Counterpoint: My Experience of the Sahara (January 2010)

Because I just posted Tanya Hurley's animation of Paul Bowles' poetic statement "Baptism of Solitude" about the Sahara that's making the airwaves today, I have to offer my experience traveling from Siwa to Bahariyya Oasis through the Western Desert and the Great Sand Sea. This took place midway on the 10-hour caravan my driver and I were a part of, and I asked several of the drivers how they would dance to the music blasting from their stereos across the dunes. (This crew would have nothing to do with Egyptian/Arab pop.) Though it's not obvious in this clip, riders from the other vehicles are on a blanket having tea prepared on a bunsen burner. Unlike Bowles' depiction, my experience was comprised mostly of laughter and bright, glaring beauty.

"Baptism of Solitude": A Tribute to Paul Bowles by Tanya Hurley

Thanks to Mikhail Iossell on Facebook, I caught Tanya Hurley's dramatic animation of Paul Bowles' famous recording : "Baptism of Solitude." Bowles is of course, one of the great Orientalists at its best and worst. Anyone who has read The Sheltering Sky (or at least seen the movie) knows his vision of the Moroccan Sahara represents violence, silence, and overwhelming emptiness. However, much of this borders on that idea of the violent and animal "other," which is uncomfortable for those of us with far different, if not opposite, experiences. Still, as is often the quandary, Bowles' language is so evocative and disturbing and evoked so beautifully it becomes something (if not accuracy). My favorite line: ..."Loneliness presupposes memory."

Writers on Dance: Edward Said on Tahia Carioca

My good friend Wah Ming Chang asked me to visit her writing class at Barnard to talk about Writing and Dance. In preparation, I looked up two of my favorite dance descriptions, Edward Said writing about his admiration for the famous Tahia Carioca (1919-1999) who comes in this essay, to represent the fluctuating politics and social mores of her beloved Egypt, and Federico Garcia Lorca's written introduction for "La Argentina."

I chose the following excerpt from Said's essay (which appears in his collection of essays Reflections on Exile) for obvious, pedagogical reasons. In these paragraphs, he begins with his eloquent definition of why her dance is specifically Egyptian ( "As in bullfighting, the essence of the classic belly dancer's art is not how much but how little she moves...") and then deftly transitions to a paragraph that concretely describes her movements with such clarity, a reader with some knowledge of the dance could enact the movement. Specificity and definition and context were, of course, fundamental in Said's quest to understand and avoid generalizing those with less power.

The essay, "Homage to a Belly Dancer," (which originally appeared in the London Review of Books) is a great find to anyone interested in belly dance, Tahia Carioca, or the process of writing about dance and the body. Here is an excerpt, starting with Said as a teenager infatuated with this woman who was for many, the essence of beauty and feminity:

"...We were about as far from the stage as it was possible to sit, but the shimmering, glistening blue costume she wore simply dazzled the eye, so bright were the sequins and spangles, so controlled was her quite lengthy immobility as she stood there with an entirely composed look about her. As in bullfighting, the essence of the classic Arab belly dancer's art is not how much but how little the artist moves: only the novices or the deplorable Greek and AMerican imitators, go in for the appalling wiggling and jumping around that passes for "sexiness" and harem hootchy-kootch. The point is to make an effect mainly (but by no means exclusively) through suggestiveness and--in the full-scale composition Tahia offered that night--to do so over a series of episodes kintted together in alternating, moods, recurring motifs.

"Her diaphonous veils were laid over the modified bikini that was basic to the outfit without ever becoming its main attraction. The beauty of her dance was its connectedness: thefeeling she communicated of the spectacularly lithe and well-shaped body undulating through a complex but decorative series of encumbrances made up of gauzes, veils, necklaces, strings of gold and silver chains, which her movements animated deliberately and at times almost theoretically. She would stand, for example, and slowly begin to move her right hip, which would in turn activate her silver leggings, tnad the beads draped over the right side of her waist. As she did all this, she would look down at the moving parts, so to speak, and fix our gaze on them too, as if we were all wathcing a separate little drama, thythmically very controlled, re-configuring her body so as to highlight her semi-detached right side. Tahia's dance was like an extended arabesque elaborated around [the seated singer who shared the stage]. She never jumped, or bobbed her breatsts, or went in for bumping and grinding. There was a majestic deliberateness to the whole thing that maintained itself right through even the quicker passages. Each of us knew tha we were experiencing an immensely exciting--because endlessly deferred--erotic experience, the likes of which we could never hope to match in real life. And that was precisely the point: this was sexuality as a public event, brilliantly planned and executed, yet totally unconsummated and unrealizable."

Photo Credit: from the Al-Ahram newspaper's report of Carioca's death in 1999.

HYPHEN Magazine on the Syrian Lesbian Blogging Hoax

Lisa Nakamura's blog post at Hyphen Magazine: Syrian Lesbian Bloggers, Fake Geishas, and the Attraction of Identity Tourism is a well considered report on recent blogging scandals and, more importantly, the motivations behind these thefts of not only identity but image of other cultures. She quotes Gayatri Spivak who writes in her book, Can the Subaltern Speak? about the too frequent practice of: "...white men...saving brown women from brown men." (Graphic from the Hyphen Magazine post.)

Summer II Classes at NYU

Registration for Summer II classes at NYU is underway. We have a Level 1/2 course from 6:30-7:25 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, July 12-Aug. 4. (Four weeks)

In person Registration: July 5-6, noon-8 pm at Coles Gym

Online Registration: now through July 6: http://www.gonyuathletics.com/recreation

Join us this summer!

Leila Tayeb Teaches at NYU

While I'm in Montreal, NYU dance students will get the opportunity to study with the beautiful Leila Tayeb, a performance studies graduate student who specializes in Middle Eastern dance. Students will benefit from Leila's extensive and very recent travels and field research in the Middle East and North Africa. I'll return to teach at the end of June.

NYU Summer Dance Classes

We're beginning registration for the first five week summer session of dance classes at Coles Gym. In advanced classes, we'll work on drum solo technique and then there will five classes taught by the fabulous Leila Tayeb who has traveled extensively and lived in Morocco and other parts of the Middle East! I'll return for the last week of classes to finish up the drum solo. (Leila is subbing for me because I won a writing fellowship to Concordia University in Montreal where I'll be studying from June 12-25.)

Here is the info. on the dance classes:

Beginning Level
(CLS 230.1)Tuesdays and Thursdays: 6:30-7:25 p.m. at Coles Gym

Intermediate Level
(CLS 231.1) Tuesdays and Thursdays: 5:30-6:25 at Coles Gym

IN-PERSON REGISTRATION AT COLES GYM: May 23-24, noon-8 p.m.
ONLINE REGISTRATION: May 24, 8 a.m through midnight May 26

http://www.gonyuathletics.com/recreation

Come dance with us!