Orientalism has come back into favour these past few years, and with it a growing number of women in search of a full-body workout are turning to oriental dance, or “Sharqi dance.” A centuries-old discipline, it builds suppleness, grace and muscle tone while helping to shed stress.
Where does oriental dance come from?
The dance is thought to trace back to ancient fertility rituals. It took shape above all in Egypt in the 10th century, with the arrival of a population from India. Historians tell of the time of the pharaohs, when sacred priestesses spun their bodies and rippled their bellies so that the goddess of love and fertility would come to dwell in them. From the very start, its history places this dance in a register at once erotic and sacred. In 1926 the first cabaret opened in Cairo with oriental dance shows — the starting point of a bodily art of precise gestures that went on to spread across the Arab world. Later, oriental dance was by turns adored, disowned, even banned in some countries, including the ones where it was born, because it lifts the veil on the taboo and the sacred. The French discovered it in Bonaparte's day, when the soldiers came home from Egypt; read then as an invitation to prostitution, it met with heavy prejudice in the West.
What kinds of oriental dance are there?
Oriental dance covers many variants and folk forms: the learned, noble style known as sharqi; a more popular style called baladi or saïdi; and the Greek tsifteteli — originally a men's war dance taken up by women, marked by the use of canes and leg jumps. These styles are far from covering everything called oriental dance, which takes in a host of more or less local forms, among them the gypsy dances of Egypt. This age-old dance seems shared, give or take a few differences, by all the peoples of Asia, Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean basin.
How is oriental dance practised?
A way of speaking emotion, this art brings femininity, vitality and grace into play. Broadly, it rests on isolating the parts of the body, which move independently of one another, on rhythms that are by turns sharp and broken, slow and flowing. The dancer can work with a veil, sometimes two, the wings of Isis (a pleated veil), a cane (the saadi dance, a parody of the men's stick dance), a melaya leff (a large embroidered cloth trimmed with sequins), sagattes or a shamadan (a candelabrum worn on the head).
The pelvis is not the only thing in motion — the whole body is. The dancer needs suppleness in the chest, the shoulders, the arms and the hands. The thighs work, the joints loosen, the abdominals strengthen. Some of the wider movements call for a very supple back, but what matters most is muscular contraction, which is why this dance can be taken up at any age, within the limits of each dancer, woman or man.
