Author : A. Shay
Publisher : Springer
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 35,73 MB
Release : 2014-07-10
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1137432381
Examining performers from the ancient Mediterranean world to the modern Islamic Middle East, including India and Pakistan, Shay explores the careers, artistic performances, and legacies of these individuals who were forced to produce entertainment and art for, and have sex with, any and all patrons.
Author : Acting Assistant Professor of Dance Christine M Şahin
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 48,91 MB
Release : 2024
Category : History
ISBN : 0197613624
"Core Connections: Cairo Belly Dance in the Revolution's Aftermath investigates local, intra-Middle Eastern, and global circulations of belly dance centered within Cairo, Egypt, in the tumultuous aftermath of the Jan. 25th, 2011 revolution. This multi-sited ethnography takes audiences on a taxi ride that viscerally moves through contemporary city-circuitries of dance venues and stories from the Nile cruising tourist boats and decadent five-star hotels to smoky late-night discos and Pyramid Street cabarets. While mapping the multiple maneuverings of Cairene dancers and non-dancers alike, this book centralizes Cairene dancers embodied political insight while fleshing out nuanced portraits of their lives and stories amidst ongoing political precarity. In addition to interweaving Dance and Middle Eastern Gender Studies, this book innovatively 'does' and writes ethnography. This book's ethnographic approach embodies the dance itself via attending to the dual meanings of moving; centralizing mobility and movement as sites of power and knowledge, but also in researching and writing in ways that move emotionally, stirring up poignant affect that leads to physical reaction, change, and connection. In other words, this ethnography aims to center the same aesthetics and values of Cairo belly dancing, to 'move' with greater feeling to cultivate richer core connections within ourselves, between one another, and within our city-spaces. In doing so, this book stakes a claim for listening to the subtleties of otherwise marginalized bodily interaction, exchange, and wisdom as rippling with potential for stepping into more revolutionary realities and relationships. Core Connections: Cairo Belly Dance in the Revolution's Aftermath investigates local, intra-Middle Eastern, and global circulations of belly dance centered within Cairo, Egypt. This ethnography takes audiences on a taxi ride that viscerally moves through contemporary dance venues from the Nile cruising tourist boats and decadent five-star hotels to smoky late-night discos and Pyramid Street cabarets"--
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 15,77 MB
Release : 2023-11-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0755647416
What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.
Author : Vida L. Midgelow
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 833 pages
File Size : 14,15 MB
Release : 2019-02-21
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0199397007
From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.
Author : GJ Breyley
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 14,98 MB
Release : 2015-11-19
Category : History
ISBN : 1317336801
The word motreb finds its roots in the Arabic verb taraba, meaning ‘to make happy.’ Originally denoting all musicians in Iran, motrebi came to be associated, pejoratively, with the cheerful vulgarity of the lowbrow entertainer. In Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment, GJ Breyley and Sasan Fatemi examine the historically overlooked motrebi milieu, with its marginalized characters, from luti to gardan koloft and mashti, as well as the tenacity of motreb who continued their careers against all odds. They then turn to losanjelesi, the most pervasive form of Iranian popular music that developed as motrebi declined, and related musical forms in Iran and its diasporic popular cultural centre, Los Angeles. For the first time in English, the book makes available musical transcriptions, analysis and lyrics that illustrate the complexities of this history. As it presents the findings of the authors’ years of ethnographic work with the history’s protagonists, from senior motreb to pop-rock stars, the book reveals parallels between the decline of motrebi and the rise of ‘modernity.’ In the twentieth century, the fate of Tehran’s motrebi music was shaped by the social and urban polarization that ensued from the modern market economy, and losanjelesi would be similarly affected by transnational relations, revolution, war and migration. Through its detailed and informed examination of Iranian popular music, this study reveals much about the values and anxieties of Iranian society, and is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Iranian society and history.
Author : Parisa Vaziri
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 38,40 MB
Release : 2023-12-26
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1452970203
Rethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Author : Barbara Sellers-Young
Publisher : Springer
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 35,16 MB
Release : 2016-11-07
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 134994954X
This book examines the globalization of belly dance and the distinct dancing communities that have evolved from it. The history of belly dance has taken place within the global flow of sojourners, immigrants, entrepreneurs, and tourists from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. In some cases, the dance is transferred to new communities within the gender normative structure of its original location in North Africa and the Middle East. Belly dance also has become part of popular culture’s Orientalist infused discourse. The consequence of this discourse has been a global revision of the solo dances of North Africa and the Middle East into new genres that are still part of the larger belly dance community but are distinct in form and meaning from the dance as practiced within communities in North Africa and the Middle East.
Author : Anthony Shay
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 1307 pages
File Size : 42,30 MB
Release : 2016-04-20
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0190493933
Dance intersects with ethnicity in a powerful variety of ways and at a broad set of venues. Dance practices and attitudes about ethnicity have sometimes been the source of outright discord, as when African Americans were - and sometimes still are - told that their bodies are 'not right' for ballet, when Anglo Americans painted their faces black to perform in minstrel shows, when 19th century Christian missionaries banned the performance of particular native dance traditions throughout much of Polynesia, and when the Spanish conquistadors and church officials banned sacred Aztec dance rituals. More recently, dance performances became a locus of ethnic disunity in the former Yugoslavia as the Serbs of Bosnia attended dance concerts but only applauded for the Serbian dances, presaging the violent disintegration of that failed state. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity. Newly-commissioned for the volume, the chapters of the book place a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine the role of dance as performed embodiment of the historical moments and associated lived identities. In bringing modern dance and ballet into the conversation alongside forms more often considered ethnic, the chapters ask the reader to contemplate previous categories of folk, ethnic, classical, and modern. From this standpoint, the book considers how dance maintains, challenges, resists or in some cases evolves new forms of identity based on prior categories. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to acknowledge the depth of research that has been undertaken and to promote continued research and conceptualization of dance and its role in the creation of ethnicity. Dance and ethnicity is an increasingly active area of scholarly inquiry in dance studies and ethnomusicology alike and the need is great for serious scholarship to shape the contours of these debates. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity provides an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research from leading experts which will set the tone for future scholarly conversation.
Author : Babak Rahimi
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 10,1 MB
Release : 2021-08-26
Category : History
ISBN : 0755635124
The result of collaborative research from noteworthy dramatists and scholars, this volume investigates the dynamic relationship between culture, performance and theatre in Iran. The studies gathered here examine how various forms of performances, especially theatre, have and continue to undergo change in response to shifting political and social settings from the antiquity to the present day. The analysis in this book focuses on performance practices, examining drama, texts, rituals, plays, music, cinema and drama technologies. This is done in order to show how Iran has been imagined through enactments and representations, and reproduced through these performative actions. The book uses a wider definition of the concept of 'performance', offering analysis of a wide range of phenomena, including indigenous rituals – such as the naqqali and taziyeh – and online performances by diaspora communities.
Author : Tina Bucuvalas
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 531 pages
File Size : 20,93 MB
Release : 2018-11-26
Category : Music
ISBN : 1496819721
Winner of the 2019 Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek Studies Contributions by Tina Bucuvalas, Anna Caraveli, Aydin Chaloupka, Sotirios (Sam) Chianis, Frank Desby, Stavros K. Frangos, Stathis Gauntlett, Joseph G. Graziosi, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Michael G. Kaloyanides, Panayotis League, Roderick Conway Morris, National Endowment for the Arts/National Heritage Fellows, Nick Pappas, Meletios Pouliopoulos, Anthony Shay, David Soffa, Dick Spottswood, Jim Stoynoff, and Anna Lomax Wood Despite a substantial artistic legacy, there has never been a book devoted to Greek music in America until now. Those seeking to learn about this vibrant and exciting music were forced to seek out individual essays, often published in obscure or ephemeral sources. This volume provides a singular platform for understanding the scope, practice, and development of Greek music in America through essays and profiles written by principal scholars in the field. Greece developed a rich variety of traditional, popular, and art music that diasporic Greeks brought with them to America. In Greek American communities, music was and continues to be an essential component of most social activities. Music links the past to the present, the distant to the near, and bonds the community with an embrace of memories and narrative. From 1896 to 1942, more than a thousand Greek recordings in many genres were made in the United States, and thousands more have appeared since then. These encompass not only Greek traditional music from all regions, but also emerging urban genres, stylistic changes, and new songs of social commentary. Greek Music in America includes essays on all of these topics as well as history and genre, places and venues, the recording business, and profiles of individual musicians. This book is required reading for anyone who cares about Greek music in America, whether scholar, fan, or performer.
