TEACHING DANCE, Part 8

A 3-Part Essay on The Importance of Teaching Finger Cymbals, Floorwork, and Improvisation in Belly Dance

Part One: Finger Cymbals

Imagine flamenco without castanets….or footwork or shawl work!  Or, imagine a flamenco dancer performing to techno music- not Spanish guitar!  Without these cultural parts, would it really be flamenco anymore? So, think about this: Imagine belly dance without finger cymbals and floorwork. Not hard to do, because, despite the fact that these are critical parts of belly dance,  they began disappearing about 25 years ago. So, what is so important about these elements and in particular, zills/zagat/finger cymbals and why have they become nearly-extinction?

Finger Cymbals Represent Culture, Identity and Aid Developing Musicality

The importance of finger cymbals is first and foremost a matter of cultural identity. Like castanets, they are and always have been an expected part of every style of belly dance, whether Egyptian, Turkish or American cabaret.  Audiences love cymbals just as they love castanets! The other important thing about learning finger cymbals is that when you learn an instrument - especially a percussion instrument, you learn rhythm and timing, and rhythm is peculiar to culture. But, for a few reasons finger cymbals are less and less used in shows by dancers these days.

Finger cymbals/Zagat/Zills

The biggest reason for this is that dancers often study with instructors who never learned to play them and so skipped teaching this crucial skill to their students. Another reason is fusion. Fusion is great and it is a key tool in creativity, but there comes a point when the child of two or more arts is so far removed from its parent arts, that it can no longer be considered a part of the family it is born of. Take flamenco as an example.

Flamenco is the child of Indian, Moorish and Spanish dance and music. The footwork comes from Indian or Roman dance, the arm, torso, hip work and singing from Arabic or Moorish dance and music, and the shawl work comes from Spanish dance. Yes, we see the resemblance in the child, but this child of three parents is as different from its parents, as each parent is to the others. The same fusion happened to classical ballet.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, ballet began fusing Central Asian, jazz and other styles into their system. This gave birth to a new style stopped which using classical dance themes and stories, (fairytales), stopped using tutus and toe shoes as the go-to style of costuming, and stopped using classical music. This led to the development of Contemporary Ballet giving birth to two styles of ballet: Classical and Contemporary. But the original classical style remains in tact and has not lost the elements that make it classical: classical music, tutu’s, fairy tales and toe shoes!

The same thing happened to cabaret belly dance: Tribal fusion styles are the children of cabaret styles, but mixed with other dance styles such as break dancing and modern dance. Costuming became old-style folkloric cabaret and techno-or world music, the go-to style of music. I have always said that Tribal Fusion styles could be compared to contemporary ballet as they are very far removed from classic cabaret belly dance. So I call tribal fusion, contemporary belly dance. But, like classical ballet, classical cabaret belly dance has always been defined by the music, the costuming and the fact that it is a solo, improvised style which uses finger cymbals – no matter what country it comes from! Happily in the past years, even Tribal Fusion dancers are adopting cymbals again and this is heartening! So dancers - Zill on! And teachers - teach them!