Tracing Genelogies (2): Presentations of Baladi

One of those early pioneers is Houriyah Mohamed, who was born in 1918 according to some websites, and who became a star in Badia's nightclub. She then went to make a series of films, one of the most famous of them, ironically enough, is called Sharia Mohamed Ali (Mohamed Ali Street) (produced 1944), which is the street where all the local belly dance troupes and musicians used to live and perform. She made a very successful duet with singer Abdel Ghany al-Sayid (1912-1962) who was renowned for his sweet, melodic voice.

In this video, Abdel Gany Al-Sayyid sings one of the his classics, Wula ya Wula (very hard to translate, 'wula', is mostly a derogatory term of boy, it can be translated as "lad", and since in Arabic most love songs use the masculine conjugations to address the female beloved, in this song instead of saying "O lass", it is "O lad"!). The song is composed by renowned composer Mahmoud al-Sherif (1918-1990), who was a master of incorporating local and folkloric motifs into his composition, creating a profoundly distinctive 'Egyptian' sound, very reminiscent of what Sayyid Darwish (1892-1923) did (coincidentally both would end up composing music that would be later used as a national anthem, one for Egypt [Sayyid Darwish] and one for Libya [Mahmoud al-Sharif]).

The song is clear 'Ghazel', not the form of Medieval Persian poetry, but the genre of poetry that deals with remebering the beloved or exalting her virtues. In that particular incident, its rather what is termed 'Ghazel Sareeh' (Clear Ghazel), because the singer is not only exalting the moral or personal virtues of his beloved, but her physical qualities as well! It is a kind of singing that is common with belly dance, where a singer would start listing the beautiful physical attribute of his beloved, and the belly dancer would start to dance highlighting or "embodying" this attribute (i.e. 'O you with the beautiful eyes' the dancer would then start winking or batting her eye lashes,....etc).

Wula ya wula, is one of the more famous songs of that particular genre. And in the song we notice how closely connected is the dancer to the singer's declarations of amorousness and she 'physically' responds to the lyrics, trying to mirror the words in her choreography.

The setting of the song, unsurprisingly is in a nightclub, and the dance is a sketch, a scene from a village, there are even palm trees in the background!, with a full "local" dress-up" for the singer and the dancer. There is even a 'corp' of dancers who for some reason are dancing North African style of belly dance, where there is a lot of falling off center, which is very unusual for its time. It is either this or they are just very bad dancers.

Houriya Mohammed follows a lot of what Baida, taught her, the costume is the one Badia created, the position of the arms, although still a bit classical, but a lot of their positioning is Badia's influence, the entrances and denouement are also "theatrical". Yet despite all these 'innovations' a lot of Houriya's movements are resolutely 'classical'.

She moves a little bit in the space, she uses her arms a little bit more, but she remains strictly within the centre-based approach to dancing. Her movement is very subtle and soft, almost imperceptible at some point. We can see that she uses the snake undulations, where her lower torso and waist go into the famous "S" shaped movement that is the hallmark of classical bellydance. Her pelvic gyrations are very smooth, very much unlike the spastic, rhythmic gyrations of later dancers.

What is absolutely remarkable about Houriya Mohamed's style of dancing is how subtle it is, and the amount of control she practices over her movement. It is almost seamless with the music and the beat. It is very well linked together and so effortless, it looks easy to execute, which I think is part of the genius of someone like Houriya Mohamed. It is to do such complex and un-osentantatious movement and convince us that it looks simple and easy.

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.

On 'Baladi-dance' and Ownership(s)

I have asked a group of researchers, dnacers, choreographers, anthropologists to respond to my introductory post and some of them generously agreed to share their thoughts and insights. Below is the response of Adham Hafez, dancer, choreographer and composer.

The first thing that comes to my mind when I watch a baladi-dance solo (because usually it is performed as a solo), is what do people think this is about? I will start by my own answer and then I will continue with the rest of the text:
I think it is about being present to explosive physical extremes. I think it is about being generous, reciprocal, sensual (and not necessarily sexual or erotic), and complex.  It is also – mainly- about alternative modes of ownership.

Belly-dance, which I prefer to call here 'baladi-dance' because it refers more to an aesthetic, an emblematic complex term and set of relations rather than it does refer to a practice localized in one body-part, choreographically speaking. Baladi (or Balady) could mean so mean things; kitsch, popular art, something national, and literally means 'my country'. With such complexity of a term, the performance practice itself is of equal complexity if not more.

Many times one would be asked "what is Egyptian in your contemporary choreographic work?" The answer always was: "Everything that you can't see." I would extend this answer to 'baladi' also; everything that you can't see is what is Egyptian about it.

What baladi-dance offers in terms of 'Egyptianess' is quite the invisible. It is the ownership of a body lexicon that allows so many innuendos and subtle choreographies to take place. It is the negative space that creates enough distance to mitigate ownerships and histories. It is an aesthetic that is about communication more than anything, and hence the necessity for the very old artifact (on our side of the world) and quite the 'contemporary'  tool: the reciprocal gaze of the performer/audience. It is the admittance of a cultural heritage without the political romance that comes with it. It is the writhing body of a woman (or in several cases that of a man) without a mere hint of pole-dancing and striptease. It is the woman celebrating her body without a feminist institution.

Baladi dance then is the constant reminder of what it is to generate physical discourse, and to experience ownership culturally. The dance is that of 'my country', and without hints of nationalism it reeks of cultural ownership, culture here as a denationalized anthropological experience; something that 'we' own and have accumulated over decades, centuries or maybe longer and we could now recognize it through certain sets of relations when it takes place. Something that 'we'- and we is a group of people that are bound by the stretches of land they inhabited and stories they have shared and accumulated, rather than by their language or alphabet (that changed quite a few times), or their religious practices or their flags. The ownership of 'baladi' here (and a slice of culture generally) rids heritage of the need of national belonging, and replaces it with a certain act of cultural belonging, as amorphous in its very essence as culture is in its nature. What Baladi-dance then succeeds in achieving triumphantly is indeed this abstract sense of belonging, almost 'depoliticizied', something that operates on/through/within a subtle terrain of taste, aesthetics, cultural accessibility and communication.

What is also very inspiring about Baladi-dance then is how it stands now within a palette of many 'contemporary' practices of dance and performing in Egypt (to be locally specific). The confusion about the ownership of time that Egyptian contemporary dance problematizes is met with effortless presence (rather than answers) in Baladi-dance. And, if the questions that Egyptian contemporary dance raise are more within the paradigm of: who owns this? Is this ours? Have we reappropriated it the way we have done electricity? Is this a universal practice or do we have to learn 'foreign languages' for it? The questions that Baladi-dance invoke then are more within the paradigm of: this is 'ours', we don't need to ask many questions about the country of origin/ the name of the country of origin at the time, this is not nationalist in a reductive way of understanding politics and nations yet this is 'ours' culturally speaking in a very direct and basic way of understanding and exercising culture.

This genre of dance, so-commonly called 'belly-dance' and in worst case scenarios coined 'oriental dance', moves culture, and moves with culture, dealing with the issue of ownership from physical discourses, and through generous presence hints at invisibilities that are necessary in shaping how 'the other' understands her/his fellow 'other' when it comes to artistic practices.

And, perhaps as a final note, it's worth mentioning that the question of the 'ownership of the score' in Baladi-dance always remained 'effortlessly present' and equally mystifying the way the practice operated within its cultural lineage vis-à-vis how its people inhabit or own it. Baladi- solos were always known by the names of their dancers, and almost never by the name of the choreographer. The ownership resided in the body/dance of she-who-delivers and those who witness, and nothing else beyond this immediacy speaks loud enough when she is dancing.

A Propos Translatablity of Baladi

I have asked a group of researchers, dnacers, choreographers, anthropologists to respond to my introductory post and some of them generously agreed to share their thoughts and insights. Below is the response of Mohammed Abbas Zaki, anthropologist, Phd student at the London School of Economic.

The problem with translatability and the cross-cultural exchange of traditions or traditional practices is reaching a consensus or agreement upon the subject matter of said translation. For example, one might study the historical development of particular variations of belly dance and the way in which those variations have arisen out of and contributed towards various narratives about tradition/culture/gender/class and so forth but as soon as one attempts to shift this practice from one cultural framework to another the process of translation itself becomes part of the newly formed tradition.

I guess in order to analyze the transmission of culturally-specific forms of dance (or any performance practice for that matter) we must separate the dance into its elements (as Ismail did in his email) maybe specific techniques, particular performer/audience relationships, performance settings and so on. Each of those elements will indubitably undergo a process of transformation as well as translation but I guess we are then left wondering if this should affect the ‘success’ of this translation. Is it that the essence of the dance has been lost in translation, as Ismail suggested, or has it simply been transformed organically in the same way that one could argue every single performance alters forms of the dance. In a sense I guess I’m arguing that translation isn’t impossible but only if we account for, accept and embrace the organic development that this process would indubitably produce.

I guess one of the things I immediately think of when I think of the translation of belly dance is the purpose of such a translation. I, for example, have seen many belly dance performances at random Middle Eastern restaurants in Europe and what completely hampers the translation of the dance in those instances isn’t necessarily the movements or techniques (both of which are usually almost flawless) but the uncomfortable consumption of ‘exotic cultures’ that this exercise engenders. I do think, however, that this is a separate issue from translation. 

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'.