Dance Fusion
Debra R. Levasseur and Robynne M. Gravenhorst
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Flamenco and belly dance are mirrors to each other–mirrors in which both West and East can see themselves. The music is the clearest tip-off. Tomas de Utrera of Soul & Duende explained at the Bop Shop show that both flamenco and Middle Eastern music are based on rhythmic cycles, such as a cycle of 26 broken down into shorter patterns like 4-3-4-3-4-3-2-3. This structure, common in Asia, is quite different from the steadily repeating pulse of Western music. In flamenco, it leads to sudden, dramatic suspensions of the pulse, when both musician and dancer are held for a moment until they swoop with redoubled attack into the remainder of the musical phrase. Middle Eastern music, as is particularly clear in Walid Habib’s oud playing, has intricate winding rhythms that flow onward without punctuating moments of drama. In both forms the singers use the extreme upper and lower ranges of their voices rather than the comfortable middle range, giving the sound a desperate, shredded quality.
Such extensive similarities must be due to a common heritage, and in fact flamenco was brought to Spain by gypsies, originally an Indic people; the gypsies’ language, Romany, is a descendant of Sanskrit. (The film Latcho Drom conveys in music and dance the gypsies’ journey from India to Spain.) At first it may seem astonishing that dance and musical forms can survive a migration across centuries and thousands of miles. But it’s more astonishing how each culture uses these forms for its own purposes.
For a closer look at that soul sickness, I’d suggest Robynne M. Gravenhorst’s Blood on the Moon. She uses erotic dancers–three women who’ve worked in strip bars, peep shows, and other sex-industry outlets–in a dance that a program note says “explores the actual consequences of crossing these socially and personally imposed boundaries.” Its opening image is a young woman bare to the waist who sits in a rumpled bed caressing her own face and body: she seems as delighted with her body as the belly dancers are with theirs. When her fingers flicked over her nipples, I could almost feel the droplets of milk she imagined leaking from them. Later in the dance, the woman puts on a black G-string and merry widow and goes through the same motions with the slovenly, drunken lack of care of a stripper doing her routine for the 100th time. Her loss of delight is the consequence of crossing social and personal boundaries.
