Raqs Nerd: sequins at my hips, bells on my knees

Welcome to the merry month of May, and with it, to this week's slightly delayed Raqs Nerd!

For the last three months, I've made it a non-negotiable practice for myself, to write and send this newsletter every single Friday, even when I have a lot going on. And I'm very proud to have achived that - until this week.

But this time was different - this Friday fell on the 1st of May, the traditional first day of Summer in England.

And that meant that I was in the city of Oxford (which was my home for around 10 years, before I moved to Manchester), awake at 4:30am, and by 6am, had forced my way through an 18,000-strong throng of revellers to be part of the entourage of morris dancers who process through the streets with Jack-in-the-Green - the symbolic "spirit of Summer", a vaguely conical man-sized leafy entity, constructed each year from fresh leaves and hawthorn blossom - before dancing for the crowds...

This tradition of dancing, whilst not quite as ancient as is might appear in its current form, has been taking place continuously every May Morning since the 1920s - over a century now.

I have been a raqs sharqi dancer for almost 18 years now, and a morris dancer for 11 of those. And people who get to know me through either one of these dances, are often quite surprised to learn of the other! They have very different, almost opposite, images in the public eye here - although both dances are both widely misunderstood, and frequently underestimated.

I think I've always had a kind of fascination with morris dancing, since seeing dancers at school fétes and such like as a child. It was exciting (and maybe excitingly transgressive) to see dancing happening "in the wild" - out in the street, and at community celebrations - rather than confined to the theatre stage or the studio. And the bells, the ribbons, the chaotic and eclectic assemblages of badges and trinkets and flowers, seemed intriguingly exotic and even weirdly glamorous to small me.

But it never actually occurred to me that I could do it myself - until a friend got talking to some morris dancers in a pub one fateful day in 2014, and found herself recruited. From there it was inevitable that I would eventually get drawn in, through the twin forces of curiosity and peer-pressure...

Since then, what started out as curiosity has become a tremendously important part of my life, and what feels like a kind of vital counterbalance to my life as a raqs sharqi dancer.

I think maybe the biggest thing that has struck me about being a part of the morris - in the place where it's from, with documented roots going back centuries - is how different it feels to be truly part of a living tradition, with a tangible lineage of transmission from those who came before. I learned to dance morris from dancers in their 60s, 70s and even 80s, who had been dancing for the best part of a lifetime - and who had a huge wealth of stories about the dancers they'd learned from. We know who our ancestors are in this dance, and we keep their memories alive.

When I 'qualified' as a full member of my morris side by dancing a solo jig, one of the eldest active members of the side (in his late 70s at the time - now approaching 90) congratulated me, bought me a pint of ale, and told me very earnestly that he hoped I would continue the tradition after he was gone. By which he meant not just the tradition of morris dancing in general, but the specific idiosyncratic traditions and history and culture of our morris side.

That responsibility from my elders, and being in a position to have earned the expectation that I'll play my part in keeping our particular branch of the river of tradition flowing into the future, is important to me. I do not take it lightly.

I feel I must add here that this is absolutely not limited by, or about, any narrow, nationalistic vision of "Englishness" determined by birthplace or ethnicity. It is about relationship with people and place, and becoming a real meaningful part of something through committing to it and doing it.

For me, the most meaningful connection is not that we are doing the dances of some imagined/fantasised blood ancestors, but that we are doing the dances of the place where we live - dances which bear the names of nearby towns and villages, steps which have echoed through the same streets and under the same ancient trees for centuries, patterns that the land knows. Something related to the Roman concept of genius loci. As a morris dancer, as I see it, I am a both a potentially load-bearing link in the chain of tradition, and making some kind of offering of my energy and soul to the "spirit of the place".

Though before things start to get too serious sounding - I'm also leaping around with bells strapped to my knees, doing dances that are often objectively quite silly (because this is also about fun and entertainment), sometimes taking on a nonzero risk of getting hit over the head with a rubber chicken by a man dressed like a court jester, and having a very relaxed and pleasant time with friends.

So how does this relate to my life as a bellydancer?

It's not just one thing, and it's kind of complicated. But here are some ways my life as a morris dancer reflects back onto my life in raqs sharqi...

• It has brought home to me, viscerally, how disconnected from tradition and oral history and the elders of our art form, we often are in the Western bellydance community - and gave me some glimpse of how it feels to be inside of a tradition and a part of it
• Morris dancers have never adopted recorded music - literally all of our music is played live, always, in a very specific way matched to the cadence of the dances, and the inseperable relationship between the music and dance is therefore always very visible. This has fed into my determination to reconnect my own raqs community to live music, too.
• When the reality of professional raqs sharqi is incredibly image-conscious and demands an expert performance of a certain kind of glamorous femininity, it feels extremely liberating to me to also be part of a dance where there is zero expectation of this and no beauty standard - I can perform in public with a bare face, bare nails, sports bra, and hair tied up, and absolutely nobody cares if I'm in any way ladylike. As long as I'm in my morris kit (our "uniform"), all that matters is how I dance.
• The way morris dancing fits into traditional performance settings, and into England's various weird and idiosyncratic local customs, has shown me something about the great importance and impact of place and atmosphere and context in dance performance. Performing something in a setting where it means something to people...
• And finally - it means bellydance isn't 'my everything' - and that's a good thing for my dance. I know I could walk away from it, if I felt I needed to, and I would still have dance, music, and creative community in my life. It means I choose this dance every day, actively and from love, rather than feeling tied to it because I don't have anything else.

All of this has been a constant undercurrent in my thought and practice as regards raqs, for the last decade - sometimes subtly, sometimes more obviously. When I look at the path my own work has taken over the last few years, I can see how important the strands of thought originally sparked in my morris-dancing life have been in shaping it.

And it has led me to be a strong advocate for everybody - Western bellydancers like myself especially - making an effort to learn about, be an audience for, and perhaps (if appropriate) to actively participate in, the dances and customs that belong to the places where we live - and perhaps to the dances that feel like they connect us our own ancestors, if those are different.

Not in a restrictive "you are only allowed to do these things and nothing else" way, but as an act of love and grounding, in connecting to and honouring both where you are right now and where you came from, and letting it be a foundation for you to move from, in the same kind of way that as raqs sharqi dancers we connect ourselves to the earth and draw our energy from it as we move.

You never know where it might take you...

With Love,

PS - if you're in the UK, I will actually be teaching a morris dancing workshop at Dance JoY festival this October, by special request of the organisers! (I'll also be leading FREE Pilates-based gentle warmup sessions each day, and teaching a workshop on interpreting one of my favourite songs, "Alf Leila w Leila")

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 🚫🤖

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