-packed with Teacher Training in fact, as I'm organising three courses and teaching on the Diploma programme.  When I resolved to devote more time to dancing, this wasn't quite what I had in mind, but it's rewarding nevertheless!

So it's been a somewhat hectic Summer.   So much for my resolution to do less and relax more. But I think that's a gradual process, after all, as they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.  Anyway, now I'm back in the swing of things, I shall get back to blogging like a good 'un - promise!

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.

Glut power, the Suhaila Salimpour way

I have just returned from Exeter, where I took a truly inspirational three-day intensive in the Suhaila Salimpour format of Arabic Dance, with Sabriye, and organised by Tatanya. 

I went with little prior knowledge, only Raphaelle's enthusiastic endorsement of the technique  - and the caveat that I'd feel like a total beginner again.  How true.  It was certainly challenging; by the end of the three days I thought my brain would explode with so many demands made on it.  And my gluts haven't been the same since!

But it was really worth it. As I've said before, when you've been dancing for some time, it's easy to get stale and lack inspiration. There are always new things to learn, but it's a question of finding the ones that speak to you.  This course definitely did.

Sabriye is one of Suhaila's senior teachers.  Based in Dubai, she is a lovely, elegant performer and a fun and down-to-earth teacher.  I enjoyed every minute of her teaching, even though my body often refused to do what was expected of it!

Glut squeezing is a key aspect of Suhaila's technique - and one that I have yet to master with any great success.  When Sabriye did a side-to-side using just her gluts, her hips moved with real force.  My effort was more like a twitch.  I've definitely got my work cut out.

By all accounts, all this glut activity can become something of an obsession. As part of the warm-up you spend some time practising your squeezes - both cheeks, right only, left only and both - at various speeds. By the end of three days you find yourself squeezing at every available opportunity.  This can go undetected when you're a novice, but with practice the movements get much bigger, and so harder to conceal - even under a big coat.  You have been warned! 

There is a serious side to all this buttock work.  Using the gluts helps protect the knees and also frees you up to build up layers of movement.

The course was actually a five-day one but I arrived on the Saturday night in time for the hafla, and stayed for the following three days. The numbers were very low, for several reasons, I feel. 

Shimmytime in Paris Pt 2 - Workshops, Egyptian style

The weekend continued with drama, injury and deportation!  As I know from experience, when it comes to visiting teachers, and particularly from Egypt, nothing ever goes quite to plan.

As I mentioned, I was expecting the show to be over by the time I finally arrived.  So I was delighted not to have missed performances by the Cairo contingent: Tito Saif, Aida Nour, and Liza Aziza.  All three were great to watch.  

Tito (seen here with the festival's organiser, Nabila Henni-Chebra from the Compagnie Ya Leil) was particularly mesmirising, giving a performance with enough energy to power the national grid! He first performed a very skillful stick dance, with not one or two, but four sticks, with which he twirled, balanced and juggled with great dexterity.

It was perhaps more about circus skills than dance but its male dynamism made a welcome contrast to all the soft and feminine sharqi that had gone before. This is obviously his signature dance - as was his drum solo while standing on a darabukka.  He did some fantastic shimmies while standing on the drum - including buttock ones - to rapturous applause from the audience.

I thought Tito's dancing was made all the more effective by his choice of costume.  Unlike some other male dancers who opt for a more 'cabaret-style' outfit, Tito wore a galebaya and trousers with a scarf round his hips.  I sometimes find that the sequins and bare belly on men rather detract from the dance so this made a welcome change.  And his movements were vigorous enough to be detected from the back row.

Following morning I made my way to the Studio des Rigoles for six hours of workshops - three with Tito and three with Aida. There was bad news - due to some complications with this visa, the French authorities insisted that Tito had to leave France within 24 hours!  What was to be done?!

A Taste of Tribal

One of the highlights of the Sirocco Dance Festival for me was seeing a performance from two members of  The Uzume, a tribal fusion group from the Netherlands - and then doing a three-hour workshop with them.  I must admit that I don't really know that much about Tribal. (When I left for France there was barely any Tribal scene and by the time I came back it had blossomed into a separate dance form!)

Done well, I believe it can be amazingly powerful - especially for the women taking part in it, as there is such as strong group ethos. But I have always found it a bit limited and limiting.  However The Uzume (apparently named after the Japanese goddess of Joy and Dancing) have inspired me to pursue it further.   I love the fact that their choreography is highly innovative, reflecting the different dance disciplines that have influenced them.

We had an opportunity to try it out for ourselves on the Sunday and I was also struck by what good teachers they were, capable of breaking down the sequences of movements very clearly and with good humour.  They had us dancing to the end - even after a weekend of workshops.  They are doing both Tribal Ford and Raqs Britannia this year - so catch them if you can!

Knocked Out By a Wild Woman!

It's taken me about a week to recover from the excitement of last weekend's Sirocco Festival - which is either a reflection of my advancing years or the fact that I don't get out much! (More likely to be the former as most of my week seems to be spent on the M4.)

The Sirocco is apparently a wind which comes in from the Sahara, bringing warmth to Europe. According to the organiser, Wendy Buonaventura, 'our festival celebrates the meeting of East and West via the inspiration of dance and music'.

Unlike other dance events which focus on mainly Egyptian or Arabic style this was truly a fusion-fest, with classes in everything from Performance & Symbolism, Cuban Egyptian and Arabic Tango to Sufi trance dance, Tribal style and Arab-Flamenco. Because the teachers and performers taking part have a great deal of acting and performance experience, there was a highly theatrical dynamic to the whole event which I found really interesting. With so much emphasis on Egyptian technique in most festivals, it was really refreshing to put that to one side and to 'explore our creative energy and the spirit of dance within'.

No-one epitomised that spirit of creative energy more than Berlin-based Raksan, a true 'warrior woman'...

Warrior Women, She-Devils and the Japanese Goddess of Dance

All these incarnations of women could be found at the Sirocco Dance Festival in Frome this weekend. It was an exhilarating experience and one I will write about at greater length another time. (It's now midnight, I've only just got back, and once I start I'm liable to write for hours.)

Quote of the weekend had to be an excerpt from Wendy Buonaventura's three-woman piece with Caroline Alfifi and Hazel Kayes:

"Arabs say that there are only three insatiable things in the world: The Desert, The Grave - and Woman!"

Ah, what power we have...

Middle Eastern Dancers To Hit the Medieval Town Of Frome Next Weekend

To give yourself a weekend treat, let yourself go and learn everything from Sword dancing to Arabic-Tango fusion, come to the new SIROCCO DANCE FESTIVAL, organised by Wendy Buonaventura and Karine Butchart, which is taking place in Frome next weekend 18 - 20 April.

There is an exciting programme of workshops and there is the possibility of coming to individual workshops as well as the whole day/evening/ weekend.

Karine will be performing her new piece "Mirrors of the Heart" at the Merlin Theatre on Friday night, and Beatrice Grognard and Raksan will also be performing - all three are superb dancers and this is a fantastic opportunity to see them in this delightful theatre.There will be a party afterwards so you can have a great dance as a warm up to the weekend...

On Saturday the Devil Woman Cabaret will see the amazing Uzume perform, plus Leila Haddad, Wendy Buonaventura, Hazel Kayes and Caroline Affifi.  This will be followed by DJ-ing from Frome's incredible Desi Heights - with the perfect mix for letting your hair down.

So Wendy and Karine invite you all to come to Frome - this charming Somerset market town with its medieval streets - to shop in the Bazaar and dance to your heart's delight!

To find out more contact Sirocco on :

Tel:          0117 927 3099      

info@siroccofestival.org.uk

www.siroccofestival .org.uk