question of the month: which came first, dance or language?
your thoughts?
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History
origins of belly dance at the bbc
Trust me, a Belly Dancer will happily dress just as skimpy and flashy - and will dance with just as many wiggles and undulations - for an all-female audience, as they will for an audience that includes men. In fact, most of the dancers I know would rather dance for the all-female audience any day.
a few little bits of history to share
history is a strange thing in this united states of america. here’s some pieces of history… perhaps someday i’ll explain why i’ve stumbled into them…
Carmencita (1894)
Princess Ali (1895)
Crissie Sheridan (1897)
Amy Muller (1896)
Spanish dancers at the Pan-American Exposition (1901)
A nymph of the waves (1903)
Princess Rajah dance (1904 - remember, ladies. the men love strong teeth…)
Ella Lola, a la Trilby (1908)
BBC on Egyptian bellydance crisis
from the bbc, with global reach, Egyptian belly dance ‘in crisis’
“The dance, from what I see, is at the moment rapidly fading in the background, whereas before, it was right up front,” she says.
“It’s very serious and I’m part of what’s going on. I’m part of the big decline that’s going on in the dance.”
“What you are seeing nowadays is just shaking, which is very Turkish,” she says.
“Egyptian dancing has many more brilliant movements, which is why there must be an academy to teach it, where I could lend my expertise.”
robots dancing to preserve culture
lots of mechanical dancing going on lately (and i’m not talking about people doing the robot) - today’s blip comes from yahoo uk.
Japanese researchers said they had turned a humanoid industrial machine into a master of Japanese traditional dance in a bid to use a robot as a guardian of cultural heritage.
they’re using motion-capture and robots to preserve dance forms - so, is this really preserving the form, or is it just “going through the motions”?