Quarter Star Summer 2006
Naheda
Zaina’s Note: I am pleased to highlight one of the most innovative dancers to ever hit the stage. I first met Naheda and her charming husband Guenter, at the 2005 Rakkasah Sunday evening show held at the El Morocco Restaurant. She was then and still is full of energy, excitement and charsima. From her turban head wraps to those double swords, she always leaves the audience wanting more.
This year she followed up that 2005 show with an EYE POPPING and BREATH HOLDING Double Sword performance, again at the El Morocco. I had never seen anyone balance a sword with their toes, but never had I seen a dancer bend over backwards with swords crossed at the neck. Absolutely amazing.
Here for your reading pleasure is an article about Naheda, written by Guenter Bauer, her husband.
I have left this article in its original format - appreciating the accented english. I personally like this read much better, as it reflects the writer. Changing it would only alter its feel - - I love it the way it is.
Guener Dedi (Naheda)
About your art: A dance which cures the soul and does the soul freely
"Naheda" - the Oriental Dance returned the self-esteem to the young woman from boar village / Ludwigsstadt at Kronach
Of Wolfgang Braunschmidt - editorial staff conductor of the New cocastle press written and published within the framework of the upper Franconian exhibition in Kronach in March 2002.
Guener Dedi was three years old when their parents got them and their three siblings from Turkey in 1968 to Germany. Their father and their mother wanted to have their children with themselves after they had found a secure job in the porcelain factory in Tettau in the circle Kronach and beat roots slowly so good one that as foreigners in the federal republic of the late years 60-er now could. The integration problems of their parents were strange to the small Guener. She went to the kindergarten and the school in Tettau and began a training to the hairdresser. The running-footpath was their home, the Turkey in the consciousness of the girl a country, that was far away from theirs home, the Tettau was called and not Izmir - the city in which she was born. The life at the running-footpath was worth living for Guener Dedi. However it the day at which she should find out came which it means to be a Turkish woman. Almost overnight she was married to the man who their parents had selected for them. There it was just 16 years old once. She found out the name of the foreigner to whom their future husband told himself only according to the engagement.
The girl knew: It did not have any chance and have to submit to the will of their parents. The life in Turkey was completely other than that in Tettau. Guener Dedi tells how she was humiliated and oppressed: "As a woman I did not have any self-esteem anymore." After zweieinhalb years it held it no more from and the pistol set to their parents onto the breast. The young woman wanted to be gotten back to Germany - or the life depart. The threat worked: "I was, "as fast as I was married, again back in Germany. With my child in the arm I arrived in Tettau at my parents." And there were new difficulties. The apprenticeship was natural in the hairdresser's salon gone, and with the authorities a long fight for the residence permit was lead. With Heinz - she found glass work and, against the will of their parents, "the man of my life": Guenter Bauer. "It", said the 36 - year today, "got me from the deep hole." "And the belly dance", complements her man.
One wrote the last day of the year 1992. A New Year's Eve party visited the pair that lives in the own house with his three children in boar village at Ludwigsstadt in knoll creek. "Suddenly the light ended and from the loudspeakers oriental music droned", Guener Dedi remembers. A cone of light followed a splendidly dressed dancer through the room. "She danced so supplely. I was totally fascinated. It was as in a dream. I felt fantastic, as in the paradise of the old Egypt, as in a fairy tale from thousand and a night." Suddenly Guener Dedi, as a lot other one from the public, found on the dance floor. When the other ones went home, the young woman decided: "I learn oriental belly dance." She discovered in this New Year night the personal freedom again, and Guenter Bauer won that according to strengths. Every week drove Guener Dedi to yard. "I visited for three hours the instruction, and Guenter waited for so long for me in the car": Anytime this instruction did not suffice her anymore. She could be trained from professional teachers and teachers: of Nesrin Topkapi (Turkey), of Samira Gamal (Nuremberg), of Yamuna (Attain), of Leyla Jouvana (Yugoslavia), of Prof. Hassan Khalil, Beata and Horadio (Berlin), of Magdy El-Leisy, Hoda Ibrahim and Taemer Yahya (Egypt) and of Momo Kadous and Soraya (Cairo). With great success.
Today Guener Dedi is teacher and choreographer for Oriental Dance.
It returned what she had missed for so long to her: Self-esteem. "More did not feel sudden I me than slave, but as a woman. I learned to be proud and upright in this life." When the soul had been cured, Guener Dedi decided on performing with their art. What was missing was a pseudonym. The selection was difficult until a fat, Arabian cook called out at an appearance of the belly dancer in a restaurant: "Naheda" - Breathe from beauty. Guener Dedi had found what she had searched. Naheda inspired many people of their art. The declaration for that lies in the fascination of the oriental belly dance, Guener Dedi says: "He is art, culture, fitness and gentle gymnastics at the same time. He is something aesthetic, something beautiful. It permits to realize feminine feelings. He provides the joy of living of Orient: to be simply loose, away of the stress which the Europeans expose themselves to continuously." And still a little Naheda is important: That their pupils have between 16 and 60 so great fun at the belly dance. To be able to experience something of this feeling the visitors of the upper Franconian show in Kronach in the 11th hall In the whole federal territory Naheda occurred alias Guener Dedi and their public carried away, just the same, as she inspired the professional world. Does the move not lure there into the city, the possible increase of the success? Guener Dedi laughs and answers with a short, but certain "refusal" and with the declaration: "Know", she says, "Boar village lies for some people far away from the pulsating life of this world. For me, however, boar village lies in the middle."
ORIENTAL DANCE: Egypt is regarded as a birth place of the Raks al Sharki translates "Oriental dance". Here the roots for those hip movements which today still are characteristic for the African and Brazilian dances as samba and rumba lie since the period of the New Empire. The former Egypt with his ueberfeinerten culture thought special favor of the emotions represented with urwuechsigen, healthy and rhythmic body movements. The isolation is characteristic for the Oriental dance - mentioned also belly dance. It goes around a conscious become every single part's of the body, and the experience of an earth-associated materiality. Although Emotionalitaet and the ability to be able to make oneself go are important, the technique is irreplaceable.
All Copyrechte at Wolfgang Braunschmidt
and "Naheda" 2002
