April, 2007
As a middle easterner (living in Australia) I am grateful for your tireless efforts to preserve this dance and therefore the culture attached to it. Also as a teacher of middle eastern dance, I understand both your passion and thirst for knowledge. Despite the fact of having been born into the dance and culture, I am forever searching and wanting to know more in order to align my intellectual knowledge with my soul and heart knowledge. (if that makes sense!). So often am I frustrated with the stereotypical views towards Middle Easterners in general and Med dance in particular. As someone who grew up with this dance passed on from grandmother to mother to daughter then granddaughter, I am deeply insulted by the strip tease reputation it has garnered through ignorant dancers and garish costuming (from easterners and non-easterners alike). To every one cultured dancer there are a dozen over-painted, under-dressed and spray-tanned women writhing around like tortured cobras!!! Still those I can tolerate if they dance from their soul. It is all the frustrated ballerinas turned bellyrinas who try to “tidy up” the dance that bemuse me the most, for it is they that have totally missed the essence of this dance…pray do tell Morocco, what is tidy about the mid east and its culture, that the dance should follow suit? And what is dance if not a reflection of its people? We are a zesty, spicy, loud, boisterous, live in the moment for the moment race that has no interest in planning for tomorrow lest Allah be offended by our presumptuousness! Inshallah (as God wills it) is our motto in life…we are tribes who still till this day search for an elusive unity and peace…the desert is our home, the sand our resting place. What in our Eastern culture present or past bespeaks of tidiness? We do not dance to be tidy but to express joy, to express pain to express unity with god and to celebrate but mostly we dance to set our souls free…
So often I feel I am fighting an uphill battle but at least I know I have managed to convey the soul of this dance in my modest way to 1000s of women over the years of my teaching. Most importantly though, I have passed it on to my daughter who will pass it on to hers (inshallah!). My daughter shares this passion with the women and men of our family and we all dance together trying to convey to others through our dancing the joy and love that bind us. Our dance is a celebration of life, of being alive, of being on earth it follows the harvests and moons, births, deaths and unions. Our dance, Morocco, is THE DANCE OF LIFE in all its facets and who said life is tidy? I write this to you first and foremost because I know you will understand but also I write to thank you as a Middle Easterner, as a dancer and as a teacher…thank you for your hard work and passion for a people and their culture…
I remain yours appreciatively
HANAN ABBBOUD (Ahlam Med Dance Centre, Adelaide, South Australia)
