Thread: Classical/Retro/Old School/Golden Era help

Hello,

I'm having an interesting problem: I'm doing searches all over to read more on the above styles, but it seems that what defines the above stylings seem to vary wildly from one place to the other. Is there a way to differentiate between classical, retro, old school, and golden era or are these terms that overlap? And if they overlap, is there some way to tell when it is more appropriate to use one term over the other? (Also, if you have visual example of what is meant by each of those terms, either pics or video, that would be awesome).

Maybe I'm just hopelessly confused, but it seems to me that some terms have common ways of being used interchangeably, which makes differentiating more difficult. (Ex: Samia and Tahia being referred to a "classical dancers" and being from the Golden Era. Dancers with more balletic movements vocabularies being defined as classical, but not necessarily from the golden era etc...)

Your help is appreciated!

Except for 'golden era' I don't think any of those terms are specific enough to define. Retro and Old School could mean ANYTHING from the past -- the original Tribal style, or 60's American style, or 70's Turkish, or or or

I generally think of Golden Era dancers when I hear 'classical' but I don't really like that term because it's pretty well-defined in dance/music to mean something completely different from bellydance.

There's considered to be more than one Golden Age(Vintage) I found out from Yasmina of Cairo when she penned her last item for our magazine. I'd asked her to write about what happened to the Golden Age dancers meaning Samia,Tahia, Naima et al and she said "Which Golden Age?"!!!!!!! So I settled on the first.
I would imagine that all "ages",fashions,movements change and development as a reaction to each other. Comapre Fifi and Nagwa( another Golden Age surely) to the Golden Age dancers and they are much earthier but also more intimate in many cases. The demands of the venue. let's face it we mainly see the Golden Age dancers in the context of film roles and big stages.
We see Suheir,Fifi,Nagwa live as well.
Interesting ,meeting Eman Zaki and attending a Samia workshop with her. She and Hoda danced the same style and inspired by their mother who was a contemporary of Samia so they were probably out of step.
You got undoubted glamorous sexuality of Mona and Hannan in their chiffon and fringe.
We've got foreign dancers like Yasmina,Liza,Samasen,Soraya,Nour and Asmahan adopting the culture and injecting some of their own..all in a modern era
Jump to Randa and I see a real athleticism there reflecting tody's woman of a different sort but still at times balletic and graceful..always powerful as were her predecessors. I think each dancer who breaks a mould still carries something of the previous "era" with them. But there's a different element now surely in that the well known dancers travel the world and are better known abroad and is working to please a foreign audience (of belly dancer at times).
Camelia is very keen on stressing the "Oriental"ness of the dance and although she is very much a modern gal there's a lovely vintage/Classical feel to her.
Oh and this is me and my observation..please don't think it's any more than my simplistic run-down.
Having just endeavoured to represent the vintage/classical era in Caroline's show..I confess to a great fondness for it and admiration for that element of Camelia..Yeah.....
And being rather vintage myself....

"Golden Age" is a nebulous term. Generally speaking, it refers to a group of artists (singers, dancers, musicians), centered in Egypt in the middle of the 20th Century. Depending on who is asked, you might hear that the "Golden Age" ran from the 1920s when Umm Kalthoum's popularity started to take off through the period right before the nationalization of Studio Misr in 1966, but others would be content to go past that milestone, and keep skidding through Abdel Halim Hafez's death in 1977, and into the early 1980s. I know it looks like I'm talking about everything but dance, but things were all happening at the same time and feeding off each other. It was a time when amazing music was being composed, performed, sung, and danced to by phenomenal artists. Much of what dancers think of as "Golden Age" were those performances in movies to songs made famous by the big four musicians. (Most of the footage we have from that era is from movies. The dance action was happening primarily in the nightclubs, but it just wasn't recorded as often.)

When dancers talk about "classical" style, they're referring to that blob of incredible cultural activity in the mid-20th Century. (If you are talking to an academically trained musician, they might argue that "classical" goes farther back to a period when the maqamat were being codified, but that's another issue.) The terms "retro" and "old school" are a bit more sloppy. They might refer to "Mid-20th Century Classical" or "Golden Age," but just like in Western culture, they can also refer to anything that used to be considered stylish, isn't anymore, and people remember it fondly, like fringe-monster costumes and Dina's very dated-looking big hair and girls-just-want-to-have-fun froofy costumes from the early 1990s.

Here are a few links to confuse you further...
http://www.bhuz.com/forum/belly-danc...ne-please.html
http://www.bhuz.com/forum/music-trad...films-you.html
Bellydance pictures, listen to oriental dance music and middle eastern music

"Old school" I have heard most typically, if not exclusively, in reference to American dance. I'm not saying that's all it refers to, as obviously that's not the case. But when I have heard this term used it is usually referring to the classic Arabic-Turkish-Greek club style of America, mostly from the 1960s and '70s - that type of movement, the seven-part routine, the props used, the hip-poufs and so on. So for example, when a teacher tells me that the next move in the choreography is "old school" I know she means classic "American cabaret"; or if I'm told a dancer was dressed in "old school" style, I expect a coin bedlah and chiffon circle skirt, or something to that order. However, "retro" I have heard used more broadly, and take it to mean different things depending on the context. It could mean "old school Am. cabaret", it could mean Golden Age- stars-of-Casino-Opera, it could mean a 1980s-style long fringed Cairo costume. It's a pretty loose term, and I don't think it has one denotation in the English MED vernacular. I think it's just used various ways per its regular dictionary definition.

The term "Golden Era" I know as the most common term for the Egyptian style typified in the film performances of dancers in the 1940s and '50s, roughly. However, like Tourbeau said, I think some people use the term more broadly, and not just to apply to dance. The thing is that the 40s and 50s were not really a Golden Age for dance in any particular way; but that time and the decades surrounding it were definitely a gilded era for Egyptian music at least. You could argue that in terms of dance, the 70s or 80s should be labeled the Golden Age. This was when the Cairo dance scene was really on fire, with dancers playing packed houses every night of the week, supporting enormous orchestras, and always commissioning new music and choreography and opening new shows. So, I think you could argue convincingly in multiple directions about what dates to set as bookends to the "Golden Age". But the point for this thread is that most people mean the dancers captured on Egyptian film in the 40s and 50s.

"Classical" I'm not sure about. I don't know that I've ever heard it stand on its own, if I've ever heard it at all. Usually I hear "classic", whithout the -al, and then its meaning can only be determined from the context (e.g. classic Fifi, classic Turkish). You've kind of stumped me here because I just don't hear the term much and it's usually paired with something that makes its meaning clear. I can't think of having heard it used to refer to the Golden Age dance, but evidently others have. "Classical" music, now, is somethin' different, and I think the definition of that is pretty well agreed upon and widely used.

Part II:

This is just my lexicographic two cents! Confusion is easy here, since people do use these terms to mean lots of different things, use the same word for two different things, three different words for one thing, and so on. I'm interested to hear what more people have to say.

Thanks ladies, that helps!

Liza: ok, I guess I can add "vintage" to my list now... LOL

FYI-The CD Golden Era of Belly Dance Vol. 1 states the Golden Era was 1940's through 1970's.

I agree however that there were 2 Golden Eras The first with Tahia, Samia Gamal etc. The second with Fifi, Suheir and Nagwa etc.