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"Dance is music made visible."
Whether you're a ballerina performing to music from an Italian opera, a flamenco dancer performing to Spanish songs, or an Oriental dance artist (belly dancer) using Middle Eastern songs, it can be very helpful to have at least a little knowledge of the song and what its lyrics mean. How can you interpret the song effectively if you don't know what it's about? A while back, I went to several musicians who play music for Middle Eastern dance, and asked each one a single question: "If you could give one piece of advice to dancers with respect to working with live music, what would it be?" I was expecting to receive a variety of great tips that I could incorporate into an article on working with musicians, but instead they all gave exactly the same answer: Obviously, musicians feel there is all too common a problem with dancers failing to do this. It's challenging for novice dancers to familiarize themselves with Middle Eastern rhythms and select moves that are compatible with the melodies. But there's another level of dancing to the music that even many professional dancers fail to address: interpreting the lyrics. If you stick around the Middle Eastern dance scene long enough, you'll see even professional dancers committing some of the following errors:
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Most of us want the people who see our shows to hire us to do additional ones in the future. We want the audience members to come talk to us afterward and tell us our performances were great. We want to be treated as wonderful star performers. But not enough of us think about delivering a dance performance that will truly convey the feeling of the song and leave a favorable impression with any audience members who speak the language. As a beginning student of Oriental dance, I used to ask my teachers what the lyrics were saying in the songs they used in class, and I was astonished that many of my teachers didn't know and, worse yet, didn't care. How can we express the song through movement if we don't know what it's about? How can we avoid doing something completely stupid like the examples I cited above if we don't have this basic understanding of our music? And how can we be credible as teachers if we can't give intelligent guidance to our students? And yet many professional dancers make no effort whatsoever to learn anything about the music they use. They don't read the liner notes on the CD's. They don't search the web for lyrics translation help. They don't buy any of the books that are available out there with translations for song lyrics. Resources do exist, but many dancers don't know about them and don't make any effort to find out about them. |
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If there's an Arabic or Turkish enclave in your community, why not learn a few expressions in their language? Learn how to say "Hello", or "Thank you." Ethnic audiences will respect you more if you know a little about their language. It's not a bad idea to learn some of the insult words, too, just in case someone calls you one of them. I heard a story about a dancer who knew no Arabic at all, but used to dance regularly in an Arabic restaurant. One night after her show, she was speaking with a man in the audience and, with a large smile on his face, he told her she was a ___, filling in an Arabic word. Seeing his smile, she thought she had been complimented, so she smiled sweetly, said thank you, and went on her way. Later, she told someone else what he had said, and they informed her that he had called her a whore in Arabic. Imagine how foolish she felt when she realized she had thanked someone for a grave insult. It's not always possible to find a class in Turkish or Arabic in your community. But we can purchase language instructional tapes for tourists that teach introductory language lessons and start to become familiar with listening to the language. Before going to Turkey on a vacation, I ordered the Berlitz Turkish-language instructional tape from Amazon.com and worked with it in my car every day as I drove to and from work. I've also picked up a little Arabic. These language instructional tapes are particularly great because they train your ear to recognize words in the foreign language. I find this more valuable than being able to read the foreign language, because it helps me begin to make sense of words in song lyrics. Arabic is probably the best language to learn first. The 20th-century rise of Oriental dance in the Middle East occurred primarily in Egypt and Lebanon, and even in Turkey most dance performances I saw when I was there in July 2000 used Arabic music. For more information about why this is the case, see my article Why the Fuss Over Egyptian-Style Music & Dance? elsewhere on this web site. |
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Even if you are willing to commit the effort to learning another language, you have to start somewhere and you're not going to master it well enough overnight to understand song lyrics. Fortunately, there's help out there to assist dancers in understanding more about the songs we use. There are several resources that can help you understand what the songs are about that you're using in your dance performances.
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If you love Middle Eastern dance enough to spend large amounts of your time and money on acquiring costumes, attending events, and taking classes, then I urge you to also invest in learning at least a little Arabic or Turkish. If you want to make claims that you are a "professional" dancer or instructor, then I encourage you to make the investment to build your own knowledge so that you can represent the dance with respect and dignity even in front of ethnic audiences who speak the language and know what the songs are about. The tools for learning a little about these languages are out there, and the resources for researching song translations are out there. It may take a little time to investigate these resources, but you'll be rewarded with a better relationship with the ethnic audiences in your community. |
| This article originally appeared on the Suite101 web site, in the Middle Eastern Dance category, on April 30, 2002. |
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