Belly dancing and Middle Eastern music hardly seem like an odd couple, but add electronic music and you have a more unusual mix. Stir in north African, Indian and hip-hop influences with the belly dancing, sprinkle in a bit of jazz and techno, and the result really adds a whole new layer of meaning to the phrase “fusion music.”
Audiences will get to experience this brew for themselves when San Francisco global electronica producer and musician Jef Stott and a Taiwanese belly dance group partner for performances in Taichung and Taipei on Aug. 1 and Aug. 2.
Stott and dancer Betty Lee (李梅林), the organizer of Shimmy Dancers, hatched plans for the show while both attended Tribal Fest, an annual alternative dance festival, in San Francisco this year.
“I saw Jef’s show and I said, wow, this rocks, this is awesome, and I thought ‘maybe we can do this in Taiwan,’” says Lee, who saw a chance to expose her students and fellow belly dancers to a new form of music.
The shows will combine a DJ set, during which Stott will improvise with electronic music and recordings, with contributions by DJs Nate D and Jez Bob, and live performances on the oud by Stott. Other Middle Eastern instruments audiences will be able to hear include the string instruments saz, tanbur and santur, and the wind instruments ney and zurna, many of which were recorded in Stott’s San Francisco studio.
While the performances may fall under the category of world music, fusion is the predominant theme.
“The feel of the show is really a dance party, electronic music made for dance clubs. It has hip-hop and techno influences, and it’s loud and exciting,” says Stott.
The partnership between Shimmy Tribe and the musicians will be based largely on improvisation.
“We get inspired by watching dancers, because they have certain form and language of movement, gestures that they do and those gestures inform us as to what sort of sounds we should be making,” says Stott.
The dancers will perform American tribal-style belly dancing, which derives its influences from North African Berber and Bedouin culture, as well as Indian and flamenco dance. Traditional-style belly dancing, on the other hand, comes from Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt, says Lee, who has trained in both.
The costumes of tribal belly dancers cover more of their bodies, and movements are stronger and more defined. Dancers sometimes fuse influences from yoga, Pilates, and popping from hip-hop dance, which Essa Wen (聞子儀), Lee’s dancing partner, specializes in.
Lee became curious about alternative forms of belly dancing after she began studying the traditional style in 2002. Since then, she has trained in Egypt, Turkey and the US. She was first introduced to American tribal-style belly dance at the 2006 Tribal Fest in San Francisco.
“Before I saw the fusion style, I had only studied traditional cabaret-style belly dancing,” says Lee. “At Tribal Fest, I saw a lot of different elements with the dance, not just cabaret or Egyptian style.
Stott, meanwhile, was first turned on to global electronica while listening to musicians like Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, Massive Attack and Ali Khan as a youngster in Los Angeles during the early 1990s.
While collaborating with the group Stellamara, Stott discovered the oud, a Middle Eastern lute, and his interest in the region’s music took off.
“I got rid of all my guitar equipment and became totally fascinated with the oud. I became sort of like a Sufi for a while and worked with the music and culture, the religious devotional aspects of the music,” says Stott. Taking an anthropological approach to music, Stott has studied with teachers from all over the Middle East, including Iran and Algeria, traveled to Turkey and plans to visit Morocco this year.
While Stott initially focused on the traditional aspects of Middle Eastern music, he found himself missing electronic music, and began fusing his two passions. Stott is now signed to Six Degrees, the San Francisco record label that includes world music luminaries like Cheb i Sabbah and Karsh Kale.
Stott hopes people who watch the show will be exposed to the different possibilities in fusion music.
“It doesn’t just have to be an American guy playing the oud or Asian dancers who do Egyptian belly dance,” he says. “What we are trying to do is encourage people to open up a bit.”
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
During her 2015 trip to Taiwan, Sophia J. Chang (張詠慧) got fewer answers than she’d hoped for, but more revelations than she could have imagined. “That was the year I last saw my grandmother. She was in hospice care in Tainan, and it was painful to see her in bed, barely able to open her eyes,” says Los Angeles-born Chang. “The grandma I’d known, a fantastic cook and incredibly kind, was already gone.” After their visit, Chang and her grandfather went back to his apartment. There she asked him how he’d met her grandmother. “He hesitated, then started talking a bit.
RSS