I continued to develop my own style of dance and before working at Arabic night clubs , I worked at the “ Greek Village ” and “ The Torch Club ” in Hollywood . Most of the singers , dancers , and musicians were gypsies , and they were * fabulous *! The club owners would pay their transportation from Greece , accommodate them in apartments located walking distance from the club , and give them money for food ; but they depended on tips for their earnings . Legally , they were not permitted to stay for extended periods of time ( perhaps due to visa restrictions ), so every 6 months a new group would arrive and replace the previous group . On many nights after work , around 2:30 or 3:00 am , I would share a meal with the singers and musicians at one of their apartments where the women would cook our dinner while the musicians played music until dawn . It was magical !
How did you get interested in the Ghawazee or become introduced to their music , culture or dance ? What made it attractive ? From the music archive at UCLA , Leona Wood ’ s husband Philip discovered some Egyptian folk recordings by scholars such as Tiberiu Alexandru , Fumio Koizumi , and Hans Hickman . Previously , we had only been exposed to the Middle Eastern pop music that was played in the night clubs or the few records of Arab music we were able to find . The first time I heard the haunting sounds of Egyptian folk music on these recordings , I was enthralled . At that time I was unaware of the fact that the music was mostly played by Gypsies . It was these recordings that inspired me to later travel in order to learn more about the culture and dance arts .
What did you want to learn when you decided to further your explorations understanding of this genre ? In the beginning , my mentor , Leona Wood , pieced together the traditional dances and costumes and most importantly , she researched everything about this music and dance genre that had previously been written by prominent 18th and 19th century travelers and historians , going back as far as the Roman poet Martial and satirist Juvenal who first described the dancing girls of Gades ( Now Cadiz ). It was from these writers that we first learned about the Ghawazee being a tribe of public dancing women in Egypt .
Leona ’ s research brought this group to the forefront ; since prior to this there had been no direct effort to specifically focus on the Ghawazee , neither among those who made reference to the Ghawazee in their writings , nor among those who recorded their music . I was fortunate to have mentors like Leona and Philip , who readily shared their research with me and established the foundation for my further studies . To reciprocate , I always shared my field recordings and films with them , thus providing them with models for the choreographies and music developed for the Middle Eastern section of The Aman International Dance Company .
During the 1960s , before going to the Middle East , I had been belly dancing in night clubs as well as performing the folk dances that I learned from the Arab students at UCLA . Finally , in 1971 I decided it was time to travel to the Middle
Domari Boy dancing - Abdel Khrem
In those days , most field recordings were not high quality and some of the musicologists doing the recordings only wanted short “ samples ” of each instrument , so the music was not complete in every song . Fortunately , the Egyptian folk recordings we discovered were full versions of the songs and music as it was played by the Ghawazee and I was able to enjoy dancing to it for almost a decade before traveling to make my own recordings .
January 2017 � The Belly Dance Chronicles 17