Last week I had the pleasure of being a guest again on Yatrika Shah's Global Village radio program on KKPFK-FM in Los Angeles. The topic: ultimate Middle Eastern dance diva Nadia Gamal. She is the only dancer featured in my book Great Spirits: Portraits Of Life-Changing World Music Artists and many people want to know why I decided to write about her. I have several answers to that question. First of all, Nadia Gamal was truly a "great spirit" whose impact on many of the people who witnessed her performances was truly life-changing. She was a great diva of Middle Eastern dance--hardly the only one but possibly the one who did more to elevate women's Middle Eastern dance to the level of high art. Then too a great dancer is necessarily a great musician whose instrument happens to be his or her body. This is especially true of Nadia Gamal, whose sensitivity to the dynamics and colors of the music she danced to was extraordinary. She always insisted on performing with live musicians and she directed them as much as she responded to them. In performance she is one with them. Finally, very few people outside the Middle Eastern dance community and Arab communities know about Nadia and very little has been written about her. Much of the information about her has been scattered and fragmentary. Therefore I felt a compulsion to attempt more comprehensive account of her. She is often referred to as "The Legend" but like many legends, the reality of Nadia's greatness has not been well communicated. My account is in Great Spirits. I was fortunate to be one of a relatively small number of people in America who actually saw her perform (until recently I thought I had witnessed her only U.S. performance--at Town Hall in New York City in 1981. I recently learned that she gave a smaller scale public performance in Los Angeles around the same time). So in a way, my writing about Nadia Gamal is my way of bearing witness to the great impact she had on me.
Let me try to encapsulate the magic of Nadia Gamal. She was a striking-looking woman, petite even in high heels, with long dark flowing hair streaming down her back during most of her life. She moved with liquid precision, which you might say is something any great serious dancer would achieve. But in the context of Middle Eastern dance she stood out with this precision because the repertoire of movements can easily be entertaining without being precise. Danse Oriental (or raks sharki, as it is called in the Middle East) is a dance of storytelling, of dramatic impact and of overt passion and so Nadia excelled because she possessed great dramatic ability (she in fact appeared in a number of Egyptian films both in dance scenes and as an actress in featured roles). As the dancer and scholar Andrea Deagon recalled the impact of seeing a television broadcast of one of Nadia's performances which involved a re-enactment of the possession of a woman by an evil spirit, Nadia's dramatic ability was such that "you saw the exact instant that the spirit entered her body." The best way I can describe the impact of Nadia's dancing is by saying that I felt a physical impact from her movements, even though she might have been thirty feet away. It was as though the energy of her intense passion was concentrated and focused through the precision of her movements into a force that generated shockwaves through the air.
It is surprising, even amazing, how meager the filmed record of Nadia Gamal's performances is. There is an excellent clip of her doing danse oriental(filmed by Ibrahim Farrah in the early 1970's in Lebanon) in the DVD entitled Rare Glimpses which is available by mail via the internet. There is a full-length performance by Nadia shot in a Lebanese nightclub in the mid/late 80's, which is entertaining but not exceptional. And there is a DVD of her giving a dance workshop, but it features very little dancing by Nadia. Several clips (including a couple from her film performances) of Nadia performing are available on YouTube....you just go to YouTube and search on "Nadia Gamal." Beware, one or two are actually of Samia Gamal (no relation), a top Egyptian dancer. These offer some glimpses of her greatness. But the best performance footage of Nadia(also shot by Ibrahim Farrah) resides in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Libary, which is located at Lincoln Center. You have to go there to see it. None of these truly compares to witnessing Nadia in live performance...something that is no impossible since Nadia died in 1990. All we have are limited footage mentioned above along with the indelible memories of those who were fortunate enough to see her perform. I am privleged to have been one of those people.
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