Gyspy in Cairo video clip

[alonewiththemoon]

I was in a show back in April, A Gypsy in Cairo. A video is being produced, and while the video isn't ready yet, you can see a clip online here. I'm in the clip, with fake hair and a shiny, shiny dress. And I didn't hate what I saw :-)

small technical note--the video is hosted by a third party and launches in a new window, so you may need temporarily to disable pop-up blockers to view it.

The Green line was wretched this morning. It's a bad sign when you walk up from the Red line at Park only to discover the platform is wall-to-wall people, and no trains in sight.

I watched a wonderful movie last night, Afrita Hanem (The Genie Lady). It's classic Egyptian cinema from the 1940s, starring the singer Farid al-Atrache and the fabulous dancer Samia Gamal, so as you can imagine it was a musical with lots of singing and dancing. I was happy to find myself really getting a lot of the humor--knowing just enough Arabic words to understand the humor in certain inflections or expressions helped a lot. It was also interesting to note that many of the dancers were wearing stuff that we dismiss as inauthentic hollywood fantasy clothing nowadays, yet this was an Egyptian movie made by the Egyptian film industry for Egyptian/Arabic consumption. I'm not saying at all that the costumes were somehow authentic or appropriate belly dance costuming today, but perhaps we can't entirely blame Western Orientalism for perpetuating certain images, and perhaps those images get as much play "over there" as they do here. Anyway, highly recommended for anybody interested in Egyptian culture.

Comments

[rojagato.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I've discovered a whole new corner of Netflix!

[dancer.livejournal.com]

"Thanks! I've discovered a whole new corner of Netflix!"

Amen to that! :)

[monicaraqs.livejournal.com]

I can't get the video clip to work! I see where it says Click here to view a short promo...but there is nothing to click.

What am I missing? Must...have...online video! :-)

(And yeah, Afrita Hanam is fun!)

[alonewiththemoon]

Are you using Firefox? The same thing happened to me, but I was able to open it with Explorer. I didn't actually have to click anywhere, the window launched itself. (artistic vision and the ability to pull together a big show does not seem to equal web design savvy, unfortunately)

[monicaraqs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, d'oh! When I allowed popups from the site it was right there. No one using mozilla will ever know this exists!

It is very cool and impressive! Quite the production--I will buy the video for sure.

Where are you? Are you the dancer with the pot on her head, or one of the two right after that?

[alonewiththemoon]

I'm one of the two after the dancer with the pot (that's Suzi Good, a Boston-area dancer, and she is indeed very good)--I'm the one closer to the camera. I don't actually have bangs in real life, but the other "ghawazee" has them and I thought her headpiece looked better than mine, so I wore them :) That's Zari with the cane right after us. She also did real Ghawazee dancing in the show.

[monicaraqs.livejournal.com]

COOL! You look great!

I love fake bangs.