food for fusion thought

[alonewiththemoon]

Really excellent panel discussion on fusion and Middle Eastern Dance held at the Carnival of Stars festival in CA last November, transcribed at the Gilded Serpent.  There is a lot of food for thought here, and I was really pleased to see these very influential and scholarly dancers say a lot of what they said.  If only everybody could be so rational!  And Gothic belly dance gets a nod from Debbie Lammam:

"Souhair Zaki, to me, is the exemplar of a fine Oriental soloist. She has the emotional nuance, the technical control, the eternal femininity the the dance represents at its best. So, as long as we keep Souhair Zaki in our minds, then no matter how far we go into Gothic Belly Dance or Randa Kamal doing a Brazilian shimmy, we’ll remember that, and that’s our responsibility. It’s all we can do to be as educated as we can about the historical record."

Amen!

Comments

[bluemoonsaga.livejournal.com]

i thought it was excellent but somebody already wrote a bitchy letter.

[bluemoonsaga.livejournal.com]

oh & suhair can look pretty gothic too ;)

[alonewiththemoon]

Yeah, she's got quite the whiteface going on in the Sweet Star of Cairo show ;-)

[fire-faery.livejournal.com]

Wow...thanks for posting this. This had me very interested.

[meddevi.livejournal.com]

I was curious as to why no specifically modern fusion artists were on the panel, it's not like the Bay Area has a shortage of them....it was mainly old school dancers...otherwise a good discussion.

[alonewiththemoon]

I don't know, I think what with the composition of the panel it will have more credibility in the eyes of the people who are always putting down fusion and going on about "preserving" dance forms. The anthropologist in me was *really* happy that the point was made that nothing cultural is ever static.