Stavros Stavrou Karayianni

Performing gender, class and nation. The tsifteteli and the politics of Hellenic dance.

Karayianni, Stavros Stavrou: "Performing gender, class and nation. The tsifteteli and the politics of Hellenic dance", 16th International Congress on Dance Research, Corfu, Greece, 30/10-3/11, 2002.

Το τσιφτετέλι θέλει κεφάτο σείσιμο του στήθους και κάποιον αισθησιασμό στίς κινήσεις τής μέσης καί τών γοφών. Οι γυναίκες με τα τρεμουλιαστά βυζιά, τους παχουλούς γλουτούς και το γλυκό χαμόγελο χορεύουν το τσιφτετέλι με ασυγκρίτως μεγαλύτερην επιτυχίαν από τους άντρες. Μάλιστα συχνά το τσιφτετέλι χορεύεται πάνω σε τραπέζι γεμάτο πιατικά (τότε είναι σωστή αποθέωση του γυναικείου κορμιού), για να μην μπορεί η χορεύτρια να κάνει βήματα, παρά μόνο να λυγίζει το σώμα, ενώ κάτω η παρέα της χτυπάει παλαμάκια. Elias Petropoulos, Rebetika

In the Orthodox church of a diasporic Greek community in the upper Midwest, Angela Shand experienced an actual “Tsifte-teli sermon.” This sermon took place on a Sunday that followed a Greek celebration, which the local priest supported by encouraging his flock to attend. Following the event, the community priest somberly announced that “he felt betrayed,” as he had publicly supported this event without having been told about the belly dancing which opened the show. The priest went on to say that “this type of dancing led to sin: Salom? herself had danced in this manner and enticed King Herod to behead John the Baptist. Furthermore, he added, tsifte-teli is not even a Greek folk dance, but of Turkish origin, and therefore should not be danced or enjoyed by Greeks” (Shand 128).

In this paper I discuss the tsifteteli and the anxieties elicited by its “Oriental” associations. I will attempt to map some processes through which the exchange dynamic between East and West enacted itself within Greek cultural borders. The Ottoman occupation of Greece that lasted nearly four centuries - a bitter and hurtful chapter in the nation’s history - has produced the desire for a modern Greek identity that denies connections with the Orient and firmly identifies, instead, with European civilization. My discussion hopes to delineate ways in which the Greek dance scene has been and continues to be a stage where Orientalism and Occidentalism compete in a contest where the rules can neither be obeyed nor ignored. Nevertheless, the imperative antagonism within this binary is what determines the performances of ethnic identity, masculinity, femininity and sexuality in the Greek context. The movements of the tsifteteli unsettle these performances, instigating a tension that becomes a form of counterhegemonic discourse-in-motion.

1. Hellenism and cultural etiquette

In travel narratives, Greece often constituted “a little corner of the Orient” but also “a little corner of Europe” although, overwhelmingly, Greeks were termed “uncivilized” and “tribal” in their manners and customs, and often discoursed by the West in purely Orientalist terms (Shannan 171). When in Essna in Upper Egypt in 1850 the American journalist George William Curtis saw Kuchuk Hanem perform, he described her in terms of Terpsichore, the ancient Greek muse of dance. His gesture relies on ambivalence for its effect. In the minds of his learned readers Terpsichore was likely to evoke an ethereal and lofty image of classical art but also an identification of Greece with the exotic Orient. Aware of such constructions and with the legacy of the Ottoman occupation prominent in the culture and their architectural landscape, those Greeks who were not reluctant to settle for a share in an “Oriental” identity remedied the discomfort by accepting a location on the cusp of East and West. Officially, however, the modern state has been prepared to denounce any ostensibly “Eastern” heritage in an anxious attempt to secure Western allegiances.

Michael Herzfeld identifies the Greek elite as having a significant share in this cultural overhaul of modern Greece: The Greeks were effectively taught that whatever was most familiar in their everyday lives was probably of Turkish origin and therefore by definition “foreign.” The local, largely occidentalized élite eagerly enforced this process of cultural cleansing, since its own relatively secure access to philological classicism… gave it practical advantages to which it subsequently clung in the realistic assessment that this cultural etiquette also secured its monopoly of power and wealth. (218-9)

Indeed, knowledge of classical philology and an investment in privilege made the elite class the most appropriate to cultivate the passion for the glorious past. “Progonoplexia” (προγονοπληξία) (Shay, Choreographic politics 175) was the most intriguing component of the elite’s fabrication of modern Greece. Of course, the choice of ancestors to worship is quite telling of the motivations and also the aspirations underlying this movement. This choice involved a persistent and systematic denial of Ottoman associations and even a wilful ignorance of the cultural opulence of Byzantine heritage. Instead, what came to propel Modern Greek aspirations was an ideological fetishization of the legacy of classical Greece. Indeed, this fetishization had formed the staple diet of Western Europe’s intellectual and elite populations, hence its necessary appeal for the Modern Greeks.

2. The tsifteteli and Grecian orientalism

Of course, the Western discourse on Hellenism did not eradicate the tsifteteli or those elements in Greek music and dance that were deemed “Eastern” and therefore undesirable. As Holst-Warhaft points out, “despite the successful propagation of the myth of cultural continuity, Greeks continued to insist on a model of community-based affiliation that was often at variance with official ideology and frequently crossed linguistic and ethnic boundaries” (“Song, Self-Identity” 232). Using the examples of left-wing opposition and its production of music as resistance from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, the Pontic Greeks who perform to music indistinguishable from that of their Turkish counterparts and the rebetes who defy societal norms, Holst-Warhaft exposes the phenomenon of Greeks embracing their national identity, while also defining themselves through song as inhabitants of a subgroup that transgresses in some respects, the boundaries and/or ideals of the state (232-3).

Especially the Pontic Greeks’ dances present a unique example of a tradition that has preserved a dance vocabulary quite unlike that of any other Greek region. A significant Pontic dance move rarely encountered in Greek dances is the shoulder shimmy - a move that has been an important part of Middle Eastern dance expression, common in dances from North Africa and the Middle East. Due to the relative remoteness of their geographical location, the Pontic peoples remained apart from the rest of Greek populations during the formative years of Greek nationhood. This isolation might account for the unique vocabularies their dances display. That the shimmy survived only, as far as I know, in the dances of the Pontic Greeks tempts me to speculate on its possible existence in a range of Greek dances and its recent intentional elimination. It is a move that not only requires skill but also signifies extremes and denotes a “dionysiac” mood and an excited climax that might be discomforting. Andrea Deagon finds the shimmy to be “a kind of motion that escapes, temporarily, countable time, a trembling that represents extremes” (17).

Historical developments that came to bear on the Greek cultural scene reasserted the significance of the politics of music and dance. In 1922, large populations from Asia Minor came to settle in Greece following their forced massive exodus from their towns on the Ionian coast. Their forced migration was the result of a tragic political development so disastrous for Greece that in the Greek world it is simply referred to as “The Catastrophe” (ΗΚαταστροφή). These refugees from Asia Minor became the victims who paid the price for Greek attempts at imperialist expansion. The “Grand Idea” (Μεγάλη Ιδέα), as it is known, is “the doctrine of Greek irredentism whereby all the lands of Classical and Byzantine Hellenism should be reclaimed for the reborn nation” (Herzfeld, Ours once more 119). From a colonial discourse point of view, what I find most noteworthy in this dire historical development is the manner in which the Greek aspiration predicated itself on the model of an East-West conflict with Greece being, of course, on the West side of the binary. The “Grand Idea” was not an inherently Greek invention but the expression of expansionist politics shared by major colonial powers. It was, in other words, “part and parcel of colonialist logic” (Gourgouris 146). Pursuing the vision of a sovereign Greece ruling over the lands that once comprised the Byzantine Empire demonstrates modern Greece’s imperial aspirations. Following the ultimate failure of the expedition, a failure facilitated by the major European powers (Gourgouris 146-7), the people who flocked to Greece as refugees came to be regarded as a loathsome reminder of this failure and the nation’s unwanted responsibility towards them. By extension, their cultural inheritance was regarded with a suspicion that graduated to persecution soon after they set up their first entertainment establishments in the Greek mainland.

The course that events took, however, forced Greece to confront these traditions that it found impossible to accept and incorporate. Following the Catastrophe, many of these victims left for Greece without their material possessions and arrived there destitute. Nonetheless, many brought with them a musical heritage and an artistic sophistication that were rare in the Greek mainland. The urban centres of Constantinople and Smyrna were viable contact zones with artistic exchanges taking place constantly, more so in the areas of music and dance that were especially flourishing. These two places “were musically sophisticated towns where Turkish, Greek, Jewish, Armenian and Gypsy musicians played together and exchanged repertoires” (Holst-Warhaft, “Rebetika” 115). Unfortunately, the Greek establishment was unable to recognize the talent and artistic sophistication of these musical forms that came from Asia Minor, since their decidedly “Eastern” character provoked suspicion and disdain. Although loved and appreciated by many Greeks, it proved impossible for these musical traditions to influence official national policy favourably. The refugee’s music, that came to be known as “rebetika,” was too strident to assimilate into the social homogeneity that modern Greece aspired towards. Rebetika simply could not qualify as native past or present and were severely censured by the authorities because of a combination of factors that I believe bears an intricate connection to issues emerging from the ideology of Greek identity. The Rebetes’ society saw itself as independent and its identity was partly based on a common mistrust of the rest of Greek society. In the words of Gail Holst-Warhaft, their music was “the creative expression of their independence.” Holst-Warhaft then proceeds to locate the appeal of rebetika in their lyrics, the introduction, and the dance which “are still close to the magic of spontaneous creativity, and yet they have the surety of a tradition behind them, and a social framework where musician and listener are united by the mutual recognition of being outside, and in many respects superior to the rest of society” (Road to Rembetika 77).

In recent attempts to reinvent Greek dance, the “surety of tradition” that Holst-Warhaft identifies as part of the rebetika would be anathema. Advocates of Greece as a Western nation denied not only the artistic and cultural value of rebetika but also any connection between tsifteteli and classical Greek dances, in a gesture that complies with the construction of Western civilization as the heritage of classical Greece. In Greece, therefore, the tsifteteli gradually came to be marginalized - banned into the region of undesirable, distasteful influences of the Orient.

Nonetheless, these attempts to sacrifice the tsifteteli on the altar of classical glamour confirmed not only its survival but also its influence. Compelled to contend with its signification, some dance enthusiasts did not adhere to the total silencing of this art. Their attempts to retrieve it, however, involved similar ideological constructs. In the book Folk Dances of the Greeks, Theodore and Elfleida Petrides make one of those remote attempts to assign a purportedly classical connection to the tsifteteli and thus situate it in the pantheon of Greek dance (59-61). Petrides traces the origins of the tsifteteli (which he calls “kelikos horos,” a literal translation of “danse du ventre”) to the ancient worship of Mother Earth and Aphrodite (whom he calls “Moon Goddess”). He interprets its undulating movements as a depiction of the serpent and water, both representing symbols of the Moon Goddess. He states confidently that its ancient Greek name was “kolia” and that, following the fall of Byzantium, the dance was denigrated by the Arab and Turkish conquerors! Petrides bypasses rebetika completely and offers an explanation that relies on a historical assumption that conflates romanticist notions with nationalist concerns [1]

In the article that I refer to at the opening of this chapter, Angela Shand configures identity, theology, and gender as the three agents that have been formative in the reception of this dance in modern Greece. She explains that each of these agents empowers ideological strategies as it diminishes every aspect of the dance that could be deemed attractive. The fact that the tsifteteli has been designated as feminine expression in the dynamic of a paternalistic society has extinguished any possibility that this dance could express something other than common female seduction and an invitation to sin. In an article entitled “I remember Nadia,” Suhaila Salimpur opens up a dimension of the dance that liberates the dancer from this male-induced political order. While she narrates her childhood encounter with Nadia Gamal, a Lebanese dancer of great talent and fame, Salimpur records an anecdotal dialogue between her and the dancer. Their exchange is significant for the kinesthetic philosophy it relays: “Do you know why I dance the way I do?” (Nadia Gamal) asked me. “Because I have suffered. I have gone through divorce, death, a lot of heartache... that’s the art. You can show anyone a step, but not a soul.” I said I would go home and work on suffering right away. She told me never to forget why I dance. It would always give me strength. And she told me to “always remember the music.”

Indeed, rebetika performed to the tsifteteli rhythm often thematize feelings and emotions of pain, heartache, and suffering. The contemporary approach that wants to confine this dance to an exuberant expression of joy, or more commonly, female seductive charm and sexual playfulness or coyness cannot be taken as absolute and needs to be challenged. [2] In fact, it seems to me that to see the tsifteteli as merely an expression of happiness (which is by no means a negative attribute, of course) denotes an attempt to trivialize it by limiting its possibility for expression of other human emotions considered to be profound or great. Tahia Carioca, the revered Egyptian dancer, feels that dignity is the most important quality in a dancer, yet, also, the dancer “must express life, death, happiness, sorrow, love and anger” (quoted in Monty 306).

This contemplative, introspective character of the tsifteteli, audible in old rebetika, has not survived very well. In the process of cultural selection, other dances whose popularity in Asia Minor was also great, such as the zeibekiko and the hasapiko, gained extremely high cultural currency since they were perceived as harmonious with, in fact enhancing, the popular construction of masculine behaviour. Contemplation and introspection have been saved for the zeibekiko, in particular, which symbolizes male ethos and enjoys widespread recognition as the expression of an indomitable masculinity, a respected and valued disposition. Its steps reify a certain machismo that seeks to assert a hegemony that has been normalized and expected of a man. The zeibekiko inscribes territorial boundaries that the viewer observes with comfort, but also awe and admiration since it ritualizes an exemplary masculinity and evokes the desire in the viewer to approve and emulate. Describing how the zeibekiko is performed, Elias Petropoulos goes into rapture:

Αφού ο ζεϊμπέκικος δεν έχει τυποποιημένο βηματισμό οι φιγούρες αποκτούν εξέχουσα θέση. Ο ζεϊμπέκικος φωτίζει τον χορευτή, τον κάνει ωραίο σαν μικρό θεό. Χορεύεται ο ζεϊμπέκικος ίσα κι ίσα, με χέρια και με πόδια. Ο σπαθάτος χορευτής του ζεϊμπέκικου, στεγνός, με πεσμένο στούς γοφούς παντελόνι, κάνει μια σειρά από θεσπέσια παραπατήματα σαν δέντρο που σείεται… Ο ζεϊμπέκικος χορεύεται με τα χέρια σε στάση δεήσως, ή ικεσίας. (38)[1][3]

The contrast with a solo dancer about to exhibit transgressive behaviour is striking and brings the performance of sexuality in dance into sharp relief. Nonetheless, this ritualization of masculinity is also invested with a strongly queer quality. In the homoerotic gaze of Greek artists such as the painter Yiannis Tsarouhis and the composer Manos Hadjidakis the attraction of this masculine expression was undeniably compelling. [4] The masculinity performed in the zeibekiko is so exalted that even if the dancer transgresses during improvisation he is still guaranteed acceptance. [5] Moreover, the devotion to this dance is so strong that even though the zeibekiko can be traced to Asia Minor there is no anxiety to justify its existence in the Greek dance repertoire. Conversely, such anxiety determines the discourse around the tsifteteli whose “origins” in the East are invoked repeatedly. [6] Thus the dance and its movements have become established as a signifier of the East and of unbridled female sexuality.

Even Gail Holst-Warhaft, who is an accomplished scholar of Modern Greek traditions, proceeds to make problematic and somewhat carelessly presented statements regarding this dance’s performance. While discussing the male homosocial world of the rebetes she makes certain observations which I find disconcerting: "This is a world that not only excludes women, but celebrates their absence. Interestingly, even the one dance of the rebetika repertoire that was essentially a woman’s dance, the tsifte-teli, was not uncommonly performed by men holding their genitals as they gyrated in a lewd parody of female dancing". (“Rebetika: The double descended” 121)

I strongly object to Holst-Warhaft’s comments, for several reasons. She does not cite the context she refers to, thus encouraging the reader to speculate on the origins of such information: is this a moment of personal witness (rather unlikely since Holst-Warhaft is female), or did an informant supply the information? By being vague, Holst-Warhaft affords the phenomenon she describes an overwhelming reach, thus harming the reputation of the dance. Furthermore, by relating information of this kind she vulgarizes the tsifteteli since she focuses attention on particularly distasteful performances of a dance that already suffers because of poor representations. Finally, despite her great interest in the historical roots of rebetika, her artistic participation in Greek musical groups in the 1970s, and all the valuable research she has conducted on the subject, Holst-Warhaft accepts without questioning that the tsifteteli is an “essentially women’s dance.” By reiterating such statements from uncited sources Holst-Warhaft perpetuates the distorted notions of this dance and even re-presents its male performers as engrossed in misogynist parody.

In "Rebetika" Elias Petropoulos does not regard this dance as purely feminine yet he finds women to be far more “successful,” as is apparent in the epigraph to this paper. That men do not have the “right” figure and are neither graceful nor “attractive” enough to perform Eastern dance seems a popular sexist misconception. In the PBS documentary series Dancing, based on Gerald Jonas’ book by the same title, the Moroccan sociologist Mohammad Chtatou comments (in English) that dance is “womanly, not manly,” thus supporting Jonas’ comment that “there is no masculine equivalent to the dance that Muslim women practice” (115). Moreover, if male spectators join the public dancers they will “undulate their shoulders and hips in what looks like a self-mocking parody of traditional gender roles, combined with sheer delight in rhythmic physical movement” (116). [7] In a critique of both Jonas’ remarks and the corresponding scene from the documentary, Anthony Shay points out that “Jonas should have at least been suspicious that his statements were misleading because the footage accompanying Chtatou’s questionable observations, heard in a voiceover, showed a large group of men dancing with great enjoyment, the very dancing he describes as female” (“The male dancer” 16-7).

While traversing the gender and sexuality divide I am conscious of the politics of nation playing their significant part. Located on the cusp of these politics, Roza Eskenazy, a singer and dancer and one of the most attractive and beloved “rebetisses,” constitutes simultaneously an interesting embodiment of “Greekness” and alterity. She was a Jewish-Greek-Armenian artist originally from Constantinople - a lineage that makes her a veritable meeting point of cultures from the Middle East. I am intrigued to contemplate the meaning of Roza’s “Greekness” as I imagine her on a humble wooden stage performing Turkish and Greek songs to the sound of the kanoon and the violin, dancing and keeping the rhythm with her finger cymbals - a performance that is radically different from popular spectacularized renditions of Greek classical tradition. Even later in her life (I remember her on black-and-white TV in the late seventies), she retained her alterity, appearing in harem pants and embroidered vests.

With the tsifteteli, its exponents, its audience and its performers in Greece, I contend that the issue moved beyond the identity of a subgroup. Since the appeal of this dance could not be eradicated, hegemony concentrated its efforts on denigrating its social status, and therefore influence, by relegating it to a class phenomenon instead. In fact, it should not be eradicated since it became necessary in defining “civilization” and class. Lower working classes were, in a sense, assigned their own music known in popular language as folk urban music (λαϊκήμουσική). Especially the kind that featured “coarse and uncomely” Eastern strains that lacked the refinement of Western music, gradually became the expression of low-income and largely uneducated wage earners who lived in the villages or in the underprivileged quarters of the rapidly sprawling urban centres of Thessaloniki and Athens. Conversely, moneyed and therefore refined and educated Greeks persevered in their role as guardians of the classical traditions and Greece’s Western character. Therefore, relegating the tsifteteli to an inferior class status has been a means of controlling it but also preserving it in a circumspect order as opposed to discarding it completely. This politic enacts the interlocking of desire and derision in a hegemonic operation to sustain what is desirable but control its contagion.

As I point out in my introduction, the Orient is a formidable signifier in the Greek imaginary. Even so, there are Greeks who accept the perpetual situating in the interstices of East and West. What is problematic - and perhaps irresolvable - about such assertions is that the very existence of this in-between location is sanctioned by the dominant imperial discourse of colonialist Europe and becomes, by extension, yet another manifestation of its power. Claims from the country itself about its situation between East and West have become cliché in modern travel discourse. Apart from Greece and Cyprus, I have read and heard of similar claims made about places as geographically disparate as Iran, Egypt, Morocco and Turkey. What I find most significant is that travel documentaries or literature are not the only sites that offer such locations. Often the countries themselves will adopt the crossroads motif as essential in their self-description and by extension self-definition. At times this position is even a matter of national pride. What worries me is the issue of compromise in this positioning and its concomitant anxiety in a postcolonial state of affairs. At times I hear it as an apology to the West; an apology for the minarets, the adobe villages, the extended family system. Often it is stated in the hope that it will relieve the exigencies and pressures of inhabiting an ambivalent location. In the case of Greece, the interesting fact is that its self-positioning falls within familiar colonialist tropes even though it has never been colonized administratively.

During its performance, the Greek body strives to negotiate movement between the poles of East and West - the classical heritage and the advent of “Eastern” songs and dances from Christian, predominantly Greek-speaking populations from Turkey. The Greek dancing body has been compelled to settle for a masculine, “European-identified” disposition, following an almost constant negotiating process involving the harsh legacy of Ottoman rule against the idealistic vision of Ancient Greece and the trauma of 1922. This is a process that I see as constant, a process of settlement that has to be reached continuously.

Angela Shand concludes her article with a scene that blends Elias Petropoulos’ verbal depiction of the female tsifteteli dancer and an actual scene that is popular in Greek nightclubs: "a woman dancing tsifte-teli on top of a table covered with glasses, plates and ouzo bottles, while below her admirers clap, shout encouragement, and throw flowers and paper money. (For many Greeks, the tsifteteli remains an Oriental dance of a woman without restraint: beautiful and sensual, but also dangerous and tempting. Placing the dancer on the pedestal of the taverna table may celebrate the sensual and exotic elements of her dance, but it also restricts her movements and allows others to keep an eye on her. Her potential danger is thus averted, and the tisfte-teli is made safe for Western civilization. (132)

That the tsifteteli has to be made safe for “Greek westernness” has been a significant part of my argument. Indeed, the dancer’s physical constraint assuages Greek sensibility since such limitation contains her potency and even denigrates the artistic potential of this dance to merely exhibitionist spectacle as opposed to “empowering and subversive” ritual. However, the dancer is placed on the pedestal of the taverna table not only to recycle the traditional sexist notions, which are appeased by such shows of apotheosis of the female body, but also to divert the gaze of the spectators from each other and from the dance itself. With the dancer on the table the dance is, in effect, erased. And the men fix their gaze on the swaying female body so they will not gaze at their male associates, or explore the possibilities that every successive move yields.

3. Works cited

Curtis, George William: Nile notes of a Howadji. New York, Dix, Edwards, 1857.

Deagon, Andrea: “Dance, body, universe.”, Habibi 15.2 (Spring 1996):16-17, 27.

Gourgouris, Stathis: Dream nation: Enlightenment, colonization and the institution of modern Greece. Stanford, Stanford UP, 1996.

Herzfeld, Michael: Ours once more: Folklore, ideology, and the making of modern Greece. Austin, U. of Texas Press, 1982.

Herzfeld, Michael: “Hellenism and occidentalism: The permutations of performance in Greek bourgeois identity”, Occidentalism: Images of the West. Ed. James G. Carrier. Oxford, Clarendon, 1995. 218-233.

Holst, Gail: Road to rembetika: Music of a Greek sub-culture - Songs of love, sorrow & hashish. Evia, Denise Harvey, 1994.

Holst-Warhaft, Gail: “Song, self-identity, and the neohellenic”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 15.2 (1997): 232-238.

Holst-Warhaft, Gail: “Rebetika: The double-descended deep songs of Greece.” Washabaugh 111-126.

Jonas, Gerald: Dancing: The pleasure, power, and art of movement. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1992.

Kouria, Afrodite: “Thoughts on some dance themes in modern Greek painting”, Loutzaki 211-214.

Lawler, Lillian B.: The dance of the ancient Greek theatre. Iowa, U. of Iowa Press, 1964.

Monty, Paul Eugene: “Serena, Ruth St. Denis and the evolution of belly dance (1876-1976).” Ph.D. Diss. New YorkU., 1986.

Peckham, Shannan Robert: “The exoticism of the familiar and the familiarity of the exotic: Fin-de-siècle travellers to Greece.” Writes of Passage: Reading travel writing. Ed. James Duncan and Derek Gregory. London, Routledge, 1999. 164-184.

Petrides, Theodore and Elfleida: Folk dances of the Greeks. New York, Exposition Press, 1961.

Petropoulos Elias: Ρεμπέτικα (Rebetika). Athens, Kedros, 1991.

Salimpur, Suhaila: “I remember Nadia.” Articles, press, and statements. 2001. Suhaila Salimpur Website. October 25, 2001. <http://www.suhaila.com/suhaila.html>

Savrami, Katia: “Two diverse versions of the dance zeibekiko”, Dance Studies 16 (1992): 57-103.

Shand, Angela: “The tsifte-teli sermon: Identity, theology, and gender in rebetika.” Washabaugh 128-132.

Shay, Anthony: Choreographic politics: State folk dance ensembles, representation and power. Middletown, CT, Wesleyan UP, 2002.

Shay, Anthony: “The male dancer”, Unpublished article, 2001.

Washabaugh, William (ed.): Passion of music and dance: Body, gender and sexuality. Oxford and London, Berg, 1998.

4. Notes

[1] Petrides attempts the same with the kar?ilama, another dance that is popular in a variety of forms in Greece, Cyprus and Turkey. Petrides believes it stems from “an ancient Pyrrhic dance, the vestiges of which were preserved by the Byzantines” (27).

[2] There exist several good examples of such songs, especially a selection included in Greek-Oriental Rebetica: Songs and Dances in the Asia Minor Style, 1911-1937.

[3] “Since the zeibekiko does not have a typical choreography, the moves acquire a special significance. The zeibekiko illuminates the dancer, beautifies him like a miniature god. The zeibekiko is performed with both arms and feet used equally. The zeibekiko dancer, lithe and slender, with his pants loose on his hips, performs a series of splendid false steps like a swaying tree. ( Zeibekiko is danced with the hands in the position of prayer or supplication.” (my translation 38)

[4]Writing about Manos Hadjidakis, Holst-Warhaft contends that “the presentation of rebetika to a sophisticated Athenian audience by a man respected as a ‘serious’ composer marked the beginning of the cultivation of rebetika by a significant group of Greek artists and intellectuals, some of whom, like the painter Tsarouhis, undoubtedly shared Hadjidakis’ attraction to the exclusively male environment of the songs” (“Rebetika” 123). Both Tsarouhis and Hadjidakis, however, did not remain spectators but proceeded to produce work (paintings and music respectively) inspired by rebetika.

[5] For illustrations and a discussion of Tsarouhis’ paintings on the subject of male dancing bodies see Aphrodite Kouria’s article “Notes on certain dance happenings in modern Greek painting” 211-215.

[6] There have been attempts to claim the zeibekiko as a wholly Greek dance and separate it from its Eastern roots. Katia Savrami, in her article “Two Diverse Versions of the Dance Zeibekiko,” proposes that Greek, not Turkish, origins of “zeibekiko.” In the case of the tsifteteli, similar attempts have been few (I mention Petrides in this paper). A study such as Lawler’s The Dance of the Ancient Greek Theatre, where she describes dances such as the “cordax” (69-86), the “igdis,” the “apokinos” and the “hygros” (72-4), has not provided incentive in the Greek world of dance for a quest for origins of the tsifteteli. The dances that Lawler describes, and which I mention here, feature moves that resemble, quite strikingly, contemporary renditions of belly dance.

[7] Jonas’ comments echo Holst-Warhaft’s, an indication that such views are not simply superficial but the work of ideology.

The author

Stavros Stavrou Karayianni was born in Nicosia, Cyprus and has pursued English studies in Canada. He has recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Calgary. His dissertation, entitled Performing Sex, Race and Nation: Middle Eastern Dance and the Politics of Empire, employs colonial discourse theory in its examination of male and female dancers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Middle East. He has presented his research at conferences in Canada, Australia and the United States. His publications include a number of articles on Middle Eastern Dance in the Habibi Journal, as well as book reviews on themes relating to cultural, political, and gender issues in the Middle East. Apart from research Stavros has performed Oriental Dance at fundraisers, feature presentations, and cultural events. He views this particular art form as a medium that reconciles his Cypriot bi-cultural heritage and gender identity.

Stavros Stavrou Karayianni (Ph.D.)

 

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[1][3] “Since the zeibekiko does not have a typical choreography, the moves acquire a specialsignificance. The zeibekiko illuminates the dancer, beautifies him like a miniature god. The zeibekiko is performed with both arms and feet used equally. The zeibekiko dancer, lithe and slender, with his pants loose on his hips, performs a series of splendid false steps like a swaying tree. ¼ Zeibekiko is danced with the hands in the position of prayer or supplication.” (my translation 38)