New Dancer Tips: Vintage Music for Practice and Performance

A snap from the famous Cairo nightclub Casino Badia, opened in the 1920s Badia Masabni, a “godmother” of Egyptian raqs sharqi or Oriental dance. All the dancers performed to live music and Badia nurtured musical taeltn such as Farid Al Atrache, Read more on Egyptian Streets!

Nearly a century ago, Lebanese-American artist and writer Kahlil Gibran wrote a beautiful short story, “The Dancer” that contains the line: “The philosopher soul dwells within his head, the poets soul dwells within his heart, the singers soul dwells about his throat, but the soul of the dancer abides in all her body.”

A dancer makes music physical poetry in motion. There are many different musical styles and traditions across the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean that a dancer may use, including ancient, vintage (in the last century) and modern flavors. How a dancer interprets music is a mix of understanding of culture, their dance style and the audience.

A good Middle Eastern or belly dancer will have a wide range of exposure to many types of music and be able to successfully and appropriately interpret them and add their own pizzaz to it—all while improvising a performance.

So what should a newbie belly dancer or someone interested in Middle Eastern dance do to get started?

Like everything else, music evolves and changes over time, and with it, how dancers interpret and perform to it. Understanding how music has evolved and to identify some classics (new and old), can help a dancer interpret music more effectively.

I highlighted a few key examples of famous musicians, musical pieces, and dancers who interpret music in wildly different and equally compelling ways, but by no means is it exhaustive.

It is meant to inspire you to fall further into the rabbit hole and listen to more music, seek out live music venues, follow new musicians, and experiment with dancing to new beats.

Middle Eastern Musical Evolutions in a Nutshell

1. An oldie but goodie, SUNY ethnomusicologist Sotirios Chianis directed a short video from the 1968s (you can tell by the fierce cat eye on the announcer) introducing different important epochs and musical instruments with short musical examples from the Middle East. Do you recognize any of them from music you dance to?

2. Ever wondered what a beatboxing tour of a hundred years of Arabic music sounds like? Look no further. Alaa Wardi has got you. If you can recognize at least 50% of the sounds, you get a gold star. If not, don’t worry, you’ll be introduced to a few further on!

3. An enjoyable podcast trek through Middle Eastern pop music history of 30 albums in 30 years, courtesy of Jay Sweet. Provides a glimpse into how politics and social changes became reflected in the music. Many of these songs will become banner standards for dancers.

Very Old Music to Dance To (pre-1900)

Although we have much less preserved from music that predates 1900, there are some pieces that have withstood the test of time.

One of them is Lamma Bada Yatathana, a 14th century Andalusian poem set to music from Islamic poetry tradition. This is the one song that will get people from Spain to Egpyt to Turkey swaying along. And it’s 800+ years old. The poem title roughly translates to “How She Ways” about the curves of a woman’s body as she walk. It is sung in such an old Arabic dialect, it is not well understood by modern Arabic speakers (like medieval English lyrics are not well understood by today’s English speakers).

It even uses a rhythm that is rare today, 10/8 or samai and is often danced in a “fantasy” style of Andalusian dance, meaning it is reconstructed with some historical source materials but many educated guesses are made as to how the dance was actually conducted since we don’t have any TikTok videos from 1345 to reference.

First, listen to the music and the lyrics:

Now, see two different musical and dance interpretations of the song, the first choreographed by Egyptian dancer Mohamed Shahin for a duet by Jurga and Salma and the second improvised with a live band by Michelle Sorensen:

Stay tuned for part II!