Belly Dance East and West

Concert Review

Due Date: Wednesday, Nov. 8

The Assignment: to view two (or more) belly dance concert videos, and write an essay describing their effect, meaning and how they achieve it, both in the dancer or dancers’ creative work in constructing the concert, and the filmmaker’s presentation of the dancer(s) through filming and editorial techniques.  One concert should be by an Eastern artist (Lebanese or Egyptian) while one must be Western (American or German, in this case).

Goals:

     To develop your own appreciation of the dynamics of a concert performance, and how a dancer determines how to present herself (or how an entrepreneur determines how to present his or her dancers) on stage.

     To develop a sense of how the filmmaker designs and executes his/her vision of the staged dance, and how this artistic vision interacts with the dance as it is performed on stage (or in other venues); to use the basic vocabulary of filmmaking to describe the techniques used to create the filmed version.

     To incorporate some of the ideas of orientalist critique and/or feminist film criticism, as appropriate, in your work.  (If you do not think these ideas are helpful, you can bring them up and dismiss them, just give me enough to see that you understand them.)

     To contrast the Eastern and Western examples of filming and dance presentation, to see if there are any culturally significant variables in how the dance is presented (bearing in mind that you are only dealing with two examples).

     To mull over this material and develop a mature perspective on what you have found, and to argue it in a 3-5 page essay that presents your findings, using specific examples and your research on the artists involved.

Western Artists

     Delilah Flynn, An Evening at the Iao (c. 2000)

     Suraya Hilal, Jewels (A Yemeni artist, but one who developed her style, presentation and performance venue in the East) (c. 1990)

     Fat Chance Belly Dance (etc.)

     Tamalyn Dallal, Emerald Evenings (1992??)

     Suhaila Salimpour, Scheherezade (2005)

     Suhaila Salimpour, Suhaila Solo (2005)

     Belly Dance Superstars, Live at the Folies Bergere (2004)

     Horacio and Beata Cifuentes, ____

Eastern Artists

     Fifi Abdo (Egyptian), Unnamed Live concert (c. 1994)

     Fifi Abdo (Egyptian), Television Special (c. 2000)

     Sohair Zeki (Egyptian), Wedding show, (c. 1984)

     Amani (Lebanese), Live Concert, c. 2002

     Nadia Gamal (Lebanese), live concert, c. 1985

     Nariman (Lebanese), live concert, c. 1990

Note: All of these are concerts, which means not necessarity that they were performed on a proscenium stage, but that they were coherent shows focusing on a particular artist.  Some were produced for TV (in the East) or for sale largely to the dance community (in the West).  I chose this format because these shows are the ones where there is most impact from film directors, and I propose that the interaction of film techniques and dance presentation gives us particular information about the culture’s relationship to its dance.  Some types of presentation, for example videos that combine a number of different TV performances by different dancers, are also very informative, but to keep things consistent, I have limited our comparisons to concerts only.