Núria Rovira Salat
ORIENTAL DANCE GYPSY DANCE SINGER AUTHOR/PERFORMER
FOR A HUMAN DANCE...
Dance was born from human functional gestures, all peoples of humanity have included dance in their panoply of customs, successively and simultaneously fulfilling several social functions: From primitive witchcraft to sacred dance, passing through ritual dances and popular recreational dances, nowadays, dance is increasingly losing this vital, spontaneous and natural dimension, gradually disappearing from the gestures of daily life and becoming an exceptional, almost mythical activity...
Too often, oriental dance has contributed to perpetuating this myth of the "priestess-dancer", goddess of fairy tales and the Arabian Nights... but does she not in reality come from more natural, social or intimate needs? So, let us try to give back to dance, and in particular to oriental dance, its cultural, group, recreational, cosmic, and above all human dimension.
...LESS ORIENTALIST
Oriental dance, as it appeared in the West, through American films of the 1940s and through the fabulous tales of romantic Western travelers, has become an exoticism. But does this cliché correspond to the reality of dance in the Arab world? Let us also specify that the term "oriental dance" could only have been created in relation to the West and for Westerners. Oriental dance is not a traditional dance, it has "westernized" in a way the Egyptian dance by replacing the popular spirit with the spirit of cabaret, with all the pros and cons that this implies. Very often, dance has become superficial, formal, and "dancing well" is synonymous with technical complexity, stylized form, glitter... But if we go through tradition to understand the oriental movement, the dance takes on another dimension, we pay homage to a heritage increasingly forgotten because of artifice. One can practice oriental dance without being interested in the traditional dances of the Arab world... but what a shame! A less orientalist dance implies a return to the sources, to understand the color, the body and the spirit in Arabic dances.
...FOR A CONTEMPORARY RE-READING OF TRADITION
When we talk about returning to our roots, it is not about superficially imitating folklore or dances linked to a context that is certainly not ours, bordering on pathos, but about making a new reading of it adapted to our life, our soul and our work. A more personal, creative and original dance, and at the same time respectful of the heritage and in an approach of sincerity. It is about not distorting the spirit of the dance, out of respect for an ancestral culture and offering, on stage, a more authentic artistic quality giving rise to a personal interpretation and a contemporary reinterpretation.
We can therefore remain contemporary by starting from the principles of tradition: The body is inhabited, centered on its axis, without artifice. It is global and no longer expresses itself in isolated parts, artistic quality is based on the art of "knowing how to be" before "knowing how to do". The gesture is simple, raw, but powerful; the expression sincere, which implies that the dancer is not obliged to always be smiling in her art, thus moving away from the principle of the woman-object. Dance is not a succession of movements but a succession of states which give rise to an organic dance, most of the time improvised and listening to the body.
The challenge in this consumerist and image-driven society for a new oriental dance is to re-educate the public through a more human, less orientalist, and more authentic gesture. Whether for Arabic or amazigh dance or for the Gypsy dances of the Balkans, this is the spirit and approach that I advocate both in my professional practice and in my teaching.