NEW YORK, NY.- When Esraa Warda participated in a residency in Algeria earlier this year, she was told she should not perform in the final show in the town of Taghit. A representative from the Algerian Ministry of Culture warned that her dancing might be “too controversial for a public audience,” Warda said. Others told her she would not be safe under the spotlights — that the crowd might throw things.
Warda specializes in dancing to raï, a popular, grassroots form of Algerian music, historically associated with social protest. Movement is initiated by the feet, hips swaying in quick, precise arcs from side to side with each step; the upper body twists slightly, the arms light in the air.
Although raï (pronounced rye) is an important part of Algerian culture — officials there are recommending that it be added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List — the genre’s subversive messaging still means that some consider it distasteful. The same applies to the accompanying dances, which are usually performed at private gatherings.
Warda went ahead and performed that night in Taghit, proving the Ministry of Culture wrong: Many in the audience cheered her on, she said, dancing along with her. Even toning down her movement for the occasion, “people went wild, people were passing out,” she said. “It ended up being a rock ’n’ roll moment, even though I wasn’t doing anything crazy.”
Elenna Canlas, a keyboardist who played alongside Warda, said: “Everybody was watching with the understanding that women don’t usually dance in the presence of men there. It was profound that something as simple as dancing could be such a political statement.”
As both an artist and a teacher, Warda, who is Algerian American, takes the North African dances she learned as a child and brings them to the stage and dance studio. Highlighting the musicality and endurance that are required for these styles, Warda shows they are legitimate art forms, with specific techniques that change from one region and musical genre to the next.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Warda will be in New York, dancing at Joe’s Pub. For this show, part of the Habibi Festival, she will dance with the all-female Moroccan band Bnat el Houariyat, from Marrakech, in styles that accompany the group’s percussive, polyrhythmic genres. These include chaâbi, which originated in working-class musical cultures, and houara, which blends Moroccan Arab and Indigenous traditions.
Many of the dances Warda performs involve movement of the hips. She is adamant, though, that they are not to be confused with belly dancing — a technique, with Egyptian roots, that is more lifted and with broader movements of the upper body and arms.
“Because we’re all lumped into the same category, we also get lumped into the same stereotypes,” Warda said of Middle Eastern and North African dancers. “We’re somehow these colonial objects of desire.”
Warda was referring to the cliches of this region’s dance found in Western literature, paintings and photographs. After the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 (Tunisia followed in 1881, Morocco in 1907), an industry developed around female dancers, with European photographers paying them to strike suggestive poses that had nothing to do with their art. They were used to create a “phantasm of the Oriental female,” Malek Alloula writes in “The Colonial Harem” (1981) — unskilled, uncultured and sexually available.
This legacy of exploitation surrounding dance remained even after Algeria won independence, in 1962, making it stigmatized in many circles. “My dancing is about trying to overcome the reasons I’ve been told I shouldn’t dance, to overcome that internalized shame a lot of women grow up with,” Warda said.
Although there are some regional dance troupes, raï, chaâbi and hundreds of other dance styles are considered part of everyday culture, used more to celebrate family occasions than to promote a national heritage.
In Bay Ridge, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, where Warda grew up, her profession as a dance artist and educator receives mixed reactions from her family’s Algerian-American community. “Some Algerians are like, ‘Are you kidding?’” she said. “‘Is raï being taught in a dance class? That’s ridiculous.’”
Warda, 29, did not grow up believing she could perform and teach these dances, since no one else was doing it at the time. Her father, who immigrated in the 1990s, worked as a food vendor on 53rd Street and Lexington, and her mother was a caretaker; both encouraged her to pursue traditional career paths. Yet, whenever she visited family in Algeria, she spent time in her relatives’ living rooms, learning dance styles through patient observation.
In her early 20s, Warda managed a traditional arts program for students at Arab American cultural centers. Hiring other artists got her thinking about the dances she loved — and why they were not valued as an art form. She started teaching workshops for free in Brooklyn.
“I created a dance system and code along the way, based on my own references,” she said of her teaching method, “based on what I’d learned dancing with my family.”
The largest North African immigrant population is in France, but the concentration on conservatory diplomas and certificates makes it difficult for those specializing in regional North African styles to work in dance. Raïssa Leï, who is French Moroccan and directs the Kif-Kif Bledi company in Paris, said her dancers cannot obtain the special artistic status that would allow them to freelance, and they struggle to book studios and other spaces. She sees Warda’s work in the United States as important for keeping “the chain of transmission” going strong.
When Warda began to teach, she sought out chikhats, or elders, North African female musicians and dancers who have undergone extensive training. Traveling to Algeria, Morocco and France, she wanted to understand dance as these professionals did.
“It’s about giving back,” Warda said. “These are people who spent their whole lives dedicated to a tradition, spent 30, 40, 50 years under the leadership of somebody else.”
By dancing with chikhats — notably raï singer Cheikha Rabia, based in Paris — Warda is bringing visibility to an aspect of traditional performance. Before the form became more widespread in the 1980s, raï singers such as Cheikha Djenia and Cheikha Rimitti would surround themselves with female dancers, who gave body to the rhythms of the songs and expressed longing through movement.
For someone used to watching Western styles, the raï dances and other North African styles might seem monotonous. Yet, in their intricate foot patterns and unflagging dedication to the rhythm — “simple, subtle things repeated consistently in cyclical movements,” as Warda described them — they give expression to the fight for survival and the solidarity needed to do so.
Chikhats have historically lived together in all-women communities. Many in the North African mainstream consider the chikhats’ public appearances to be raunchy and low-class. (Their name can be used as an insult.) They bring up tough, sometimes illicit topics: female desire, forbidden love, complex feelings about emigration.
Yet, although some chikhat singers have gained a global following, dancers are limited to cabarets and weddings. “These dances are not readily commercialized or accessible in a globalized way — which is what allows people to fantasize,” Warda said.
Google “North African dance class” in the United States, and you will probably come across fusion (otherwise known as “tribal”) belly dancing. The style draws from a hodgepodge of dance cultures, including flamenco and Indian.
American fusion dancers use the facial markings of Indigenous North African tribes and traditional high-pitched ululations. Practitioners insist that despite references to this heritage, fusion technique is not cultural appropriation but its own creation. The steps, many improvised from colonial imagery, reinforce the idea that North African dances have no actual skill.
In Algeria or Morocco, the dances accompanying raï and chaâbi are less a staged spectacle than a part of daily life, with techniques passed between generations. In immigrant communities, re-creating the environment needed to keep this up can be difficult, if not impossible.
Sumaya Bouadi started taking Warda’s classes because, having been raised in the United States, “it just wasn’t something I could see a lot or have the opportunity to learn,” she said in a phone interview.
For Algerian Americans, mastering these skills still represents a form of pride and cultural connection. Nacera Belal remembers when her aunt first saw her really dance as a teenager. “She was so excited that I had figured out how to do it,” Belal said in a phone interview. “She was screaming, ‘Oh, my God, look, look at how she dances.’” Belal sees her classes with Warda as a way to keep honing her style and musicality.
Warda teaches students where each step is from — not just the country, but the region — and how it’s performed in a given context. “To make historical points about why your dance is so specific to where you come from — that’s dangerous for an African woman to do,” Elle Williams, a former student, said in a phone interview.
“Being a Black trans disabled femme, walking into any room is just never comfortable for me,” Williams said. “But in Esraa’s class, I didn’t feel any judgment, I didn’t feel any stares. I’ve never felt that much camaraderie with femmes who did not look like me.”
While bringing North African dancing to a wider audience, Warda still returns to the living room, pointing out that outsiders have underestimated the agency women find in this practice. “The traditions are still very much propelling forward in these private spaces — and they always will be,” she said.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
