Raqs Nerd: the collector 🦋 and the scientist 🌌 - which are you?

As my long-time readers will know, before bellydance came into my life, I was on a different path entirely - studying physics, with the hope of becoming a particle physicist. That didn't go to plan at all (as you can tell by the fact that I'm here, writing this)... and these days, I tend to feel that that part of my life is very much behind me - almost as if it happened to a different person.

In fact, this summer I even (finally!) took the scary but ultimately healing step of clearing out and recycling all of my university notes and my phenomenally dull masters thesis (on deep inelastic scattering at HERA and something about W bosons, if anybody cares to know), and selling all my physics textbooks.

And yet, I find that my past life in the sciences still has a way of creeping back in, in how I think about, understand, and teach dance.

And so it is that whilst brainstorming for my upcoming finger cymbal classes (join in person), and considering my lesson plans, I was (very tangentially, but I promise this will come back to dance eventually) reminded of a famous quote from the "father of nuclear physics" Ernest Rutherford, best known for discovering the structure of the atom in 1911:

Now before we go any further, I must point out that very few if any physicists today would actually agree with that view!

Because part of what Rutherford was saying was that the laws of physics, by themselves, can completely predict everything else that happens - chemistry, biology, ecology, social sciences, and so on - and therefore that all the other sciences were just describing and cataloguing stuff that only physics had the actual explanation for.

And our understanding of science in general, and physics especially, has developed, and got a whole lot weirder and less predictable, since his time...

But the reason this popped into my head whilst preparing dance classes is that it does still point out an important distinction:

Between seeking to understand something through description and cataloguing, vs seeking to understand through illuminating and understanding the underlying principles.

Returning to the subject of finger cymbals - I recently saw a prominent American bellydancer announcing that she had catalogued seventy eight finger cymbal patterns.

Seventy eight! All individually catalogued, documented, and set out for dancers to drill, study, and memorise.

Meanwhile, renowned Egyptian qanun player and music expert Dr George Sawa states on his website that in his view, dancers need to know three finger cymbal patterns.

And this, for me, illustrates these two approaches perfectly.

My own approach to playing, and teaching, finger cymbals is much closer to that advocated by Dr Sawa (although I haven't yet had the chance to take one of his classes): I also teach, and use, only three basic patterns as the foundation of cymbal playing.

However, that does not mean my actual cymbal playing is necessarily any more simple, or less interesting, than a dancer who has painstakingly studied dozens and dozens of individually catalogued patterns!

The difference is in how I reached the point of playing what I play on my cymbals, compared to how a dancer who memorised many patterns reached the same point.

The first approach - let's call it "the collector" - works out and names and writes down every possible permutation of what you could do with cymbals, and then relies mainly on memorisation - i.e. drilling and learning by rote.

The second approach, my own preferred one - let's call it "the scientist" - takes the physicist's method: working out what are the most fundamental building blocks of whatever we're working with, and then seeking to understand the rules that govern them.

When you take the "scientist" approach rather than the "collector" approach, the more complex patterns just generate themselves on the fly.

Kind of like how a universe full of nothing but hot gas, can follow the laws of physics and end up glittering with with stars, planets, and galaxies. Or how a warm sea full of simple bacteria can follow the laws of evolution and natural selection, and end up with rainforests and butterflies and whales - and eventually, with bellydancers reading things on the internet ;)

Take simple building blocks, let them follow the right set of simple rules, and all kinds of surprisingly complex magic can happen.

And so it is that I can tell you that 95% of my finger cymbal playing is (in my mind, in how I think about it) literally just constant alternating runs plus gallops, with occasional syncopation and accents - and yet, if you were to record me playing along to a song, and compare it to a list of patterns from somebody who takes a "collector" approach, you probably would be able to tick off a surprisingly large number of them.

Because when I take my few patterns, and then apply principles like "use these to follow along with the phrasing of the melody" or "use these to emphasise the end of a phrase" - all kinds of variations just happen. Based on having trained my hands to play the building blocks, plus having trained my brain to recognise musical phrases, and having listened to a lot of good cymbal playing.

And the beautiful things about doing it this way is that in general, very little conscious thought is required when you're actually performing. The goal here is to ingrain both the simple building blocks and the process for building variations, into your nervous system, on a level where you don't have to consciously micromanage it unless you want to do something especially fancy - any more than you have to consciously think about how to move your legs when you walk, when you're just walking down the street.

To be clear - I think both the "scientist" and "collector" approaches can be effective routes to learning and building skill, for different people

But for myself, my personality and how my brain works, and my way of teaching dance - I am firmly in the "scientist" camp. I always want to examine the reasons behind something, that make it what it is - not just have a big catalogue of stuff to learn, without the context of "where did this come from and why, and how does it relate to everything else?".

And if I have a choice between memorising a load of information, or internalising a few principles that will let me create many variations without the need for a lot of memorising, I will always choose the principles. Complexity from simplicity, when and where it's needed, instead of complexity for the sake of complexity.

For me, this also applies to dance technique itself - yes you could document and categorise and name a bajillion different moves and steps... But ultimately, most of them could also be condensed down to a small set of building blocks - plus the processes of combining and evolving them during a dance performance.

And the magic, for me, is in the processes.

Did this resonate with you? And which method do you identify more with - the collector 🦋 or the scientist 🌌?

With Love,

PS - Last chance to join my upcoming classes, starting next week! Including ONLINE Egyptian Ashra Baladi course, plus last few places remaining for in-person Level 2 and Level 3 courses (beginners classes are now all SOLD OUT) - sign up here 😊

PPS - there are now just 4 in-person places remaining for the Raqs Roots Intensive: Ishas el-Musiqa with Nisaa and Reda Henkesh! A unique chance to learn about music and musicality for Egyptian dance from the perspective of traditional Egyptian performers - and to explore the full depth of cultural nuance around this glorious art - find the full event information here​

PPPS - 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. I was using the Oxford comma, semicolons, and hyphens (because I don't actually know how to make my computer do an m-dash), for decades before generative AI was even a twinkle in the empty, soulless eyes of a tech bro, and I'm not going to stop just because a machine has started replicating them. This is a 100% generative AI free zone 🚫🤖