Tracing Genealogies (1): Presentations of Baladi

One way to try to understand Baladi dance is to see the way it has been represented. Or in that sense, how its development was preserved, since there is no possible means of notation of the choreography but through learning and physically memorizing the movements. One key method of preserving the historicity of the practice itself, was visual representations in Cinema and film.

Fortunately enough, cinema as a visual medium, started becoming an industry in Egypt over a century ago, so we have a very long tradition of 'representing' not only our understanding and perception of what Baladi is, but also how it itself as a practice evolved through the many contributions of its star performs and its contact with other dance practices throughout time (ballet, ballroom dance,....etc).

One significant force that completely revolutionized the perception, representation and the way Belly Dance is practiced till this day is the artist and impresario Badia Masabni (1892-1974). Who was from Lebanese origin and came to Cairo in the early 1920s and opened the first cabaret and night club that represented Baladi as we know it today. 

Nearly every single famous belly dancer from the 20thC danced at her casino and night club at some point in time. Such was her influence that we can easily compare her influence to that of Martha Graham on Modern Dance. She, like Graham, completely changed the way dancers approach their practice and the very format of its representation.

For example, the costumes most belly dancers wear now, are only pale imitations of the innovations she first created. Her nightclub was the artistic hub for the luminaries in the performing arts and music fields. The best composers, singers, comedians, dancers all performed in her night club and everyone coveted her patronage to be able to perform on her stage.

What is very interesting about Badia and her school, is that most belly dancers who danced in her troupe, were also trained in ballet, ballroom dancing, Latin American dances,.....etc. And how each one of them chose to respond to this training and those styles of movements produced an incredibly diverse group of dancers who each became a pioneer in her own way.

In one of the few surviving records of Badia actually, a lady called Jalilah managed to upload an almost three minutes of a recording of Badia dancing with her corps at her famous night club in 1934 (she managed to acquire the film material from an Egyptian film professor). Apparently the recording was meant to serve as some kind of advertisement for the night club. Although the recording is only a few minutes we can still discern a few observations that came to define Badia's contribution to how belly dance came to be defined and received by audience, at least in film and media. First, of all  the idea of a "corps of dancers", a direct borrowing from her experience doing music hall, revue and vaudeville for years. Belly dance is chiefly a solo dance, where once dancer establishes her own relationship to the audience and to the music. Even in contexts where there are more than one dancer, they either take turns at dancing or two dancers create some kind of call and response and call kind of dance, where one dances one motif and the other would join for emphasis or pick a particular pattern and repeat it at specific intervals, serving more as percussion. The clear attempt at creating a simple choreography for a group dance that moves across space and although the dancers seem out of sync, lacking the discipline of more uniform dance, we can see that a series of basic movements are repeated by everyone. What is interesting about what Badia was trying to create is a preset choreography for an improvisation-based way of dance, that has a certain lexicon of movement but that is never predetermined before the actual moment of performance. In that sense to create a choreography with a line, that moves to a certain cue of music and that does not allow for much space for individual interpretation is nothing short of a revolution in belly dance. The other noticeable feature is the idea of center stage and accompanying dancers. As a matter of fact the idea of stage itself. The notion of a designated space for performance that is elevated from the audience and that keep the audience at a particular distance from the performer is  Western invention that was slowly taking hold in Egypt's performing culture and traditions. The genius of Badia is that she did not shun Western innovations but rather tried to integrate them with existing local or regional forms and formats of performance. Sometimes a bit clumsily like in that recording, but the idea of using a stage, creating a group dance and then moving across the space to "reach" the audience, as would be in a more conventional setting for belly dance, is only a testament to Badia's desire to reinvent a medium in a way that appeals to both traditional and non-traditional audience.

In a more even rare coincidence the famous TV host and presenter Laila Rostom, interviewed Badia Masabni in her show 'Stars on Earth', in 1966. Well in her seventies by then, the 'dean of belly dance', a bit senile and eccentric sheds a bit of light on her journey to becoming  the single most profound influence on belly dance and performance in the 20th C. From the disjointed fragments of her life, we get to understand that she grew up in Latin America, spoke Spanish as her first language, and started her interest in performing by participating in school plays back then. What is fascinating is that she actually learnt Arabic almost as a second language, that she had a keen interest in fusing different styles of dance (she lists in them in the interview: foreign, Turksih, Tunisian, Moroccan,...etc) and that she found that traditional Classical Arabic music did not "encourage people to move as much", and that's why she introduced an orchestra along with traditional Arabic music ensemble. We can then understand why some of her disciples and dancers also opted to continue this fusion (Samia Gamal as a prime example of that) between Western style music and dance and some others not, like Tahia Carioca, whom she describes as "the most Oriental of all the dancers".
The footage also shows her attempts at singing and performing, along with virtuoso Oud player Farid Ghosn (1912-1985) and while little remains of the brilliance and showmanship that characterise her legendary career, her play with finger cymbals shows an enduring agility and a keen sense of rhythm even for a woman who is pushing 75.