When
Esraa Warda participated in a residency in Algeria earlier this year, she was
told she should not perform in the final show in the town of Taghit. A representative
from the
Algerian Ministry of Culture warned that her dancing might be “too
controversial for a public audience”, Warda said. Others told her she would not
be safe under the spotlights — that the crowd might throw things.
اضافة اعلان
Warda
specializes in dancing to raï, a popular, grassroots form of Algerian music,
historically associated with social protest. Movement is initiated by the feet,
hips swaying in quick, precise arcs from side to side with each step; the upper
body twists slightly, the arms light in the air.
Although raï
(pronounced rye) is an important part of Algerian culture — officials there are
recommending that it be added to
UNESCO’s World Heritage List — the genre’s
subversive messaging still means that some consider it distasteful. The same
applies to the accompanying dances, which are usually performed at private
gatherings.
Warda went ahead
and performed that night in Taghit, proving the Ministry of Culture wrong: Many
in the audience cheered her on, she said, dancing along with her. Even toning
down her movement for the occasion, “people went wild, people were passing
out”, she said. “It ended up being a rock ’n’ roll moment, even though I wasn’t
doing anything crazy.”
Elenna Canlas, a
keyboardist who played alongside Warda, said: “Everybody was watching with the
understanding that women don’t usually dance in the presence of men there. It
was profound that something as simple as dancing could be such a political
statement.”
As both an
artist and a teacher, Warda, who is Algerian American, takes the North African
dances she learned as a child and brings them to the stage and dance studio.
Highlighting the musicality and endurance that are required for these styles,
Warda shows they are legitimate art forms, with specific techniques that change
from one region and musical genre to the next.
Many of the
dances Warda performs involve movement of the hips. She is adamant, though,
that they are not to be confused with belly dancing — a technique with Egyptian
roots that is more lifted and with broader movements of the upper body and
arms.
“Because we’re
all lumped into the same category, we also get lumped into the same
stereotypes,” Warda said of Middle Eastern and North African dancers. “We’re
somehow these colonial objects of desire.”
Warda was
referring to the clichés of this region’s dance found in Western literature,
paintings and photographs. After the French invasion of Algeria in 1830
(Tunisia followed in 1881,
Morocco in 1907), an industry developed around
female dancers, with European photographers paying them to strike suggestive
poses that had nothing to do with their art.
They were used
to create a “phantasm of the Oriental female”, Malek Alloula writes in “The
Colonial Harem” (1981) — unskilled, uncultured, and sexually available.
I created a dance system and code along the way, based on my own references… based on what I’d learned dancing with my family.
This legacy of
exploitation surrounding dance remained even after Algeria won independence, in
1962, making it stigmatized in many circles. “My dancing is about trying to
overcome the reasons I’ve been told I shouldn’t dance, to overcome that
internalized shame a lot of women grow up with,” Warda said.
Although there
are some regional dance troupes, raï and hundreds of other dance styles are
considered part of everyday culture, used more to celebrate family occasions
than to promote a national heritage.
In Bay Ridge, a
neighborhood in the
New York City borough of Brooklyn, where Warda grew up, her
profession as a dance artist and educator receives mixed reactions from her
family’s Algerian-American community. “Some Algerians are like, ‘Are you
kidding?’” she said. “‘Is raï being taught in a dance class? That’s
ridiculous.’”
Warda, 29, did not
grow up believing she could perform and teach these dances, since no one else
was doing it at the time. Her father, who immigrated in the 1990s, worked as a
food vendor on 53rd Street and Lexington, and her mother was a caretaker; both
encouraged her to pursue traditional career paths. Yet, whenever she visited
family in Algeria, she spent time in her relatives’ living rooms, learning
dance styles through patient observation.
In her early
20s, Warda managed a traditional arts program for students at Arab-American
cultural centers. Hiring other artists got her thinking about the dances she
loved — and why they were not valued as an art form. She started teaching
workshops for free in Brooklyn.
“I created a
dance system and code along the way, based on my own references,” she said of
her teaching method, “based on what I’d learned dancing with my family.”
The largest
North African immigrant population is in France, but the concentration on
conservatory diplomas and certificates makes it difficult for those
specializing in regional North African styles to work in dance.
Raïssa Leï, who
is French Moroccan and directs the Kif-Kif Bledi company in Paris, said her
dancers cannot obtain the special artistic status that would allow them to
freelance, and they struggle to book studios and other spaces. She sees Warda’s
work in the United States as important for keeping “the chain of transmission”
going strong.
When Warda began
to teach, she sought out “chikhats”, or elders: North African female musicians
and dancers who have undergone extensive training. Traveling to Algeria,
Morocco, and France, she wanted to understand dance as these professionals did.
“It’s about
giving back,” Warda said. “These are people who spent their whole lives
dedicated to a tradition, spent 30, 40, 50 years under the leadership of
somebody else.”
By dancing with
chikhats — notably raï singer Cheikha Rabia, based in Paris — Warda is bringing
visibility to an aspect of traditional performance. Before the form became more
widespread in the 1980s, raï singers such as Cheikha Djenia and Cheikha Rimitti
would surround themselves with female dancers, who gave body to the rhythms of
the songs and expressed longing through movement.
For someone used
to watching Western styles, the raï dances and other North African styles might
seem monotonous. Yet, in their intricate foot patterns and unflagging
dedication to the rhythm — “simple, subtle things repeated consistently in
cyclical movements”, as Warda described them — they give expression to the
fight for survival and the solidarity needed to do so.
While bringing
North African dancing to a wider audience, Warda still returns to the living
room, pointing out that outsiders have underestimated the agency women find in
this practice. “The traditions are still very much propelling forward in these
private spaces — and they always will be,” she said.
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