The
Gilded Serpent presents... I'd taught
privately in the '60s, training many dancers. Jobs were still
plentiful and well-paying. In 1968, Rosetta Le Noire,
with whom I'd worked in the Broadway musical, "I Had a Ball",
made a proposal I couldn't refuse: "Teach a weekly class
at my school or I'll never speak to you again!" OK. I did.
For 7 years. I started teaching master classes for other schools
in 1972. In the mid 1970s, I was invited to teach a 3-credit course
in Mideastern Dance and Culture for the State University of New
York, with a concert by myself and the students at the end of
each year. 'Loved it, Credit goes to Dr. Paul Monty for coming up with a wonderful concept in the early '70s. One that I firmly believe set us on the path that brought this Art to its current status and international popularity: he was the first to envision and take the professional and financial risks involved in producing large-scale Mideastern dance seminars/ conventions with evening concerts all over the US, presenting and making master teachers of Ibrahim Farrah, Dahlena, Serena, Jamila, myself and several others. Many followed his lead in their local areas, producing seminars featuring the "stars" Dr Monty created and/or teaching themselves. This was to become became my favorite teaching arena and a great opportunity to share my hard won knowledge on a wider scale, first all over the U.S.and Canada and now most of the world: from Casablanca, Morocco and Cairo, Egypt to England, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Finland, Italy, Australia, Israel, Brazil and all over Germany, meeting so many wonderful people, who share my love of this field.
I worked long and hard to try and come up with a teaching method that would make the dances more easily learned and remembered. Serendipity again presented the solution: Lucy Smith/ Scheherezade and the Women of Selket invited me to teach in Richmond, Virginia. That seminar would be held in a very large Mason's hall, great for the large crowd that would be there, but the sound system was waaaaaay over there on the other side of the 80' long room: how to work it so that I wasn't running the 2 minute mile every 3 minutes or so? What to do about rewinding?
If it weren't for the problem, I might never have found that method/ solution! While I wasn't the first to come up with the "weeklong" concept, the joy of teaching these seminars lead to my scheduling and teaching my own weeklong intensives, at which even more can be shared. I was frustrated, in those early days, because most seminar attendees insisted on nurturing the mass of mythical malarkey abounding at the time and wouldn't believe me, when I'd tell the real story of the real dances. I started showing the research films I'd made on some of my trips and organizing dance-packed tours (again, the first to do so) to prove that the reality was, indeed, far better and more varied than the fantasy.
I began writing articles to help dispel the myths about Raks Sharki and other Mideastern dances for international medical and feminist magazines way back in 1964. There were no publications specifically for Mideastern dancers/ afficionados until the early mid '70s - I wrote for several. Many of my articles have been translated and printed in other countries, in other languages. A few are posted under "Articles" on my website. I'm still threatening to get started on the Opus Magnus everybody's been urging me to write ("How to Evade an Expectorating Camel"©. . .) Waiting for the Statute of Limitations to expire on a few "adventures" and a few governments to change before I can do that...
learning and teaching as much of it as I can, before it's all gone. So much has already been lost just in the few years since I started going "over there," and it is in imminent danger. Realizing early on that the real ethnic dances were mainly group dances, and no matter how fast I could move, I couldn't be a whole group all by my lonesome, if I was going to show the beauty and variety of these disappearing treasures to the Western public, I needed a dance company. It took a while. The Casbah Dance Experience was born in 1978 and debuted officially in Lincoln Center's Damrosh Theater later that year. It would be the first time Guedra, Schikhatt and Gnaoua were presented in concert to an American public.
As it ended, there was dead silence. I thought my career was over. A couple of seconds later, the crowd was applauding furiously and cheering: I didn't have to go off and hide in a cave! The rest of the concert went very well, indeed. We also got non-profit, tax-exempt status as an educational institution that same year. Again, the first in our field to do so.
Casbah and I were invited to perform at the Statue of Liberty Centennial and for many different cultural events and organizations. There were countless shows for the N.Y.C. Department of Cultural Affairs: solo lecture/ performances, duets, concerts with the entire Casbah Dance Experience, the Delacourt Dance Festival - solo (Anahid Sofian opened that venue to Oriental dance and the quality and class of her performance made it possible for others to follow!), Riverside Dance Festival (only dance company invited to appear there 5 times!). Casbah was the first dance company officially hired by the United Nations to perform in its Dag Hammerskjold Auditorium. They knew my work because I'd soloed a few times for the General Assembly, which lead to invitations to perform in the USSR. I wrote the script for and appeared in "Belly Dancing: Midriff Myth" -- a half hour video produced by the University of Wisconsin/Madison that won several awards for them, gave 4 annual bi-lingual lecture/ performances (French/ English) for Dar America in Marrakesh, Morocco, was one of the first inducted into the AAMED Mideastern Dance Hall of Fame (American Academy of..) as "World Class" for "International proliferation of her art, her myriad of talent and for her untiring pioneering in this, her chosen field of ethnic dance", was named 1997 Instructor of the Year by IAMED (International Academy of Middle Eastern Dance) , was voted Best Dancer and Best Instructor and Casbah Dance Experience was named Best Troupe of the Year 2 years in a row by Mideastern Dancer Magazine, Ethnic Dancer of the Year in 1997, Instructor of the Year in 1998 and Award for Lifetime Achievment in 2001 by Zaghareet Magazine. A major thrill for me came in July, 1999, when, along with Dr. Barbara Sellers and Shareen al Safy, I was invited to Cairo, as one of the keynote speakers, where I presented the paper I had first given in 1993 at Lincoln Center in New York City for combined conferences of the Congress on Research in Dance and Society of Dance History Scholars on "Dance as Community Identity in Selected Berber Nations of Morocco" and also gave 2 dance workshops, one in Raks Sharki (Oriental Dance) and the other in
 Pity
nobody
filmed any of their full-length live shows, so different from anything
you see them do in the films, in which their dance had to take
a very back seat to the story and the censors' mental scissors,
but it is far better than nothing, since now all of them are gone.
We can see full-length color videos of most of the Egyptian names
of the 1970s and '80s and a few of the current Lebanese stars:
wonderful! So far, I've made and released 7 full length videos: 5 in 1984,
from my on-site super-8 films of my 1977-82 research, one of my
dance company's 1986 award - winning concert at the Riverside Dance
Festival and one in 1997 of the concert at the Haft Auditorium,
featuring Nadia Hamdi from Cairo and several East Coast dance stars.
Non-Mideastern-born Oriental dance fans' need for dance-related shiny, beaded items created whole new industries in Egypt and Turkey that didn't exist there before. Our ideas for useful class and costuming items have had an effect on costuming over there (those coin and beaded hip wraps, just to name two!) and we now have several venders, who regularly import from there and vend at our seminars and by mail. There are several excellent American designers and venders of the theater fantasy "Tribal" and "Gypsy" outfits, body stockings, skirts and jumpsuits for giving and taking class.
Me? I would've done what I did anyway, because I am totally insane about this subject, but you have no idea what a joy it is to be able to share it with so many others. How long do I intend to continue? It's stated very clearly on my condensed bio: "Till six weeks after I'm dead!" Part
1 Have
a comment? Send us a
letter! 4-12-04
The Bellybus by
Dervishspin 4-11-04
"Magda, Hurry!"
by Majida Anwar 4-5-04
Rakkasah West Festival
Photo Teaser March 2004, Richmond, California |
but
it ended after 3 years, when the Dance Division had severe cutbacks
and all the ethnic dance courses were cut. So I bit the bullet
and opened my own school, in my small apartment, in 1976. Moved
to a loft in '79, so I could have a bigger studio, and when harrassed
out of there (some things haven't changed enough yet!), to West
15th Street and now on West 20th Street
- and so it goes . . .
Truth
gives us the wings that brought us where we are today. Most of
my jobs now are in places that wouldn't have thought twice about
slamming the door in my face in the 1960s. I know because I tried
and they did, but I kept coming back with more and more proof.
Haven't stopped. Won't. There are still too many fine dancers
having shows cut or not getting hired because of ignorance and
misinformation, but we have learned to rally and write letters
of support for each other.
