Hello friends and fiends! August - windy, foggy, and cold in the pretty little patch of earth I call home - often feels separate from the brutal heat so much of the rest of the northern hemisphere is sweltering in. I don’t take it for granted (she says, putting on another sweater).

I’ve been thinking a lot, and again, about the words we use to describe what we do in dance, and how challenging it can sometimes be. They are slippery and ever-changing, especially as we change, especially for those of us who didn’t grow up in the dances we do or the music we make.

I am generally against codification of naming movements in people’s dance forms, sometimes called folk, traditional, vernacular, or (shudder) ethnic. This is especially true for terminology that comes from outside the places or cultures they come from. I learned early on in my training to embrace the chaos. When I started, half the time the time I was taking classes in languages I didn’t fully know (and that still happens - dialects and languages abound even in places we might at first think are one kind of thing!), so my English-speaking teachers telling me there was no name for a movement and to follow along and figure it out didn’t feel like a big deal. A name? Pfft. I wanted to know the effort it took to do a step, what music it went with and why, how it felt in my teacher’s body, how it felt in an artist’s body, how it felt in my body, how it felt when done fast and how it felt done slow, how it might look and feel different when done to a different song or instrument, or to a voice, or when done in another village or region or place or time. I wanted to go beyond thinking of anything as a ‘step’ and know it in its context.

Sidebar: One time after a show in New York, someone approached me to very kindly share that they had enjoyed my dance performance. “You know so many steps!” they said, and while it was meant with, and taken with, kindness, it was a little crushing in how disconnected it was to what I feel I am doing when I dance! Thank you kind stranger for taking the time to be nice. And still, while dancing is basically just purposely shifting your weight around, I don’t think of dancing as being a series of steps.

When teaching, I of course use terms for movements when I need to, and I try to make them relative to shapes or other movements (circle, lift, grasp, bend, push) rather than an essentialized phrase (egyptian walk? um, okay the bangles!). I often mention that in other classes people might learn the same things with a teacher using different names, and that is okay. It can be frustrating for learners, who sometimes want to know that they are indeed learning, or that there are certain steps to master to get to the next level. I get that, but it’s not what I have to offer or how I see these dances and songs.

Working with dance is a spiral we move in and out of as we grow and change more than it is a linear path.

I love knowing the names of things - instruments, songs, rhythms - and I often ask others what they call things, but I’ve learned to know that every answer is never the only answer.

Teaching again last month felt so good. People came! And I think we had a good time! I’m very glad to be doing this class, here, now, and with the people who were and will be in the room. I’m glad it’s monthly so I can stretch out and prepare in between in the way I need to and want to.

Next class is August 8. Read on for details about that, upcoming events, and some inspirational peeps, reads, and songs.

xo - Monica

Classes

Monthlies with Monica
Mediterranean Movement
Second Saturdays

Danzhaus
1275 Connecticut Street
San Francisco
(Plentiful street parking, near the 19 and 48 MUNI lines, and bikes are welcome in the studio, though it is up one flight of stairs)

Next class Saturday, August 8 - Register here

Events

Gruppo Pizzicato
Live Italian music at Vino Rosso
629 Cortland, San Francisco
Sunday, August 9
5 - 7pm, heated and outdoors
Free, with yummy food options

Gilded Raqs Belly Dance Festival
San Jose
Sunday, September 13
I’ll be dancing a solo piece in the 3:00pm hour.

More events are on the calendar

Reads

I woke up this morning and wrote about the Cottonwood trees in the Sonora desert.

I’m rereading Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, and it is life changing, yet again. It’s a little slow to read as I keep going back to savor passages, and also because I keep filling my notebook with terms and ideas I want to think about more.

Finally got my copy of Molly Crabapple’s Where We Live Is Our Country out of the library. Can’t wait to dive in.

Majda Anwar wrote a really nice piece about studying with Nagham Ibrahim, an Egyptian Ghawazee dancer and teacher with a long lineage behind her, for her publication Raqs News. I have studied this style with Khairiya Mazen, and would love to take class with Nagham one day.

Listens

I am enamored with the new album from the band Nuhara. Reading an interview with them, I learned that one of the members, who by chance I met briefly in Palermo many years ago, learned that his grandfather was recorded by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax back in the 1950s. When he asked his grandpa about it, he said, ‘but I wasn’t singing - I was working!’ Inspired, he hooked up with an electronic musician and singer, and they took these old Sicilian work songs and reimagined them (including his grandpa’s song!). It is so powerful and good and deep, and something that connects the past, present, and future in a special way. The feeling of continuity of these songs, and of the Sicilian people owning them (something Alan Lomax was clear about in all his recordings, and that his daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, continues to live by) and their being able to relisten and then reuse and make and BE them, is beautiful. It’s also just good listening.

Highly highly recommended. You can find it here (and please buy the album if you like it so the artists get paid for their work).

“The Association Of Cultural Equity, which Lomax founded in 1983 and of which Wood was then president, had begun a long-term mission in 2004 to return Lomax’s recordings from across the world to the places – and if they were still alive, the actual people – that they had come from. “This music is an important part of their history. For people in oral traditions, it may be one of the only things they have left,” Wood tells me over the phone. “It’s theirs, by right.”

The Sicilians, Wood says, received the material with particular enthusiasm and a desire to share it further. “If someone wanted the recordings, they didn’t go through this bureaucratic thing like an archive or library or institution. ‘Would you fill out this form, and then pay us, and then we’ll approve your request, blah blah blah.’ They just immediately sent them out to the villages.” 

Cool peeps doing cool things

Jennifer Barone, poet, has a new book out called Sirenland. It is an evocative, lush tome about her own roots in Naples. I have long been a little obsessed with nymphs, sirens, mermaids, gorgons, and other creatures that are a mix of scary beautiful monster femme weirdness, and this book is an exploration of those themes through the lens of an artist thinking about their relationship with a place and their family.

Nour Bouhassoun, a gifted local singer you may have been lucky to hear if you’ve ever been to an Aswat concert, has a project called Arab Women’s Lit. Follow her for some special titles and writers you may not hear about elsewhere.

July 25 was Antifascist Pasta Day. A small collective of people and designers put together this great informational booklet about it. I found out too late that there was a gathering in Oakland. Let’s go next year if they do it again - and maybe dance and make music!

Thank you to Dore Stein of Tangents Radio on KALW (I’m a member!) for the tickets to see Ukrainian band Dakhabrakha outside in an east bay watershed. I hadn’t seen them in many years, and they were wonderful.

Thanks for reading, and as always, I’d love to hear what you are up to. Thanks to those who leave a comment on this newsletter page or reply. It means a lot to me to stay in touch off of social media.

M.