If you know the names of the other two dancers, please, feel free to comment or send a message. Thank you.
Prens Ercan Serce & his troupe
20 Tuesday Jul 2021
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in20 Tuesday Jul 2021
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inIf you know the names of the other two dancers, please, feel free to comment or send a message. Thank you.
14 Wednesday Jul 2021
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in14 Wednesday Jul 2021
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in12 Monday Jul 2021
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inI have not managed to find the name of the artists. Anyone who might know, please feel free to comment or send a message.
04 Sunday Jul 2021
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10-Day Performer Challenge, Baxevanis, Bernidakis, Challenge, Cretan, Crete, cultural history, Day 10, Ioannis Bernidakis, Lagoudakis, Manolis Lagoudakis, mediterranean
Day 10 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, started on December 28th 2019.
Day 10 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, after being invited by Serkan Tutar (thank you Serkan!).
A major influence to my dance, my perception of culture, and my perception of humans as full beings has been the culture or civilisation of Crete. Crete is the big island in the South Aegean, with a long history that covers a time span of many thousands of years.
Because of their geographical position, Cretans had the chance to have close relations with the Eastern Mediterranean and North African cultures, and you can hear and see this in their music and dances. They also had the problem of being invaded by all major powers of each era and faced suppression and harsh retaliations because Cretans were resisting in all cases and in all possible ways.
However, geography is not enough to explain why Cretan music has scales similar to Arabic ones in most of its musical tradition (Crete has been an Arab emirate for 130 years in the Middle Ages). They also have other scales, depending on the area and style of music. You can also hear in the same Cretan music Italian renaissance themes and cadences, but also Ottoman melodies. There are also melodies that we do not know where they came from, just that the Cretans preserved them with care and respect as their own tradition.
Cretans have their own tsiftetelis, not many, but distinctive in style, and most of those tsiftetelis have no other versions in other regions of the greater Greek world but probably have links to melodies that are lost or not widely known in the Mediterranean, if those are not their own local creations (probably they are) . They also have their own zeybek dances, only in 4/4 rhythm. Many of the lyrics in the songs, just like all Cretan dialects, include Venetian, Turkish or Arabic words and phrases, that are old style language.
Given the resistance and the revolt history of the Cretans, I reached the conclusion that this accommodation of other cultures is not a sign of submission. Otherwise, the Cretans would have forgotten everything, they are very good to erase what they do not like. I believe that Cretans did what I was suggesting in Day 9 of the Challenge: They fought back injustice, they kept what seemed beautiful enough. From history we know that they created alliances with many people who were also supporters of justice, so we have revolts where the Venetian settlers ally with the Cretans against Venice. Some unverified oral history says the same about the Arabs and Cretans against the Byzantine Empire. I suspect the same happened with some Turkish people, otherwise it does not make sense when the nowadays Cretans say that the Turks taught them how to make their famous knives for war.
Let’s finish the 10-Day Challenge with a quiz: what is the rhythm of this song? hint: follow the voice.
04 Sunday Jul 2021
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10-Day Performer Challenge, Challenge, cultural history, dance tradition, Day 9, Mindfields, politics, Prodigy
Day 9 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, started on December 28th 2019.
Day 9 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, after being invited by Serkan Tutar (thank you Serkan!).
As you may have seen from the previous Challenge days, dance traditions are very political. Unfortunately, politics have been silenced in the bellydance world for many decades now, in a general effort to make things easier for everyone. However, this effort, no matter how well intentioned it has been, brought up other problems that every depoliticisation entails.
First, you cannot depoliticise anything. Everything is political, and dance, especially Mediterranean dance is more political than one would imagine. By silencing the political and social history of the dance and its influences, you are betraying the dance, it’s culture and the people who created it under very challenging conditions.
Second, not talking about politics has reduced the discussion to cultural appropriation, which is a very limited perception of the dance, its culture and the people of the culture. It also presents the dance as something that does not contain resistances built in it on purpose by its creators. It represents the people and their culture as unable to resist or have their own agenda. It erases all anticolonial resistance and all possibility of people involved with the dance to be part of this struggle.
Third, it led to outrageously racial situations where local women in Egypt and elsewhere cannot access the business or they access it on very low salaries while westerners can take over the business, and impose what is traditional or not to the big global audience. It also led to exclusionary practices against black dancers and no action to include them. I have mentioned the strikes of the 1980s top models who seemed to understand better that everything is political than nowadays bellydancers.
Fourth, it led to a pursuit of ‘dancing like an egyptian’ without recognising that Egyptian dancers have been so good not only because they were practicing the best out of their art, but because they were full human, that is political beings, engaged in their social history in the making. You cannot dance like Tahia Carioca or Dina not because you are not able to copy movements, but because you have not faced the political decisions those artists faced in their lives. Whining when Dina or Randa Kamel say that Egyptian dancers are different or better in Egyptian style shows how depoliticised our dance has become. It is not about blood descent but about community life.
Finally, it led to a decline in dancing technique and expression. “Movement never lies”, which means that we know from the dance all the stories of all dancers and their communities. Those who walked on fire, dance in a different way from those who haven’t. Those who walked on ice learn different things from those who haven’t. You don’t need to be Egyptian to be a great dancer as long as you walk the communal path of the great ones. Dance reveals your politics anyway, make sure that you are not afraid of it:The dance.Enjoy a rare saidi, also used in the Matrix I soundtrack.
04 Sunday Jul 2021
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10-Day Performer Challenge, Bouboka, Challenge, cultural history, Day 8, Eimai prezakias, rebetiko, Roza Eskenazy, Tsifteteli
Day 8 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, started on December 28th 2019.
Day 8 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, after being invited by Serkan Tutar (thank you Serkan!).
It comes of its own that rebetiko has affected music and dance in Greece, much more what we call tsifteteli in Greek or oriental dance in particular.
By rebetiko we mean a music and dance style but also a lifestyle that developed in the big urban-ports of the Aegean sea, like Pireaus-Athens, Izmir, Istanbul, Thessalonike, Syros and Chania. Rebetiko is folk performance arts with a mixture of music scales, techniques, languages, and themes of lyrics.In scholarship there is an emphasis on the underground, worker class, proletarian, marginalised social character of the style.
To me, who as you know from the previous Challenge days, have lived in a community where the musical and dancing traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean are our main folk arts, this music and dance are not a sign of marginalised underclass. For me this is tradition. However in the South of Greece where the nationalist and whatsoever capitalist development has lasted longer than in Thrace, this tradition was formally persecuted, in some cases very violently.
Rebetiko has been developed within this context. The key year is 1936, in August of which the dictatorship of Metaxas was imposed, lasting until April 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded Greece. Metaxas was an outright fascist, and apart from attacking the leftists, the trade unions and anyone progressive in the country, he also imposed censorship on music and songs. His nationalist vision was the extreme outcome of the usual Greek nationalist narrative: following the colonial perception of ancient Greek culture and the cherry-picking of its conservative traits out of it, everything that was related to the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa was deemed as foreign element and a degrading characteristic. Such characteristics, according to this narrative, should be erased from Greek culture in order to restore the culture into its genuine (Aryan/indoeuropean/white) form.
Oral tradition says that the song Eimai Prezakias was the pretext for the censorship. Scholars have not found evidence for the claim. However, many official records are lost due to the WWII and to the unfortunate coincidence that many high ranking intellectuals like Simon Karras were involved with the censorship helping the dictator to eliminate the “nongreek” elements from Greek culture. The collaboration with Metaxas dictatorship is one of the darkest pages of the history of Greek ethnography and musicology.
After WWII rebetiko was never the same. Makams, instruments, prominent artists had changed. Women were not band leaders anymore and their roles were secondary. The artists who denied to work with the censors and later on who did not play music for the nazis and their local collaborators, ended up in poverty and death. After 1936 we never had any songs like this one.
The clip includes scenes of Roza Eskenazy (the song singer) dancing, Boubouka dancing and Metaxas holding his fascist ceremonies. The song lyrics were explicitly comparing nationalism to heroine addiction.
04 Sunday Jul 2021
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10-Day Performer Challenge, African, Challenge, cultural history, Day 7, Epirus, Greek, Kato sta dasia platania, Peloponnese, Southern Greece, Spyros Yannios, Western Greece
Day 7 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, started on December 28th 2019.
Day 7 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, after being invited by Serkan Tutar (thank you Serkan!).
I have written a lot about the influences by mother’s family and culture, but my father’s family was also deeply entrenched in traditional performance arts too. Actually, those were the ones to hold a professional relationship to music and singing. Even when my father and his brothers were married and had regular day jobs, they were invited occasionally to perform because they were considered to be quite respectful to the old musical styles. This allowed me to learn a lot from their narratives concerning respect to musicians and working manners in traditional arts.
However, my father’s family was from the South mainland Greece, in particular from the mountainous areas of central Peloponnese, which has a completely different musical and dancing tradition than Thrace. They dance tsifteteli of course, by they believe “it is Turkish”, yet they have interesting shimmy work which I was thinking of as outrageous when I was a kid and my cousins and friends encouraged me to “move it!”. They also have floorwork with extreme backbends, which I was thinking of as exquisite, mostly because I could do them with easiness (vanity detected!).
The music of Peloponnese, just like the one of Epirus in the West coast, has very different scales and styles, and most dances are line dances. The scales are very interesting, because they have nothing to do with the usual Eastern Mediterranean maqams. They are literally similar if not identical to the pentatonic scales that folk musicians use in the Upper Egypt area or even more to the South, i.e. the Central African plains.
Yes, you read correctly. For reasons that we do not know, the West part of Greece has more African scales than one would expect. Of course, this contradicts the national narrative about Greek music. It also contradicts the tendency of nowadays musicians to write down all musical traditions of Greece in Ottoman notation, which is appropriate only for some of them.
For the pentatonic scales of the western Greece, real education requires to learn from the masters “by the ear” because there is no notation for them. My father and his family used Western names for base notes, although they did not use music sheets (my father could read and write music but he was not using it for traditional music), and the rest was based on oral tradition.
Therefore, if this song sounds jazz-y to you, it is because it is! It is a song that I grew up with. Now you know why I like tribal fusion bellydance and why dancing to variable music seems normal to me.
04 Sunday Jul 2021
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10-Day Performer Challenge, Abdel Halim Hafez, Arabic, Challenge, cultural history, Day 6, Greek, Sawah
Day 6 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, started on December 28th 2019.
This is day 6 of the 10-day Performer Challenge, after being invited by Serkan Tutar (thank you Serkan!).
Arabic music in Greece has a peculiar history. Although it is everywhere, it is nowhere at the same time. I mean, many melodies and songs that have become popular in Greece are Arabic, yet those became known to the public through artists who usually do not admit that they copied Arabic music. At the same time the copies were usually much lower quality than the original.
Therefore, I arrived to access the “real thing”, especially the classical versions of Arabic music when I was studying and living in Manchester and was very lucky to have flatmates from Arab countries. Maybe I have told you before about that magical 2002 Eid night, when someone put Sawah by Abdel Halim Hafez to play and a tall guy from Syria tied a kitchen towel on his hips and danced the full piece. I had never listened to anything more beautiful before and I had never watched such a beautiful dance before. My jaw was literally dropped until the music was over and my Arab friends were rolling on the carpet laughing at me who was so entranced with the music and dance.
As you may imagine, I had the chance to watch Arabic dance as danced in community settings, and that was from several Arab countries, and listen to various types of music, before I even learned their style names (like raqs sharqi, baladi, khaleegi), much less the names of the rhythms. In reality my friends, apart from generously showing me what they knew and giving me a quite substantial archive of Arabic music, did not bother to teach through terminology that we now use in bellydance. They only graciously told me that I would better practice (ehm, I knew that!), and that was it. I started practicing on my own since 2002 and then I started taking classes in 2005..
What I have experienced with Arabic music is very different from what the formal bellydance world has done during the last decades:
1. People dance all types of music and definitely enjoy classical Arabic music in their gatherings, the quality of music is something that they never give up.
2. Contrary to the perception that folk dances were vulgar-simple-boring, everyday, vernacular dancing is elegant, sophisticated, interesting to keep audiences watching for hours and full of feeling.
3. Especially about the westerners involved with the dance: The perception that the countryside dances are the real thing but are vulgar and communal not allowing personal expression, and the urban dances are elegant but “adulterated” because of commercialisation, shows dissociation from the dance. It also shows a reproduction of the damaging perceptions imposed on western folk-vernacular dances. The search for purity ignores the centuries if not thousand of years urban & countryside traditions intermingling in the MENA world, and it erases the fact that in patriarchy many traditions evolve through income-making. So workers who play music and dance are excluded as genuine art creators and only the “eternal peasantry” (does not exist in practice, it is an essentialist dream) or the visionary middle class artist, like Mahmoud Reda (bless him), can create art. Far from that.
Enjoy Sawah, the full version!
04 Sunday Jul 2021
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10-Day Performer Challenge, Challenge, cultural history, Day 5, Greek, Jewish, Morenica, Roma, Romani, Savvina, Savvina Giannatou
Day 5 of the 10-Day Performer Challenge, started on December 28th 2019.
Day 5 of the 10-day Performer challenge, coinciding with the New Year Day of 2020. Thank you Serkan Tutar for inviting me to the challenge!
A major influence to music and dance in Greece generally and in Thrace in particular, comes from the performance arts traditions of Jewish and Roma people. Their influence to bellydance worldwide is immense but I am afraid that the widely spread structural racism makes those cultural contributions invisible. To that, the genocide against Jews and Roma people during WWII created a peculiar situation where everyone recognises the genocide in discourse but continues the erasure of cultures in practice.
In Thrace, just like in the other parts of Greece, we have several tribes of Roma people, each with their own style of dancing. Contrary to the usual sexualisation of Roma women, in Thrace they are considered to be the most modest in their dance compared to the women of other ethnic groups, with arms placed near torso and with a selected yet amazing range of movements.
Given that many names are common among Christians and Jews, it is not that easy to know which religious group a person might be from, and in Thrace it is not allowed to ask about religion nor ethnic origin, so hopefully this works better for Jewish people to intermingle with others. Jews live in Greece since antiquity that is Jews from ancient Palestine-Judaea, but we also have Sefardis and Askenazys, who came later during the Ottoman times.
Many songs and melodies who are now considered traditional Greek are copy-pastes of Jewish and Roma music, without unfortunately the proper credit to the communities where they have been taken from. Moreover, ethnic and religious groups who are marginalised and discriminated, tend to undertake the entertainment sectors when the privileged exclude them from more prestigious and profitable sectors of the economy. They also tend to learn the traditions of others, the privileged ones, who hire them to perform in feasts and events.
Greeks owe a lot to Roma and Jewish people who saved and continued traditions which would have been lost because the church or the state did not approve them, because they were ridiculised as peasant and backward or because the petty bourgeois dreams of the majority did not include education in traditional performance arts.
The debt is even bigger in the South of Greece where bellydance-tsifteteli is still considered non-traditional by not only authorities but also the people. So, the Roma influences on the dance are greater there with shimmies and floorwork that does not exist in Thrace. Same is with the music: if you remember the clarinet taksim of the Dope Crunk piece by Beats Antique, this is a traditional taksim in the South mainland Greece, a traditional Roma taksim, played by all folk musicians of the region.