Dirty Dancing in Egypt - Sabendo um pouco mais...
Autor: Lu Ain-Zaila | Publicado: 2014-05-14T09:50:00-03:00


Este artigo foi publicado no site e no jornal impresso e fala da dança oriental (Raks Sharki), o nome Dirty Dancing in Egypt, significa - Dança Suja no Egito - mas calma!!! não é assim não, a idéia do dirty tem a ver com dança não reconhecida ignorada/amada/odiada, aqui não é a tradução literal, pois quem lembra do filme Dirty Dancing - americano, o filme tratava de uma dança não aceita pela família da moça, então o contexto é este... 



O interessante é que ele é escrito pelo Alaa Al Aswany, o autor do romance "The Yacoubian Building", disponível em português, que aliás tem filme tb... e outros livros.



O prédio existe, mas nenhum personagem ou figura baseada mora lá, o escritor conhece o prédio e quis homenageá-lo, fica no centro do Cairo.



em 16/5/2014, disponibilizo a tradução aqui. 













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                    The Opinion Pages                        |                    Contributing Op-Ed Writer                            

Dirty Dancing in Egypt


MAY 13, 2014









CAIRO
 — Egyptians are currently suffering from a grinding economic crisis, 
hefty inflation, a breakdown of security and widespread terrorist 
attacks. Despite these trying times, the most watched clips on YouTube 
are of Oriental dance (as raqs sharqi is often translated).



In
 just one recent month, a video by the Egyptian-Armenian dancer Safinaz 
was viewed by Egyptians more than four million times. The Lebanese star 
Haifa Wehbe’s dance video got more than 10 million hits. Oriental dance evidently provides light relief from the general state of tension, but there is more to it.

Oriental
 dance has always been controversial in Egyptian culture. Egyptians love
 belly dancing, as it is commonly known in the West. Tahia Carioca, a legendary belly dancer,
 declared to the newspaper Al Hayat in 1994, “Go to any wedding party 
and once the music starts up, you’ll see all the girls in the family 
suddenly get to their feet and dance like crazy.”

But
 people do not hold Oriental dance in high regard because they equate 
its suggestiveness with vulgarity and loose living. To call someone the 
“son of a belly dancer” is an insult.

The
 tradition of disdaining Oriental dance has a long pedigree. In the 
“Description de l’Égypte,” written by French scholars following 
Napoleon’s invasion in 1798, dancers were described as “women with no 
training or decorum, and of their dance movements nothing more obscene 
can be imagined.”

That prospect seemed less troubling to the writer Gustave Flaubert, who toured Egypt in 1849-50 and was enchanted
 by a dancer named Kuchuk-Hanem (a Turkish name meaning “the little 
lady”). He admired her as “a tall creature, more pale of complexion than
 the Arabs.” The American writer George William Curtis, who visited 
Egypt at around the same time and also fell in love with her, described 
the dancer as “a bud no longer, yet a flower not too fully blown.”

So what is the secret of this mythical allure? The Palestinian-American
 academic and author of “Orientalism” Edward Said, writing in Al Hayat, 
contrasted Western ballet, which “is all about elevation, lightness, the
 defiance of the body’s weight,” with Eastern dance, which “shows the 
dancer planting herself more and more solidly in the earth, digging into
 it almost.” He noted how the latter suggested “a sequence of horizontal
 pleasures,” but “also paradoxically conveyed the kind of elusiveness 
and grace that cannot be pinned down on a flat surface.”

One
 suspects that few fans are so finely attuned to the aesthetic 
considerations, but is Oriental dance more than mere titillation?

Andrea
 Deagon, an associate professor of classics at the University of North 
Carolina, Wilmington, has practiced Oriental dance since she was 17. 
Oriental dance is liberating for women, Dr. Deagon argues: a form of 
self-expression in movement that voices what is, in Egyptian society, an
 otherwise unutterable truth about the pleasures of the body. And it is 
because Oriental dance poses a challenge to a religiosity that sees any 
form of display as an act of impurity that it has always been 
misunderstood and associated with dishonor.

That
 is precisely what makes it a subversive art: The dancer who shakes off 
the shackles of the patriarchal order strikes fear into the hearts of 
religious conservatives, and may even pose a threat to tyranny. Hence 
its periodic repression.




In
 1834, Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad Ali, took steps to preserve, as he saw 
it, Egypt’s morals by ordering the arrest and exile to Upper Egypt of 
all belly dancers and prostitutes. He also imposed a punishment of 50 
lashes on any woman who danced in the street.

In
 the 1960s, under the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the government 
department responsible for supervision and censorship of the arts 
ordered that “Oriental dance is not permitted to show the following: 
lying on the back, lying on the ground in a vulgar fashion so as to 
excite, or making rapid movements in such a way as to cause excitement. 
The thighs are not to be fully open while on the ground. There are to be
 no wobbling up and down movements.” The dancers must have had a good 
laugh when they heard of the regulations, which, impossible to adhere 
to, would have entailed a career change.

The
 Nasserite state made great efforts to preserve Oriental dance as a 
sanitized form of folklore, removing it from the realm of the sensual. 
In 1961, Nasser placed the Reda Dance Troupe under the auspices of the 
Ministry of Culture. The Troupe, which included the aristocratic Farida 
Fahmy, danced all over the world, winning medals and prizes, but 
Egyptians — for all their admiration of the Reda Troupe — still clung to
 the earthier Oriental dance they knew and loved.

Even
 today, Oriental dance may be performed in Egypt only with a government 
permit. An officer of the “morality police” can arrest a dancer for 
wearing a costume that shows more of her body than the law allows, or 
because she has danced in a manner deemed too provocative.

A
 certain hypocrisy pertains. While the government has cracked down on 
dancers in the name of public morality, it has not hesitated to use them
 for its own political purposes. After the 1973 war between Egypt and 
Israel, the American secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, was engaged
 in the “shuttle diplomacy” that eventually led to the 1979 Camp David 
Accords. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry was always sure to book Mr. 
Kissinger’s favorite dancer, Nagwa Fouad, for a private performance 
during his stays in Cairo.

Just
 as the Egyptian state has double standards when dealing with Oriental 
dance, so does the rest of society. The conservative Egyptian who looks 
down on dancers has no problem buying a costume for his wife so that she
 can dance for him. Provided belly dancing takes place within a conjugal
 setting, he considers such behavior licit.

Will
 Egyptians’ attitudes toward dancers ever change? They have more 
pressing concerns for the moment: bringing about democracy, electing a 
government that respects human rights and providing a decent living for 
the millions living in poverty. But I look forward to a new Egypt where 
belly dancing will have evolved into an art form, without the 
connotations of immoral conduct that still surround it today.

In
 a real democracy, there is a place for every citizen, belly dancers 
included. Until then, Egyptians are sure to continue to be enthusiastic 
consumers of Oriental dance — but with scant respect for the dancers.



 Alaa Al Aswany 
 is the author of the novel “The Yacoubian Building” and other books. 
This article was translated by Russell Harris from the Arabic.&nbsp;