October 2007 Archives

I'm so excited! 

I finally got around to dropping a line to Professor Amnon Shiloah, writer of Music in the World of Islam, a critical work in doing my period raqs research. In question was a reference to period works that detailed dance steps on page 27. To sum up, it wasn't the response I expected; the reference I recalled was off, but he did give me references to two works:

• His article 'Reflexions sur la danse artistique musulmane au moyen age' -- or, loosely translated, "Thoughts on Islamic Dance in the (European) Middle Ages. Yes, this promises to be about as cool as you'd might imagine. :) The full citation is:
  

  'Reflexions sur la danse artistique musulmane au moyen age'
  Cahiers de civilisation medievale, vol 5, 1962, pp 463-474

• David Wulstan's article 'Bring on the Dancing Girls', found in al-Masaq, Vol. 17, No. 2.  This article is, with a bit of work, available online; go to the Informaworld page for this article, register, and when you return to the page, you'll see you have 30 days of access for free!

So I have the latter work; it's not quite SCA-period, but it is interesting, including a unique attempt to reconstruct dance based primarily on music.  It's really more of a music article than a dance one...and it's also somewhat "oh la la".  There's some comments, some parts, that strike me as a little too much of the scholar going "ohhh, look at the hot chicks wiggling their hips!"  But I want to do another, deeper read of the work before I condemn it completely.

Anyway.  I'm doing an ILL for the first work today; it's also in the upcoming work Music and Its Virtues in Islamic and Judaic Writings, but it's not out yet, and it's over $100 smackers.  I, along with other dance researchers, should support such works -- I'll be damned if we don't need more, and more expansive, research -- yet that's a good bit of money, sadly.

Decisions, decisions...