#debkah

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Gender

The theme of gender highlights dabbikah’s narrations which show how gendered categories and values are sustain and shifted through dabkeh.

Some describe how traditional concepts of female/male are reinforced or contested though traditional social dabkeh, or how presentational stage dabkeh might expand gender roles and create a more equitable space for female dabbikah.

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The most publicly promoted form of dance in the contemporary West Bank is dabkeh (alternatively transliterated as dabke, debkeh, debke and deppka). Recognized in language as more than just an appendage word to dance, one does not dance dabkeh, one yadbeks… This linguistic distinction crucially allows it to not be considered a style of rasqa, but a separate activity subject to a different set or moral values.

Nicholas Rowe. 2010. Raising Dust : A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine. New York. I.B. Tauris; Distributed in the United States by Palgrave Macmillan.

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As social scientist Gillian Bottomley observed about folk dance and representation: “Representation itself implies a kind of power, the power to define, to describe, to act on behalf of someone else.  Describing particular forms of dance as ‘folk dance’ for example carries certain historical and political connotations” (1987, I). These dances ensembles thus have the power to represent an entire nation.

Anthony Shay, editor. 2005. Choreographic Politics : State Folk Dance Companies, Representation, and Power. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press

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Resources

On the resources page you can find supplemental materials such as interview logs, the project bibliography and select quotes from readings.  

Scroll through a transcript or browse an article to better situate Tradition In Motion: DABKEH! and better contextualize what dabbikah are referring to, experiencing and demonstrating in video excerpts. 

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Technique & Aesthetics

Technique and aesthetics make dabkeh - dabkeh.  This theme highlights posts that point to steps and form in presentational dabkeh, participatory dabkeh, and the layered relationships and cultural rules performed in the traditional dabkeh performance of groups like Freedom Dabkeh Group.

Technique and aesthetics inform practitioners’ view of dabkeh as authentic, innovative, traditional, hype, or stage-worthy.  Form, steps, music and embodied feeling also represent cultural values such as community, pride, uniformity as well as innovation, communication, spontaneity and eye-catching dexterity.  

This theme also points to technique, styles, repertoire and aesthetic values learned in teaching in formal class contexts by trained instructors, or in social dabkeh in community gatherings and how these styles relate to different purposes and contexts (stage presentation, protest, social celebration).

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Cultural Sustainability

The theme of cultural sustainability emerges in many of the dabbikah’s interviews.  This theme looks at what cultural values are sustained through the practice of dabkeh; it also highlights modes of transmission and learning of dabkeh.  

Dabkeh is a dance of cultural sustainability. It is highly dynamic yet traditional; its form and structure connect dabbikah in the line, while calling for innovation and virtuosity, embodying cultural sustainability across generations and migrations.

Narrators touch on questions such as: How is dabkeh taught and learned?  In the context of formal troupes, classes or more informal social gatherings?  What are the stakes of cultural sustainability of dabkeh -for second generation Arab Americans living in NYC or for young Palestinians growing up in the occupied West Bank?  

Although the theme of cultural sustainability specifically highlights the transmission of dabkeh, it is also a larger framework for thematic articulations of gender, aesthetics, identity and resistance.  

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Edited Transcription of Interview Ramzi Edlibi Ramzi’s residence. Queens, NY 7.6.2012 Nicole Macotsis I interviewed Ramzi in the his house in Queens, NY, in preparation for a dabkeh festival I was organizing in Fall, 2012, at Alwan for the Arts. I was born in Bahrain, an island in the Arabic...

Below are a few excerpts of the edited transcription of my interview with Ramzi.  In telling part of his life history of dabkeh and dance, Ramzi brought up key figures such as Wadea Jarrar, Caracalla, and Moiseyev in the development of dabkeh as the national folkloric dance of Lebanon.  He also makes the important distinction between theatrical dabkeh, and traditional social dabkeh, speaking to the characteristics and aesthetics of both.

In addition, Ramzi’s interview touched on the diverse rhythms, cultures and dances of dabkeh, and which all fall under the category of “Dabkeh - to stomp, to make sound.”  

Read the full transcript at the link above.

I was born in Bahrain,.. But I grew up in Lebanon, in Beirut.  In Lebanon, we’re talking about the sixties or the fifties.  TV wasn’t a very popular…media, …it wasn’t around in every house.  So, the entertainment was live,…  [In] every house there was an oud.  My mom was an oud player, my uncle was an oud player, my mom was a singer, she sang and we gathered almost every week in different houses.  ...And I kept the beat… or singing…  There wasn’t derbekkeh around, but it was like… cooking pot, playing on a plate, anything… very simple.  And they always asked me to dance.  “Come on, come on, you should dance!” So I did dancing a little bit...

... I auditioned to be a physical education teacher.  I got in.  In this school, they teach the dabkeh-  a class.  Who was the teacher? Wadea El Jarrar.  Wadea El Jarrar is very famous.  She’s the mother of the dabkeh.  Everyone is her student.  If you’re talking about Halim Caracella, Fadl Abdullah who has now one of the biggest folklore dabkeh groups in Lebanon, and so many. She’s like - Wadea [Emphasis with hands]!...

.. ’83 I came to the US.  From ’72-’82, I did strictly dabkeh.  I learned probably… 300 choreographies from so many, Abdel Halim Caracalla, Alain Zoghbi, Fadl Abdullah, … so many.   And even… very small choreographers, they have no name, nameless, they create the steps here and there.  And there’s a standard you have to know in the dabkeh world: the Dance of the Derbekkeh, the Dance of the Mijwiz, which was called Mijwiz Caracella, and three dozens of popular songs back then, like Diggy ya Rababa, Te La We Tetammar Ya Ear, Dugo al Mahabij … there were so many that were standards.  So we had to learn these theatrical dabkehs which were not traditional. I have a friend of mine, Yahya Nasrellah, he lives in Michigan.  He memorized all these steps.  He has a dance company, and he’s still doing those steps.  He knows!

I forgot those steps-the theatrical, I kept what I learned from Wadea, and the traditional dabkeh, I kept this, and I don’t do any more the theatrical dabkeh- I could do it, but i have to review it.   I prefer the traditional....

Now, I value more the dabkeh.  I study classical, at the same time, I value the feel of the dabkeh.  I know now more the feel of the dance as the feel, not just jumping around, the feel, the real feel.  …  I know dancing after all these years...

...I’anni, dabkeh-  it’s a name.  Dabkeh - to stomp, to make sound.  Dabkeh. Some, they say dabkeh, it started [by] fix[ing] the ceiling, so they have this… something like mud, they lay down the mud with the plants, and they stomp on it to make it straight.  This is one theory.  But to me, it’s older than this- it’s connected with religion, praying.  It’s a form of praying. It used to be a form of praying. When Islam came, all this went home [and were separated].  The tradition is still going, but in different names.

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Dabbik Bio: Ramzi Edlibi (dancer, teacher, choreographer, musician) began his study of Arab dance and ballet at an early age in Lebanon with Wadea Jarrar and Abdel Halim Caracalla, historic figures in the development of Lebanese dance for the stage. In addition to Edlibi’s formal training, social dances and music, such as debkah, were a part of his everyday life.

Edlibi went on to perform with leading vocalists and dance companies of the Arab world such as Fairuz, Sabah, Wadi Al-Safi and Caracalla Dance Theatre. He then traveled abroad to perform and teach,while civil war raged in Lebanon, learning other dance traditions along the way.  Since establishing himself in New York City in 1983, Eldibi continued his dance career, researching and presenting dances and music of the world.

Edlibi is Artistic Director of Dance Around the World, an arts in education program that brings dance and music to public schools.

Photo:  Ramzi at Temple of Jupiter, Ba’albek, Lebanon. 1991.