The Giza Club

January 2003

Dear Amina,

Back in India. First Rule of Indian Internet is: Don't send long emails; they ALWAYS get lost. Servers always going down, electricity going off, etc. I'm paying to use computers by the minute, and have to wait 15 minutes to get connected to Hotmail, another 15 to get it to accept my password, THEN find that I can't get into my inbox. Arrrggh!

Finally got over my three-month-long cold and have gotten down into Rajasthan and started to do a bit of dance research, though got sidetracked into horses, which led me to meeting various members of the local maharaja's family who have horses.

The dance research is somewhat promising. I strongly suspect that either the Mazins * and some other groups of Ghawazi came from this area, or else some of the local dance "jatis" (usually translated as "caste," but often means "profession," and usually the practitioners are related by blood, so it also has the sense of "tribe") AND the Mazins et al. have the same source elsewhere. Probably elsewhere, as the local jatis as well as the Mazins and other Ghawazi have the habit of moving around a lot and usually have a word-of-mouth tradition of having come from "somewhere else." There is certainly linguistic evidence for this.

My hotel hired a troupe of dancers and musicians a few days ago and somehow had me running the whole show; it was as if they sensed I had worked with similar people a lot. I saw the dancers do some moves which, if slowed down and "Egyptianized," could have evolved into some of the typical Mazin Ghawazi moves. Also saw a young boy dance with the kind of wooden clappers one sees in paintings from the Turkish and Mughal Empires used by some court dancers, and he used hip moves, a lift and drop of one hip to the side while moving to that side; the clappers sounded like castanets and were capable of the same variety of rhythms, dynamics, etc., as finger cymbals, despite being basically little boards with no fastenings.

But of course nothing is simple in the belly dance world; with regard to moves, I am told that even the local dancers have been influenced by "Bollywood" dancing, which is the kind of dance done for Indian movies, which usually have dance scenes in them like Egyptian movies often did in the 40s through the 60s; and Bollywood dance has been influenced by Middle Eastern dance, which even the Indians, so eager to claim origin of various arts, admit. Also the North Indian style of entertainment dance called Kathak is known -- and recorded by court historians -- to have been much influenced by Persian dance (they say "Persian," but this may well include Turkish and Arabic).

I saw a Moroccan belly dancer at a hotel restaurant in Delhi a couple of weeks ago who did Egyptian style -- said she had studied with Ibrahim 'Akif -- and saw a Turkish dancer in Kathmandu (I kid you not), who was doing mostly a sort of "modern fusion belly dance," with a lot of western music, including rap (though at least both her costumes were of the most tasteful Turkish style).

Anyway, I'm dying and have to check whether there's anything to edit from the Tibetan monk I've been working with, and there's only a 50% chance of this email going through, so I'm outta here...

* "Mazin" is the family name of an Egyptian Ghawazi dance dynasty. Edwina has researched and published extensively about the "Banat Mazin" (Mazin daughters) and can help Giza members arrange to study with them in Egypt. See her article in the Gilded Serpent online magazine about Khairiyya Yusef Mazin.