One of the enduring visual representations of Baladi, is the one captured through film and one particular choreographic format, is the one pioneered by Samia Gamal (1924 - 1994). Originally born in Upper Egypt she moved to Egypt with her family and began to dance with belly dance legendary impresario Badia Masabni by the late 30s. She initially started dancing under Tahya Karioka, who was the leading dancer of the time, but slowly broke away, from her style and vision as she was trained by Western teachers, particularly ballet and Latin American-inspired dances of the time. At the casino of Ms. Masabni, she imbibed all the Western influence of the time, and like Masabni herself, she outdid her mentor and patron in incorporating modern choreographic architecture to her dances, she is the first to have a "corps de ballet", to use high-heels while dancing and last but not least to actually introduce diagonal shifting of space in belly dance.
A lot of her success can be credited to the faith and support of ingenious talent of Farid al-Atrach (1915 -1974). In this clip, of the film Akher Kedba (The Last Lie), produced in 1950, it was Farid that developed and produced the film and composed the music as well. It was among the many film features that Farid made with Samia.
The clip shows a sketch, a belly dance sketch on a theatre stage, very similar to the ones that Samia used to dance in Masabni's famous night club, with costumes "imitating" traditional or folkloric styles of baladi performers and dancers, with only Samia's costumes looking very much like the costumes Masabni's developed for her performers at the turn of the century.
The idea of presenting sketches of belly dance at theatres and night clubs was one major development of belly dance by the turn of the 19th C. It literally was taken off the streets and "framed", like other entertainment sketches of the time: musicals, ballroom dances, Latin American dances, Jazz,...etc. And in a way that made belly dance open to absorb and assimilate elements of what we might consider "modern".
For starters, the double-framing of the dance, a sketch within a sketch, the belly dance as a theatrical sketch made within a film about something else. This in itself show the degree of the referentiality, viewing the dance with at least three different lenses.
Secondly, the basic format itself of the dance forever changed, instead of live playing of a small band of musicians, it has become orchestrated (which meant introducing elements of Western music and instrumentations), in many cases recorded music, and the many innovations of using corps de ballet or the unusual use of space, that Samia pioneered.
If we compare this sketch with the one of Karioka's we will immediately realize the differences: the undulations are much more pronounced, with falls and rises more dramatic, turning around and going off center is more common, and what immediately strikes us choreographic-wise, is the use of the arms. Samia Gamal took Masabni's lesson (a movement Masabni is said to have taken form Isadora Duncan) to heart and used the arms to frame her torso, or to isolate more easily, and to give a certain sense of elongation and vertical continuity to her movement, while Karioka, more true to traditional belly dance, rarely raises the arms beyond shoulder level, and almost always keeps them parallel to her torso or minimally extended to the side.
The use of space might not be very clear in that particular film, but another earlier film, Afreeta Hanem (Ms. Genie) also with Farid al-Atrach, produced by Farid in 1949, shows Samia Gamal much more clear use of arms more reminiscent of Samba (a dance that Samia particularly liked) and a real venture into space, beyond the more concentric movement of traditional belly dance.
The venture into space earned Samia, the infamous joke that Tahya Karioka made about her, that "she needs a football stadium to be able to dance", ridiculing Samia's efforts to break the center-based approach to belly dance.
Samia's decentering of belly dance and the incorporation of arms, shifted the focus from the pelvis to the the use of arms and legs. In a way it became less about the 'belly', and more about the entire body of the dancer. Making space an integral aspect of the dance and an element just as important as the music for example. In a way this comes in line with her effort of breaking belly dance from the mould of an intimate dance aimed for a small audience that gather informally in any public space to watch the performer, to a more elaborate dance that makes use of space in a way akin to theatrical representation, a form of representation that she is used to, since Samia started learning belly dance in that kind of setting, i.e. a cabaret, nightclub kind of setting.
This "modernizing" of setting, format and what body parts to use opened the door of other "styles" of belly dancing. Something some more traditional performers criticised Samia Gamal for. Since this opened the door for "Westerners" to be able to dance this style and not only that but to expand on this repertoire and include more elements from ballroom dancing and Latin American and Afro-Cuban dance.
For example, lot of contemporary performers of belly dance, are Brazilians, who include a lot of elements of Brazilian Samba in their routines, most of them citing Samia Gamal as the primary inspiration for this style of movement.
What is interesting is how Samia Gamal herself viewed her own position, as more of a dancer/performer, rather than strictly a "belly dancer" or "traditional dancer", in the more common nomenclature of dance.
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