Raqs Nerd: on physicality, and being human

What does it mean to be human? And what makes a human being irreplaceable, in the creative arts?

These are questions I've asked myself a lot recently.

We've all, by now, seen how online spaces are being increasingly flooded by a rising tide of machine-generated text and imagery. And increasingly, machine-generated music and video too. Being online has begun to often feel to me like being a lone human being, surrounded by an endless sea of mindless, babbling large language models.

I have recently encountered bellydance performances to AI-generated music at haflas... And back in February, Chinese robotics firms showcased humanoid robots which performed acrobatic dance moves on stage, and choreographed duets with human dancers.

So against this backdrop - what is our purpose, as dancers, as artists? How do we continue, in a world where anything that has been created before, can be mashed up and put back together again on demand by a computer?

I realised I do already know my own answer, deep down. It has been, for some time, the philosophy behind everything I do:

Our dance, our creation, must be about genuine felt connection between human beings.

Being flawlessly pretty, being polished, being technically impressive, doing something you can replicate perfectly evrey time - soon enough, a large language model will be able to generate a choreography precisely engineered to be as elegant and dramatic and impressive as possible, and a robot will be able to perform it.

But I would have little to no interest in watching that robot (after some initial curiosity about the impressive engineering and mechanics of the thing, I suppose). Would you?

Your surface-level beauty, and that of your dance, isn't what makes it profound on a human level. Nor the complexity, nor the technical perfection.

When I watch a great Raqs Sharqi dancer, I notice that I literally feel their movements as if I were doing them in my own body. It is visceral. I feel them deep in the core; in the solar plexus; in the places where emotions live.

It is not only that these dancers communicate emotion in the ways we might normally think of - words, expressions, gestures, and the like. It is that they create such a powerful sense of physical embodiment that it resonates in the bodies of others, below the radar of consciousness - nervous system to nervous system. The dancer is flesh, blood, bone, sinew, nerves and mind, muscles and soul. And so are we all.

Scientifically speaking, I think this has to do with the work of mirror neurons, which I have read a lot about in the past because they are really important for motor learning. But I'm more interested in the experiential side of things here.

When we dance, we aren't computers moving a puppet. We are living animals, in which consciouness mingles untidily with the unconscious, and the wisdom of the brain with that of the body. We are something magical.

Our dance has the impact it does precisely because it is a human being doing it. Because human nervous systems have this tendnecy to resonate together, and feeling can resonate between us both in terms of conscious emotional communication and embodied physical sensation.

This also connects to music.

Listening to the singers I most enjoy, I also feel the act of singing in a visceral way - the core engagement, the breath, how it might feel to make that sound with my own voice

As with watching dancers, it becomes a kind of full-body emotional resonance - rooted in the basic experience of being human, of existing in a human body, having a heart and lungs and liver, alongside the experiences of love, fear, loss, joy, longing...

And while it's most obvious with singing - with music literally produced from within our bodies - something similar is still there with any musical instrument played by a real person. We feel their energy; their presence and concentration.

We resonate with the breath of the ney player, the exhilarating precision and power of the tabla, the smooth friction of the violin, the constant push and pull of the accordeon, the gentle plucking of the oud and qanoun... Each of these sounds represents somebody's physical effort, somebody's conversion of feeling into movement into music.

I think we can feel that, even in recorded music, when we can't see the musicians, maybe even don't know who they were. Our nervous systems are exquisitely attuned to other humans, to physical and emotional resonance, if we allow it.

I hope it goes without saying that my writing is in the same kind of spirit. In this era of chatGPT, writing this newletter to you every week feels almost like a spiritual practice.

I write it myself, entirely. This particular one started out as handwritten notes in my journal, which I have typed up by hand. This too is an exercise in being human, and in emotional resonance - just as my dance is. I hope that something of I feel about this subject, comes through to you in my words.

We are under so much pressure now, to create more and more, faster and faster, more and more flawlessly.

But we can still, especially in our personal lives and our art, resist. We can actively choose to be human, to embrace and feel the full experience of it, and make that the foundation of what we do. We can choose to cultivate human connection, relationship, resonance - with our audiences, and with our fellow artists.

This is my driving force.

With Love,

PS - my thinking on this matter has been somewhat indirectly inspired by reading Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Player Piano" last year. Written in the 1950s in the era of factory production line automation, but eerily relevant today in the era of AI.

PPS - for Manchester-area dancers - my live music workshop series with multi-instrumentalist Mina Salama and percussionist Medhat Shahin begins on Monday! Find out more here​

PPS - every part of this newsletter is written by me, a flesh and blood human being, using my own thoughts, feelings, opinions, and writing style - now and always. This is a generative AI free zone 🚫🤖