Thread: Funoon Al Jazeera El Arabiya

A big name for what was a big project!

Nawarra who is based in the UK asked me last year if I would be interested in joining her in a new venture to re-visit folkloric styles from across the Middle East and North Africa as part of a big project.

The aim was to bring dancers together for a performance which reminded people of the roots of bellydance where and Tribal styles sprung from. Folkloric as a style in itself has been dying out in the UK for some time now, so we embarked on this project in order to create a revival of interest.

For the Leeds show (which was our opening) we invite the Arabian Dance Theatre to provide a 'Reda-easque' feel to some of the pieces. The rest of the show was choreographed by Nawarra, Beverley Smith (who also made most of the spectacular costumes) and myself.

We performed the show at the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival last Saturday and I would just like to share the project with people here on BHUZ.

Fantastic! I was gutted not to be able to make either of the performances :( Hopefully you will be doing it again somewhere.....?

it was an amazing night, really refreshing to see good folkloric as opposed to fakeloric, well researched ladies, the costumes & music kept me glued to my seat, xx

Wonderful project and it looks like a fabulous show! Good work by all involved!

Wow, this looks like a wonderful show!!

Thank everyone.

We did actually deliberately include some 'fakeloric', but we had narrative in Arabic and English providing background information and placing it in some of context.

We are embarking on another project to move this one forward but focus more on the perhaps lesser known styles and tribes of the Middle East as well as the popular ones.

when in context everything works,
loved the unity the week after, a good mix of styles and abilitys,
well done again