Raqs Nerd: Ahmed Adaweya - notes from a six-month obsession 🎶 One of the ongoing themes since I started Raqs Nerd back in January has been my project, veering into obsession (or, Autistic special interest) of listening to all the music recorded by Egyptian sha'abi legend Ahmed Adaweya (see e.g. "Raqs Nerd: But is this ART?") And now that I'm six months in, and have listened to I think most of Adaweya's available recordings (and indeed got to a point where I can sing along to a fair number of...
12 days ago • 7 min read
Raqs Nerd: feeling of the music - a dance nerd's dream event! This week is a special edition of Raqs Nerd, in honour of registrations opening this week for the Raqs Roots Intensive 2026: Ihsas el-Musiqa, with Nisaa and Reda Henkesh, on the 20th-22nd of November in Manchester UK - an event which I have put my heart and soul into for the last few years, and have been known to unironically describe as "my baby"... Our theme for this year, "Ihsas el-Musiqa / اØساس الموسيقى", literally translates...
12 days ago • 4 min read
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,...
26 days ago • 4 min read
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. With morris...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Raqs Nerd: What I'm reading right now It's just a brief one this week, as I've been very busy here in Manchester doing all the final organising tasksfor Tevec's Turkish workshops this weekend (and by the way, I've just seen her slides for the "history and development of bellydance in Istanbul" lecture now, and as a nerd I am now VERY EXCITED for all the fascinating info and footage she's going to be sharing! Join it online here) So in a departure from my normal long (and maybe slightly...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Raqs Nerd: Tarab, and what we miss This week I'm back to writing about music and emotion - picking up from where I left off a couple of weeks ago (if you're new here, you can read my past newsletters here) I've been thinking a lot this week, again, about the phenomenon of Tarab (طرب) - the state of enchantment or ecstasty produced by music. My feeling is that dancers from outside the source cultures are often quite drawn to or fascinated by this topic (as indeed, I have been)... And as...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Raqs Nerd: growing in spirals 🌱 It's almost a cliche at this point, to say that the most advanced dancers - the dancers with the deepest, most emobodied practice - are those who never stop practicing the basics, and approaching "beginner" technique with fresh curiosity. I've believed this for many years, and I do my best to train in this way as well as passing the wisdom on to my students... But a recent experience from outside of dance has given me some new insights on how this process works...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Raqs Nerd: building relationships with the music My last two newsletters have been all about deep listening, and tuning in to some of the subtle features that give music its capacity to create transcendent experiences... Today, I'm looking from another angle: how music weaves itself into the fabric of our lives - and why we dancers, in particular, need this to happen Since I started learning Egyptian Arabic, I've been watching (and making my long-suffering partner watch) a lot of Egyptian TV...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Raqs Nerd: wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff Time: it is fair to say I have a weird relationship with it. As a very neurodivergent person (definitely Autistic, probably ADHD), I experience what's known as "time blindness" - I tend to have very little inherent sense of time's passing. Even at the age of 37, slightly embarrasingly, I still will look at my watch, go off and quickly do something, then be horrified when I look at my watch again and it's not still the same time anymore as it was last...
2 months ago • 7 min read