Western Travelers, Eastern Dancers

Western Travelers, Eastern Dance Project:  Mission Statement

In the Middle East and North Africa, dance was never codified and described by authors within the culture.  As a result, almost all we know about pre-20^th century popular dance traditions, including “belly dance,” must be learned from the descriptions of Western travelers to the East. These travelers often brought prejudices with them about the Arab or African “character,” and a conviction that dances involving hip articulation were necessarily sexual in intent.  They were often unaware of the complex cultural dynamics behind the roles dancers played within their own societies, and motivated by either prurience or moral outrage.  All the same, their writings provide us with valuable information about the dance and dancers of the past.  The Western Travelers, Eastern Dance Project is dedicated to disseminating texts about “belly dance” to a broader community, providing brief critical commentary that situates the author and his or her observations in the milieu of the time and the culture, and provides the reader with resources for further study.

Authors: Western Travelers, Eastern Dance is coordinated by Dr. Andrea Deagon, Foreign Languages and Literatures, UNC-Wilmington, and authored by Dr. Deagon and members of her Honors 210 class (Fall 2006), “Belly Dance East and West.”

Author goals:

(1) To locate a 19^th century or earlier travel narrative and find the section or sections dealing with dance and/or dancers.  This will most likely involve the use of Interlibrary Loan and other research tools.

(2) To reproduce the text of the section that relates directly to dance and/or dancers for the web page.  For some texts, dance references will be in one particular area, for others, the references may be scattered.  These texts are (in general) out of copyright and it is OK for us to post them on the Internet.  You can use whatever method of text capture you like, but please proofread carefully to make sure everything has come out correctly.

(3) To provide readers with a commentary on the text that will give them fundamental information about it.  Some issues to consider:

□       The location of the dance and ethnicity of the dancers

□       Who was the author? and what nationality?

□       How old at time of travel?

□       What was his (or her) purpose in coming to the Middle East?

□       How does this purpose affect his/her narrative?

□       When was the travel?

□       When was the narrative published?

(3) To interpret the passage, both to show the author’s perspective and to work out what sort of information we can get about the actual lives of dancers and the details of the dances they did.

Author’s Perspective:

□       How does s/he talk about the dancers?  (As sexual beings?  As people?  As fallen women?  As commodities?  As artists?  Sympathetically?  With disgust?)

□       What points about Islamic (or Middle Eastern, or African) life does he or she relate to the dancing?

□       Does the dancing inspire other sorts of thoughts (romantic, visionary, ancient, sexual, revulsion, pity, satisfaction, wonder, etc.) 

□       Is the dance connected with the author’s world in any way (does he compare it to anything in his direct experience)?

Details of the dancers’ lives

□       What was their location and ethnicity?

□       What was their status?

□       What did they do in their dance?

□       What music accompanied them?

□       What were their physical surroundings like?

□       Where did they dance?

□       What was their relation to the audience?

□       Facial expression, other details of presentations

□       What did they wear?

□       How were they paid?

□       How were they regarded by the other Arabs (or Turks)?

□       What do we learn about their lifestyle?

Other comments: Whatever you feel rounds out your commentary.

Also provide:

□       A one-sentence description of your author (see the sample on the Web page for guidance).

□       A brief (1-2 sentence) bio on yourself.

Suggest helpful links, either for your topic/author in particular, or for the page in general.

Note:

It may not be possible to answer all questions about your chosen author, and in each passage, different questions may come to the forefront.  Keep in mind your ultimate goal, which is to provide people with an interest in researching Middle Eastern dance with a helpful guide to the sources.

Writing:

You should go for clear, straightforward writing that can be read by any high school graduate, so try to avoid serious academic language.  We will probably go through a few editing sessions before we publish.

Though you don’t need to consult outside sources, if you do, footnote them. 

I probably don’t need to say this, but be sure all of your language is your own.  Do not cut and paste from any other site, obviously.  Quote and cite any source if you use four words or more straight from it.  This material will be published (on the Web) so our standards of originality and of citing referenced work have to be particularly high.

Submission: Practical details

Submit your material

□       in 12-point Times New Roman

□       in Microsoft Word (not in html; definitely not in Works; if this format is a problem consult me now to work out a solution)

□       without formatting (“without formatting” means in block paragraphs, no indents, no tables.  (If material will ultimately go into tables, I will put it there.)  You may use italics, but not different size fonts or graphics.  See the Denon entry “before” for an example of how an entry should look when submitted. 

□       If you have images to include with your text, then get them to me separately in .jpg format.

□       Submit material to me in elecrtronic copy for its first due date.  When we meet for an editing session, bring the material in digital format (on a flash drive or CD) or email it to me ahead of time, with your last name and what it is in the subject line.

Your submission should consist of:

□       Author name and date of his/her travel

□       Sentence describing author

□       Bibliographical information (your source for the quote)

□       Passsage(s) describing the dancers, including enough of the surrounding text to give a sense of the place, background and scene

□       Your discussion of the passage

□       If you have used other discussions of the passage in researching use, provide that bibliography here, together with any footnotes you want included.

□       Any relevant graphics and a brief explanation or title of the graphics.

Format for Author Section:

Some authors are better known than others; some have a venerable role as mainstream authors while others published little or nothing other than the travel narrative in question.  So obviously, if you have a prominent author, you need to put a little more into this paragraph, and if your author is obscure, you may not be able to find much.  Structure it more or less like this (without the numbers):

(1) Author's full name,  (2) Nationality ( (3) birth-death dates).  (4) Mention profession or other circumstances that might explain a perspective: social standing, religious leaning if relevant, aspects of personal life that are relevant to his experience of the orient.  (5) Dates of travel in the Orient  (6) Reasons for travel  (7) Relevant facts to his perspective on the Orient (for example, did he convert to Islam and live the rest of his life there, or did he go in the military and end up hating the place, or was he touring the holy land with a church group and looked on the dancers as vile sinners, was he also an artist or professional writer writing about the Orient, etc.)  Note that you do not have to be mechanical about this, but you can incorporate these elements into a paragraph of description.  Try to keep it to one or two paragraphs, and remember that you are providing your reader primarily with information that will help them understand the passage about dance, not doing an independent report on the author.  Simplicity is good.

Format for the text and commentary

For now you can just put both, clearly labeled, into block paragraphs.  It is better to break the text up into sections not more than a couple of paragraphs and comment on them.  Use the guidelines above for ideas.  Again, you are using your persepctive in order to give the readers of the page some helpful insights in their own use of the text.  Avoid repeating what the text says; instead, comment on what you learn from it or what light is cast by other sources.

Author List:

(This is not exhaustive so if you come up with any more, let me know and we can include them.  I have given the author’s name and some publishing information; some of these have been republished and may be available in later editions.  The 20^th century dates are reprints of earlier travel books.)

Curtis, George William.  Nile Notes of a Howadji.  London.

Du Camp, Maxime.  Correspondence quoted in Flaubert in Egypt (below).

Flaubert, Gustave.  In Steegmiller, Francis. 1979.  Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour.  Chicago: Academy.  (Travels in 1850-51) 

Fromentin, Eugene.  A Year in the Sahara.

______. Un ete dans le Sahel. (In French)

Gautier, Theophile.  Voyage en Orient. (In French; I don’t think there is a translation.)

Gordon, Lucie Duff.  1983.  Letters From Egypt.  London, Virago.

Lane, Edward.  Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. 

Leland, Charles.  1873.  The Egyptian Sketchbook.  London: Strahan.

de Maupassant, Guy. 

Niebuhr, Carsten. 1790.  Travels through Arabia.  Edinburgh.

de Nerval, Gerard.  The Women of Cairo.

Ohanian, Armen.  The Dancer of Shamakha.

St. John, James Augustus.  Egypt and Nubia: Their Scenery and Their People.  London: Chapman and Hall, 1845.

Shawn, Ted.  Gods who Dance.

Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary.  (Correspondence from Turkey.)