(As printed in the Quarter 2/06 Issue of The Belly Dancer Magazine)
Sausan, Egyptian Dance
Seattle, WA, October 2005
By: Roxelana
October 15 & 16th, a handful of lucky dancers gathered at the Hiawatha Community Center in West Seattle to learn classical Egyptian dance from Sausan. This incredible teacher was dragged from her San Francisco academy by Jaleh to teach us Puget Sounders her Code of dancing. Sausan crammed six months of classes into two four hour sessions. The fact that my brain didn't explode at the end of the first day is a testament to her style of teaching.
Sausan refers to such Egyptian greats like Samia Gamal, Taheya Carioka, Na'eema Akef, Nagua Fouad, and Fifi Abdou like old friends, demonstrating at a drop of a hip their various signature moves. If you've ever seen the old movies, you know them. I came away from this weekend wanting to stop at Scarecrow videos and check out the old movies and spend the rest of the week watching the dancers do what I just learned.
At the beginning of the weekend, Sausan explained her "Egyptian Code". Her aim is to preserve the classic Egyptian style of dancing, the same style you see in the old movies. While the dancing is gorgeous and fluid, it is different from what's being taught nowadays. Today, and especially in the West, the on isolations, articulations and accents. If you were to watch some of the old Egyptian movies, you’d notice the dancing is more in the torso than the hips.
That's the first, and main, rule of Sausan's Egyptian Code. "Dance from the heart." Specifically, dance from the chest. Sausan turned everyone in the workshop into human metronomes by the end of the first day, lifting our chests on the first and third beat of the music.
After the break, Sausan introduced the lower body movements. We did grapevines, side steps, and something she called an Egyptian shimmy, all with the bobbing bosom. You'd think the chest would stop moving when you focus on the hip, but Sausan's style is not about isolating body parts. It's about containing and controlling them. The energy may be going to the hips, but that chest is still lifting with the first and third beat, the arms still gathering the energy for you to use. Classical Egyptian is, as I mentioned, a fluid dance; there's very little standing still, posing, hitting an accent, traveling to a second spot, posing, etc. There are accents and poses, but not as much as what's being taught today.
Sausan also pointed out where the beats are in the rhythms - good transition times, when to undulate up and when to undulate down. She also gave a taste of her class on drum solos. (I hope she visits again to teach that class; it sounds fabulous!)
While Egyptian dance doesn't need to be choreographed - like all forms of belly dance, once you know the basic building blocks, you can create a work of art as you go - it really helped me to have something I could practice the Code with at home.
With this beautiful routine, Sausan covered everything she taught the day before, plus more. What more? Well, how about the hand movements (dominant hand turns counterclockwise when doing torso work; it turns clockwise with hip work), the Royal walk (the only move I am still struggling with), the soliloquy (which is a more descriptive term for taqsim), the entrance and the nephis, the essence of the dance?
Throughout the entire weekend, which included a fun evening out at Mamounia with half of the Saturday participants, Sausan was friendly, open, upbeat and free with information. She countered the usual workshop oh my God, Ii can't do this!" panic with the permission to relax and let our brains process the information. The relaxed attitude allowed the information to percolate through the many layers of our brain, right down to our chests and hips.
If you are interested in learning the classic Egyptian style or just looking to bring a sense of lightness and joy into your dance, I cannot recommend highly enough Sausan. Since I'm not sure when she'll come back to the Puget Sound and I doubt any of us could afford to commute to San Francisco for her weekly classes for half a year, I think you should take the week-long session. Not only do you learn all we did over the weekend, you get to eat at Sausan's restaurant.
Mmmm, good food and good dancing? What else do you need? For more information, go to her website at: http://www.sausanacademy.com/
Thank you, Sausan, for sharing your knowledge. Thank you, Jaleh, for bringing her to West Seattle.
