Amel Tafsout in Peebles, Scotland!

A few years back, I was lucky enough to learn North African dance in Scotland, direct from master teacher Amel Tafsout.  Amel is originally from Algeria and teaches North African dance.  She is a very special, warm and spiritual person and I was lucky enough to have attended her Stirling workshops on a couple of occasions.  I really loved Amel's teaching style and her insightful teaching.

Amel Tafsout

Well the good news is she's coming back to Scotland.  Thanks again to Celia Buchan of Borders Arabic Dance, Amel will be teaching 2 days of workshops in Peebles, on 13th to 14th April 2013, and there will also be a Hafla. 

On Saturday 13th April there are 2 workshops on the Dance of the Ouled Nayl and Algerian Rai, followed by the Hafla in the evening.  Then on Sunday 14th April, there is a very special workshop in Sufi spinning.  I've taken the Sufi workshop before and can thoroughly recommend it. 

For all the details and to book, go to Borders Arabic Dance.  And don't miss the excellent early bird deal for all bookings made by 18th March (£65 for all 3 workshops). 

If you don't know Amel already, here's a wee excerpt from her official bio:

Amel Tafsout inspirational master dance artist, choreographer and one of the finest exponents of contemporary and traditional Magreb dance of our time.  Raised in Algeria she has been fascinated by dance and music since childhood.  She holds 2 M.A .degrees in sociolinguistics and romance languages a research in dance ethnology and a long training in healing practises. Her knowledge and experience make her completely unique.  Now resident in the United States she is a voyager between countries, languages and cultures.

I hope to see you there!

More dance from Morocco

I've added a couple of new clips of traditional Moroccan dance to my YouTube channel.  I filmed these during my trip to Marrakesh last year.  You can read my previous post for a collection of some of the other videos, including Berber dancing and an unexpected surprise during a beauty cooperative tour.

First of all here is the candle tray dance filmed at the beautiful Palais Chahramane restaurant.  I loved watching this dancer for her sense of spectacle without skill.  Possibly even an insight into what might have been the low class street entertainment of days gone by.



The second video is of fun and athletic Gnawa musicians and dancers.  This was part of a brilliant afternoon of entertainment aimed at Moroccan people rather than tourists, in an unlikely location - an outdoor restaurant, behind a service station on the road to Casablanca.  I have still have some unpublished video of the different acts that featured, so either watch this space or feel free to leave me a note if you would like to see more.

A little bit of something sweet

Today I had a go at whipping up a batch of traditional Arabic sugaring wax.

Sugaring is a traditional method of hair removal using a sticky toffee like mixture. This is a common beauty treatment in Arab countries like Egypt and Lebanon and featured in the movie Caramel. This helps to ensure that Arab women have no unwanted body hair.  This perfect clean look is also seen as very important quality in a dancer.   

I've used hot wax with fabric strips as a home treatment in the past, but always went for a non sugar based hot wax.  The results are very good, although admittedly a bit messy and time consuming.  However, a good quality home wax is hard to find in the UK and can also be expensive.  A while ago, I therefore switched to epilators.  These are pretty convenient but on my skin type I find that these machines tend to become less effective over time.

My YouTube Arabic teacher Maha posted a video of her recipe for Arabic sugaring wax.  I've never tried this before and thought I would give it a go.  I knew it probably wouldn't be quite as easy as it looked in the video but at least the ingredients are pretty cheap and simple - sugar plus a small quantity of water, lemon juice and salt.

Here is the clip:



One of the comments under the video suggests the recipe is:

• 1 cup of sugar
• 2 tablespoons water
• 1 1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon salt

 You could probably do some research of your own if you wanted to look up alternate recipes.  It looks like the acidity in the lemon juice is the important ingredient as that that helps to get the mixture to go to that sticky and stretchy consistency.  I'm not sure why the salt is there, perhaps someone can tell me?  Maybe that's something that you just wouldn't leave out of Arabic cooking?

It took me 3 tries to get the mixture and the cooking method right.  It was caster sugar I had in the larder, so this might have affected the quantities and the outcome.  It turned out I had too much liquid in my mixture so although I could pick up the paste to knead and stretch it out, it ended up a little bit too soft and sticky to use, especially when it took on the heat from the body.  The result were sticky clumps of toffee that refused to budge from my legs - I then had to improvise with hastily cut fabric strips in order to get this off.  I reckon this kind of consistency would probably still work okay with the heated wax and fabric strip method - but this wasn't what I was going for. 

In the third try, I reduced the liquid quantity down a touch from what I've given you above.  I guess this is something that needed to work with my own cups and spoons.  I don't have any marble in my kitchen - as used in the video - so I used a glass/Pyrex heat proof bowl to pour out the liquid.  To get the cooling effect that marble would have provided, I sunk the bottom of my dish into another bowl of cold water.  When I had something cool enough to touch and solid enough to pick up in my hands, I started to work it between my fingers to stretch it out.  I ended up with the caramel coloured mixture you can see on the left of my photo below.  This wasn't quite sticky enough to work, so I experimented with a small piece and stretched this between my fingers until it became stickier and lighter in colour - shown on the right.

Sugaring wax

I ended up with a small and pliable piece of toffee that could be pushed onto the skin and stay in one piece when I ripped it off.  The same piece could then be pushed into the next bit of skin.  It took quite a bit of effort to work it onto the skin into a thinnish layer and also to try and get a good pace to complete an area of the body.

My verdict?  Well it does work and it doesn't risk burning the skin on application, like hot wax can (although does need caution when preparing it).  It's also natural, cheap to make, and surprisingly clean to use - certainly once I got the third batch right - and any wax left e.g. on the bowl and work surface can be easily cleaned up with hot water.  However, it does take time to get the preparation method right and to get the hang of an effective technique for quick hair removal.  Perhaps I need to watch an expert at work.  I also found I didn't always manage to pick up all the hair with the wax and frequently had to go over the same area again.  I've still got some fresh balls of wax left over and I've popped them in the fridge to use next time.  In my view it's definitely worth another try and I plan to continue to work on that technique. 

A Taste of Morocco

I've gathered together a few short dance and cultural video clips from my recent visit to Morocco, posted to my YouTube account.

Berber women traditional dancing and singing

This was taken in a restaurant in Marrakesh.  The dance style is Berber from the Atlas Mountains and is characterised by earthy hip movements, twists and pelvic tilts.  This is a huge amount of fun and the chemistry between the women combined with changes in pace - "dance for a bit...get tired...sing for a bit...dance for a bit" reminded me of the Ghawazee dancers from the South of Egypt.



The costume is Atlas Berber.  The dress is in two parts.  Firstly a high necked, long sleeved underdress worn to make sure that the whole body is covered.  On top is a tunic with a very long and full skirt, tucked into the belt to give the hips extra volume to emphasise the movement.  There are then two long lengths of rope like wool, decorated with big sequins.  One is tied several times around the hips as a belt and the other in a sort criss-cross backpack style and around the bottom.  These add back in the feminine shape to help exaggerate every movement.  The look is topped off with a headdress and babouches (slippers). 

Moroccan Horsemen perform the Fantasia at Chez Ali, Marrakesh

This is a very short clip of the dramatic charge and gunfire, "Fantasia", of the Moroccan horseman.  This traditional art was showcased at Chez Ali - a sort of Moroccan Disneyland theme restaurant a few mile outside of Marrakesh.  The night, also called Fantasia, is on a typical package type itinerary for many a tourist to Morocco. However, this doesn't detract away from the sheer skill involved in performing this manoeuvre.



Cooperative Marjana, Essaouira, Morocco 

This clip is the highlight of my recent visit to Morocco, taken at the argan oil women's beauty Cooperative Marjana, about 30 minutes from Essaouira.

These beauty cooperatives appear throughout the Moroccan countryside, providing employment for local women to prepare natural beauty products through traditional methods.  Argan oil comes from a rich almond type nut grown on the Argan tree which is native to the region.   It is a vitamin E rich oil used in luxury face creams and other beauty preparations.  Again, these cooperatives are typical to a tourist itinerary.

Marjana, however, proved to be a little different and it was a joy to be welcomed by drumming, singing and dancing before the obligatory oil extraction demonstration and sales pitch got underway. And it was sheer magic when this worker who was in her 80s got up to dance for us.



My final clip is the same woman at work.  This time, she is showing off her dexterity, sorting almonds. Although producers often now use machines for processing the oil, the traditional methods of argan and almond oil extraction are being kept alive.

"Lauren of Arabia"

Egyptian percussionist, musician and dancer Karim Nagi has posted this great clip of a lecture he gave from a panel discussion in the Diwan 2009 conference at the Arab American National Museum in Deerborn Michigan, USA. Karim discusses the Americanization of Arab dance in America, and how Arabs can reintegrate into the development of their own art forms.

This is an articulate and intelligent presentation of the issues around how dance originating from the Arab world has often been portrayed and mistranslated in the West and how important it is both for non-Arabs to understand properly the culture, form and origin behind Arabic dance and for Arabs themselves to embrace their own cultural wealth of dance.

I think this video is a must see for any Egyptian or Raqs Sharqi style dancer and for those with an interest in Arab culture. 




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Night of the Zar - the best of traditional Egyptian music

Makan, meaning the place in Arabic, is a small performance space in Downtown Cairo, by Saad Zaghloul metro, that holds regular concerts of live traditional music from the Egyptian Centre for Culture and Art (ECCA).  

The ECCA seeks to safeguard Egypt's rich musical heritage and oral tradition, researching, documenting, preserving, showcasing and celebrating some of the increasingly rare musical forms - both returning them to the Egyptian people and sharing with the world. 

One of the true highlights of my recent visit to Egypt, was a night at Makan to see the Mazaher ensemble, presenting the music of the Zar.  In its original form, the Zar is a healing ritual, one of the few, ancient healing ceremonies performed mainly by women for women. Zar is meant to pacify spirits and to harmonize the inner lives of the participants. A small circle of women gather with the aim of communicating, through music, song and energetic movements, with unseen entities or spirits.

Zar is a part of the underground culture and the practice of Zar in Egypt has nearly vanished.  In the whole of Egypt only around 25 people continue to practice this knowledge and this tradition.  The musicians of the Mazaher ensemble, Umm Sameh, Umm Hassan, Nour el Sabah are among the last remaining Zar practitioners in Egypt and they perform regularly at weekly musical evenings hosted by Makan.

This was a small, and intimate setting, with great acoustics and space for an audience of perhaps 60 people, made up of young and old alike, both Egyptian and foreign.  The show itself was an evening of stunning music with beautiful vocal melodies and energetic rhythms that could penetrate your entire being.  The lead singer had amazing charisma and with a glint in her eye she wove an interplay of gentle humour and deep emotion, which was both captivating and incredibly moving.

Here is a small clip that, although cannot possibly do the music justice, at least shows you something of the atmosphere of the place.  The song was one of the audience favourites - Banat el Madrassa. 

This second very short clip, shows two musical instruments featured in the Zar - the tamboura (a six-string lyre) and the manjour (a leather belt sewn with many goat hooves).

We helped ourselves to a cup of traditional tea during the interval and spoke to the Egyptian girl sitting next to us.  She had attended this concert for the first time only a week earlier, and already she had come back to hear more.  I now feel I need to plan my next trip to Egypt, so that I can do the same. 

Descriptions of the Zar ritual and Mazahar ensemble used in this blog entry are to be credited to the Egyptian Centre for Culture and Art.

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Raqs Sharqi Society welcomes new Associate

I'm so excited!

Yesterday I got a letter from the Raqs Sharqi Society. They have accepted my application for Associate Membership of the Society.

The Rags Sharqi Society is an independent not for profit association that promotes, teaches and provides opportunities to study traditional and contemporary Egyptian Dance, in the UK and around the world. I have been taking lessons with teachers who are members of the society since it was first established 12 years ago. So I am really excited to now be accepted as a representative of the Society through my own teaching and performance work.

The Society promotes a particular style Egyptian Dance, that has emerged over the last 25 years. It's a little different to some of the other styles of Egyptian Dance and Middle Eastern Dance. It is based on the traditional roots of music and dances still found in some parts of Egypt today. But what makes this style different is the modern twist, that pays tribute to the ancient roots whilst finding a new contemporary interpretation, with a strength of discipline and performance adapted for stage equivalent to any of the contemporary dance arts.

That's a lot to live up to. My I only hope that through my work and the small contribution that it makes, I can help more people within the wider community discover the beauty and enjoyment of watching and learning this amazing dance.

www.habibadance.com