Gilded
Serpent presents... When I was much younger the world that floated around me had much more potential than now to emanate enchantment in particular waves of artistic activity.
With devotion, I would hold the kinesthetic memory, fold it carefully and keep it close to my heart like a relic guarded by and guarding a soldier at a front line in the duress of imminent catastrophe. In the havoc of everyday life only the truth of dance illuminated my hopes. Such has been my adoration that I was even fascinated by the very body of the dancer herself. This is difficult to explain, but I would stare at the dancer before and after the performance, not only during, as if applying all my efforts at exacting the artistic promise from the body even when it was not dancing but engaged in everyday routine movement. Or is it that the body itself as an instrument of art becomes sacralized in the eyes of a devotee who sees the mortal body as the conduit of immortal revelations of universal significance? This fascination, indeed sacred regard for the dancer’s body has not left me since my very early adulthood, only now, I experience it merely when I find myself in the shadow of a great artist’s magnitude. Therefore, you can imagine my feelings when on a Friday afternoon in April, during Toronto's International Bellydance Conference of Canada, I find myself seated at a small coffee shop on St. Clair West with three other new friends who are also participating in the conference. One of them, sitting opposite me, is Tito Seif. As discreetly as possible, I study his body with great fascination. He is very striking and well built, his frame inspires a feeling of abundance, his arms are beautifully toned but, fortunately, not unattractively muscular, and his hands, even when resting idly, combine the strength and resilience of a manual worker with the dexterity of an artist. He is an imposing person but more attractive than anything else is his smile and the way his personality exists in his body; a way that is light, playful, kind, and generous.
In my extremely limited Arabic and in his somewhat limited English we talk about his children and his having to be away from them, his love for dance, the places where he will travel to after Toronto, the excitement but also headaches of Cairo. Throughout, he remains simple, uncontrived, immediate. And my gaze traverses his entire body with that religious hunger and that spiritual thirst, for this is the body where the dance comes alive, the body where movement materializes in rapid sequences that albeit evanescent, articulate in their power and eloquence the sadness and necessity of loss, the joy and pain of desire, the undeciphered mysteries of the body’s passions, ecstasies, strength and fragility.
Even though difficult, it is nevertheless intriguing to attempt to examine what accounts for Tito’s overwhelming success. One element of his art that is immediately striking is his seemingly effortless choreographic artistry. Even when seeing him for the first time, an uninitiated eye will be impressed by the ease with which he performs the moves. They flow from his body with graceful precision and richness, demonstrating not just great technique but enormous potential to reach a lot further than indicated, physically and beyond. Such facility allows the audience ease and comfort with the performer. Then, there is his smile: at once welcoming, wayward, sexy, kind, and above all demonstrating a rare pleasure in choreographic indulgence. With his technique and smile, Tito does not simply dance; he seems to be creating Dance anew in every performance and even in every workshop. Finally on this point, there is the gellabiya that he wears, shunning colorful, glittering and glamorous costumes that most other male cabaret performers choose to wear. Contrary to expectation, the gellabiya operates in his dance as a prop, something that augments the performance adding a striking aspect to it. Commentators often point out that wearing the gellabiya during performance earns him a greater amount of acceptability as a male dancer in the Arab world. This might indeed be the case. However, when I saw him in performance I felt that the appeal of his garment has gone beyond the politics of propriety of Arab male dress. Tito manipulates it during the dance, modes of manipulation that, along with the gender implications and political dimension of this garment turn it into a kinesthetic fetish during his performances. This is how he adds a performative dimension hitherto unseen on the world’s stages. Yet, there is another less salient component to Tito’s success and importance that we must consider, engaged as we are on personal or collective quests in art and the cultural impetus of the present. He has invigorated belly dance and breathed new life into it not only because of his talents but also because of his historic situation which is significant and not at all fortuitous. When and wherever he performs, his body becomes the confluence of several historic dance narratives that have had enormous impact on universal sensibilities about this particular art form. I am talking about how he carries on this art referencing consciously or unconsciously, I am not certain, some of the greatest belly dancers the world has even seen.
For example, he combines the acrobatic skill of Nayma Akeef. Coming from a family of acrobats Nayma had great strength, flexibility, and agility. Tito emulates Nayma’s features when he dances on the tabla and when he performs his exhilarating cane dance. Furthermore, as he glides eloquently yet elegantly across any dance floor or stage he brings to mind the wondrous grace of Samia Gamal. His arms invite the viewer with the same luxurious sensibility, the same energetic languor. And, as he smiles playfully and negotiates even more space for himself on the floor and in the viewers’ emotional world, he reminds me of early Nagwa Fouad in her pre-diva days. However, above all, in my eyes he evokes the charisma of Tahia Karioka. Unique among dancers, she made herself famous with an enigmatic smile, a magnetic personality, a captivating depth in her glance. And, equally important is her awareness of her corporeality in space, an awareness that was sensitive not only to her own choreographed corporeality but to the people around her so that her introspection and her embodiment of the music were engendered by a complex mechanism of interpersonal and intrapersonal exchange. This is precisely what marks Tito’s own exchange during performance.
I have compared him with great female legends who determined the character and legacy of early cabaret belly dance. Yet Tito, for all those who have seen him live or on videos and even on Youtube, remains in control of gender, assertively male and submissively humble, characterized by an exuberant masculinity and a refreshing choreographic flexibility that knows no gender boundaries in movement. And this comment brings me to his shimmy; an epiphany of his kinesthetic genius. In the words of my beloved friend, dancer, and dance critic Andrea Deagon, the shimmy is a significant manifestation of personal but also cosmic forces. The world around us is engaged in constant movement, vibrating often beyond our notice: In the visible world, the trembling that characterizes the shimmy may occur as leaves shake in the wind as ripples on the surface of the water, or in the wing of a bee or a hummingbird. Or it may occur violently in the destruction of an earthquake or in the palpable vibrations of air after a thunderclap. In the natural world we come to understand that some motions are too fast for us to count or measure. The shimmy is a kind of motion that escapes, temporarily, countable time, just as the movements of insects or birds or breezes defy quantification (“Dance, Body, Universe”). Natural disasters that signify the fragility of human existence, the apprehension and elation that accompany so much of our life’s experiences, the delight of the present and the fear of the unknowable, all these natural and emotional forces determine our investment in art and how we make imaginative sense of the world. With his intense, precise, rigorous, invigorating shimmy, Tito brings the mystery of creation into art, the unspeakable power of the body into view, the power of emotion into play, eternity into the moment. We leave the cafe on St. Clair with my teeming brain overwhelmed by choric wonder. My youthful fascination over the dancer’s physical (and not only dancing) body allows me to sustain some memory of his presence. And, assisting this memory is the distance I have covered in terms of sensibility, in terms of artistic growth and imaginative potential. And in my struggle to keep the memory of Tito’s body and dancing into my head some vision of his shimmy remains: an intimation of the eternal in the moment.
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for more? 4-23-08
to ? From Toronto,
Ontario, Canada The International Bellydance Conference
of Canada 5-16-08 Visiting
Cairo: You live a whole lifetime in one week! by
Paola 5-13-08 The
Ancient Art of Keeping Your Mouth Shut by Neon 5-9-08 Carl
Sermon's Photos from the Hoover Hafla 5-8-08 The
Dance Zones of Egypt: Sahra Kent's Journey Through
Egypt Basic 1 Workshop Report and photos by Debbie
Smith 5-5--8 Dances
along the Nile, Part 2: Raks Al Balas by Gamila
El Masri, Reprinted with permission, from Bennu, Issue
Vol.6 #3 |
