What is Oriental Dance?
The Oriental Dances includes a whole lot of different dance styles. The dances differs from one country to another, but there are also different folkloric dances in different parts of one country.
Most known is the style of Belly Dance. The most characteritic movements are the isolation of movements in hips, chest, shoulders or head as well as fluid movements and a "shimmy" shake in hips or shoulders.
To show the variety of the styles, a performance often contains classic oriental dance with gracious movements, a drum solo - darbouka solo - with sharp and exact movements as well as a folkloric dance like saidi.
Where does the Oriental dance come from?
There are many theories about the origin of Oriental Dance. Many agree that dance and movement appeared before the spoken word and has through history been used for creating a link between the divine and life on earth.
Egypt is often mentioned as the origin of the dance, with the decorations showing dance scenes inside the pyramids as a proof. But the pyramids weren’t built until the third dynasty, approximately 2680-2150 BCE. Thousands of years earlier there are archeological findings of civilisations in Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia/Turkey, aprox. 9500 BCE, and later the blooming culture of Mesopotamia, todays Iraq, around 3000 BCE. There are clear evidence of cultural exchange between these regions, in case of religion as well as games. Therefore, it’s hard to imagine dances not to have influenced each other.
These cultural exchanges, together with migrations, has melted together to what we today call Raqs al Sharqi – The dance of the East.
During the Romanticism, Europe started to take note of the eastern literature and a curiosity around this – in the eyes of the westerners – exotic world awakened. When the oriental dance appeared on stage during Chicago World Fair at the end of the 19th century, the idea of this folk dance was changed dramatically. The dance costume was transformed into a two piece costume to show the belly and the name changed into “belly dance”. The dance got influenced by ballet to be able to be put on stage and props like the veil was added for a feeling of mystique. Dancers in North Africa and South West Asia adapted the new dance fashion to meet the expectations of the western tourists and the styles was crossed and mixed. That’s why it’s hard to mention one specific place as the origin of the Oriental dance.
What does Oriental dance look like?
There are many different styles of dances from the Middle East. In Western countries the most well known might be belly dance. Here's an example of Maria performing an oriental piece at a festival in Uppsala, September 2015.
Choreography by Aziza (CAN).