Approach Baladi

How does one approach an informal tradition? How does one work with a form of 'low-art? Is it possible to integrate a practice of popular entertainment into a contemporary framework without forfeiting criticality and conceptual correctness?
These questions and many more pervades the mentalscape of any artists or art maker who ventures into the world of traditional or popular forms of art practices and tries to find in-routes into the contemporary field to represent them or even try to incorporate them.
Baladi dance is one form of traditional popular form, that is mainly relegated to the realm of low-art and mass-entertainment, where there is no question of its entertaining value but there are a lot of questions raised when tries to approach it beyond its usual framework of representation.
At the outset this project my intention was problematize the notion of one tradition being an innate and not-able-to-be-transmitted, specifically in the context of choreographic transmission.
Baladi dance then operate on two levels:
1) National/Cultural: One has to be aware of the historical trajectory of how and where Baladi dance developed as well as the cultural practices that surround it, i.e. the music, the gender polarity of performing, the costume,....etc
2) The choreographic content: the specificity of the moving body, the Baladi body; how does it move? To what does it move? Can this movement be replicated?
The movement strategy in itself, the improvisatory drive of the choreography beyond recurrent motifs and specific sequences.

Initial discussions with Pere were mainly concerned the position of high and low art within contemporary practices and the communicability of one of those specific forms across different bodies and frames of representation.
I remember Pere saying that low forms of art, are ones that elicit an instant bodily reaction (horror, arousal, laughter,...etc) when that does not engage a mental involvement with the work.
And to me it would be very interesting to generate a certain context of debate/conversation among all of you, around the way in which you think Baladi dance operates and whether it can be truly 'transmitted' or is it doomed to be 'lost in translation'.