30 June 2008

Editor's note: This story is the second in a series examining the state of contemporary dance in Lebanon.

BEIRUT: Artists have an ambivalent relationship with audiences. On one hand, it may be argued, a piece of art only fulfils itself in its reception and appreciation. On the other, the growing estrangement of "popular culture" and "high culture" in the 20th century ensured that there could be no unified criteria for what makes "good" art. Popular forms remained interested in art's entertainment and decorative qualities, while "high art" was increasingly concerned with challenging its audiences aesthetically and intellectually.

Popular audiences disparage high art as "elitist." Aficionados of high art dismiss popular forms as sentimental, cheesy, crassly commercial.

Though the degree of ambivalence varies from artist to artist and from medium to medium, the same sort of divergence is evident among audiences of dance. In Lebanon, popular culture remains committed to folk forms like dabkeh and belly dance, while the middle classes - the natural audience for contemporary dance - remains emaciated after 15 years of civil war, civil unrest and migration.

One prominent effort to bridge the gap between Arabic folk and contemporary dance - which has also found a loyal following - is the Caracalla Dance Theater. Abdel-Halim Caracalla founded the troupe in 1970 with the aim of creating a hybrid dance language, merging Occidental and Oriental technique. Caracalla's oeuvre takes themes familiar to folk culture and dance, elevating them to high spectacle through rich costuming and the disciplined training of his dancers.

"There will always be the elite who looks for aesthetic beauty, which is not always the case in contemporary dance," explains dancer and choreographer Omar Rajeh. "But the scope is expanding."

A Caracalla alumnus, Rajeh is the co-founder and artistic director of the Beirut International Platform of dance (BIPOD) and co-founded the Maqamat Dance Company in 2002. BIPOD marked its fourth anniversary in 2008 with a program of local and international talent and a growing audience.

"We have a strong student audience," Rajeh adds, "and if we look at this year's BIPOD, we can see the range of the audience has considerably expanded - young people, families and the elderly. During BIPOD 2008, I was really pleased to see the same 70-year-old woman attend every single event."

Classical ballet dancer, choreographer and teacher Nada Kano, who founded the Beirut Dance Company, also exudes optimism about the Lebanese audience for dance. "The audience was [once] more elite but now it's really expanding because you don't have the language aspect to dance. Anyone can watch it," she says.

Kano's impressions of dance culture in Lebanon echo those of many other dance professionals who have studied abroad. "The contemporary dance scene in Lebanon is very young," she observes. There has always been Caracalla, she adds, but there's been little progress in terms of contemporary dance.

Kamil Mroueh teaches modern jazz, classical ballet and belly dance at the Amadeus Music Academy. "The Civil War destroyed the middle class," he says. "The rich, who are mostly interested in cars, real estate and marrying someone wealthy, don't genuinely care about art."

Though skeptical of the aesthetic maturity of Lebanon's upper classes, Mroueh remains confident that anyone can watch dance. Lebanese and international performers often don't charge audiences to see their work here, he observes, (whether during festivals or thanks to the sponsorships of non-profit arts associations), so not earning a lot of money is no excuse not to be interested in dance.

A more difficult obstacle to contemporary dance gaining a firm foothold in Lebanon, in Mroueh's view, is the way the form is traditionally perceived. The reason Lebanese audiences are more attracted to Caracalla-style performance than to modern dance is a constant awareness of one's image. "Traditional dancing" - with its elaborate, colorful costumes, lighting and a specific kind of music - he believes, appeals to an "ostentation" that is part of the Lebanese mentality.

"Caracalla caters to that," he says, "whereas modern dancers show themselves." It's an utter frankness that is hard to accept in Lebanon, "knowing that we are too serious and have a facade of never letting go."

A related aspect of dance reception that Mroueh dislikes is the gender (and sexuality) issues audiences project upon professional dancers. He says this is a problem he's experienced personally as a male belly dancer - a form he refrains from practicing because of the "mutterings" it would provoke in the audience.

"I was really upset when I read a recent article about modern dance, that was focused on the image of a very 'gay-looking' male dancer," says Mroueh. "It was promoting the wrong thing: sexuality, and not the dance itself." He believes the real problem of modern dance in Lebanon is that "everything is mashed together: sexuality, politics and religion," an association he speculates might be related to Lebanese "suffering a lot of sexual frustration."

This complex is less evident in other parts of the region, he argues. "In Egypt, there are male and female belly dancers," he says. "They are the best, and we will never dance like them. But here, you're practically hitting a man in the b***s with belly dancing!"

In Rajeh's experience, though, audiences' minds are surprisingly open to the idea of a male dancer. "I never thought about me or my body in terms of taboos," Rajeh says. He feels a body can be both feminine and masculine, but these are not its only characteristics.

Dancing is discovering the body's resources. "It's interesting for me to look at the infinite qualities of the body," he continues, "and how these qualities develop in different ways."

A greater challenge, he believes, is the more general societal attitudes toward modern dance, which affect not only the formation of audiences but of young dancers as well. While his own parents were "okay" with his decision to go into dance, they stressed that it was a risky career choice. His more distant relatives were less receptive. "What a pity," he recalls them saying. "There is no future in it."

"Since the foundation of Maqamat Dance Company [in 2002], I think there has been a lot of progress," Rajeh continues. "I am optimistic about the future even though it's going to be difficult."

For Mroueh, the significance of society in cultivating an audience for local dance is less significant than the role of the state in supporting the form. The Syrian and Egyptian states financially support their own operas and classical ballet institutions, he argues, while the Lebanese seem to be interested only in music.

"The real problem hindering the development of modern dance [here] is the lack of peace, social security and government funding," Mroueh says. "We need four or five years of peace in a row so that dancers who live abroad can come back and enrich our dancing scene."

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.