Performance to Sev Acher by Artie Barsamian and His Orchestra

I am so happy today to present a beautiful Armenian song that has been used for belly dance. My friend Linda gave me a stack of vintage belly dance albums over the summer, all of them by Armenian musicians, and that’s how I found this lovely recording of Sev Acher (Black Eyes) by Artie Barsamian and his Orchestra.

I’ve been able to find out that Artie Barsamian was from Massachusetts. He was a very accomplished clarinet and saxophone player, and he performed both Armenian music and jazz. He recorded 13 78s and then another 14 albums over his long career, and he also loved to play live shows. In the YouTube clips below, which feature performance footage interspersed with interviews, he tells a very funny story about how his dad wanted him to learn to play Armenian music, but Artie wasn’t that interested in it. He would play a few Armenian songs with his father, who was a violinist from South Boston, in order to get permission to take the car out! But of course, he later loved playing it.

Here is my performance to Sev Acher for the Winter Cairo Shimmy festival this past weekend. Due to the festival’s time limits I had to cut short the beautiful clarinet solo at the beginning, but I hope to perform to this magical song again when in-person performances resume. Enjoy, and please subscribe to my Monthly Newsletter while you are here. I share class information, my dance research, music and cultural notes and more!

San Francisco Bay Area Belly Dancer Alisa Greer performs to Sev Acher by Artie Barsamian and his Orchestra for Winter Cairo Shimmy 2020.

The is the musical life story of Artie Barsamian with interviews live performances.

You can read a bit more about Artie Barsamian in this Boston Globe article.

And here’s something quick and free you can do to help preserve Armenian heritage - sign this Change.org petition asking UNESCO to protect Armenian cultural and historical sites.

Fall 2020 Virtual Classes

Hello Dancers,

Well, we’re still sheltering in place here in California, so let’s keep belly dancing from our homes.

My Fall teaching schedule is up now on my Classes page. Registration for the classes through the SSF Parks and Rec starts on 9/4 for SSF Residents and 9/8 for everyone else. And the one bright side of virtual classes is that you can take them from anywhere, so please feel free to join us.

You can register for the Parks and Rec classes directly on their website. I hope to see you in class.

In addition to teaching, have also been using this shelter in place time to go through years of performance footage. I have always lacked the confidence to share my dancing on social media and so I neglected this part of being a dancer. It’s been nice to go through them all now and I will start sharing some here. I am working on my YouTube channel and I hope you will consider subscribing.

Here is one of the performances I posted there. It’s a lovely American Cabaret style performance from 2014 featuring live music by local belly dance favorites Meridian Band. I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you all for reading and I will look forward to seeing you in class.

Safinaz and Mahmoud El Leithy - صافينازومحمود الليثى

Hi Everybody,

I have some fun clips to share today, and at the bottom of this post there are some class updates if you’d like to skip ahead.

Shaabi Movies

This post is one I have been dreaming of doing for a long time. It’s pure joy, which is something we can probably all use more of right now.

A few weeks ago I did a short post featuring a film clip from the 1970s of the Egyptian belly dancer Souheir Zaki performing with the Shaabi singer Ahmed Adeweya.

Fast forward 40-something years and Egyptian cinema and TV movies still love belly dancers and shaabi singers together. Today I want to feature one of my favourite combinations, the belly dancer Safinaz and the Egyptian singer Mahmoud El Leithy.

Safinaz /صافيناز

Safinaz (صافيناز‎) is the stage name of the dancer Sofinar - I’ve seen her listed both as Sofinar Gourian and Sofinar Grigoryan. Either way, that is an Armenian name! I have followed her career with interest in part because I am also an Armenian belly dancer, but mostly because I just love her dancing. She is one of the most popular dancers in Egypt today and has been featured in several Egyptian films.

Although technically a foreign dancer in Egypt, I think she must be so popular among Egyptians because she does have the essence of Egyptian style in her soul. Her interpretations are nuanced and beautiful when the song calls for that, and she also exudes a kind of warm, playful, even silly, joy. She doesn’t seem to take herself too seriously and she doesn’t over do it. She has brought her own personality to Egyptian belly dance rather imposing another style of dance and simply calling it belly dance.

Safinaz and Mahmoud el Leithy /صافينازومحمود الليثى

Safinaz has paired with the Egyptian singer and actor Mahmoud El Leithy (محمود الليثى) in several films. His music is in the shaabi/mahraganat style. You can seen from these clips that he also has a lighthearted sense of humor and I think they are so much fun to watch together. The songs below are what I would call the lighter side of Shaabi music. For a more complete explanation of Shaabi, I highly recommend my teacher Amina Goodyear’s Shaabi music history page.

So without any more delay, here are a bunch of fun clips with this pair from their various movies. They never fail to make me smile. PS: If you are reading this in email, you actually have to click through to the post on my website to see the videos. I am not sure why, but you do!

فيلم #امان_ياصاحبي ... ( فيلم عيد الاضحي ٢٠١٧ ) سعد الصغير - محمود الليثي - بوسى صوفينار - نرمين_ماهر - عبد لسلام بدرية طلبة شيماء_سيف علاء_مرسى عبد الباسط ح...

اغنية اذا كان قلبك كبير غناء / محمود الليثي / صوفينار فيلم عمر وسلوي بطولة / كريم محمود عبد العزيز / بوسي / سعد الصغير / محمود الليثي / علاء مرسي / يوسف عيد ...

اغنية يا واد انت يا اجنبي غناء / محمود الليثي / صوفينار فيلم عمر وسلوي بطولة / كريم محمود عبد العزيز / بوسي / سعد الصغير / محمود الليثي / علاء مرسي / يوسف عي...

اغنية " بونبوناية / فيلم عيال حريفة بطولة / محمد لطفي - بيومي فؤاد - محمود الليثي - بوسي - سعد الصغير صوفينار - سليمان عيد - حسن عبد الفتاح - حسن الخلعي - ال...

I hope you enjoyed the clips and I will end this post with a few pictures of Safinaz too.

Class Updates:

I have a few class updates:

First of all, the City of South San Francisco is making three of my virtual beginning belly dance classes available for FREE in July. You can go to this post to see the class days and times and to get information on how to register.

I am also planning a drop-in virtual finger cymbals (zils) class for later this month and also working on my August schedule, so please contact me if you would like information on upcoming classes!

Happy Dancing!

صافيناز

Armenian Belly Dancer Safinaz - Sofinar Grigorian

صافيناز‎

Armenian Belly Dancer Safinaz

Performance Video - SirensFest

Last week in virtual belly dance class we danced to the song Zay el Assal (زي العسل). It is one of my favorites and coincidentally I was cleaning out a cupboard over the weekend and found a DVD recording of a performance I did using this song in 2016 at the North Bay Belly Dance Bazaar! I thought I would share it here:

I am slowly adding more performance footage to my YouTube channel, please subscribe if you you’d like to see more.

The North Bay Belly Dance Bazaar has been renamed and is now called SirensFest. It is a wonderful, positive event that truly celebrates bellydance! I had such a great time there. The festival is scheduled to go on this year, October 3 -4, 2020, and the organizer, TerriAnne Gutierrez, is planning to build a stage outside, so I feel very hopeful about this and I will keep everyone posted as I learn more.

The song Zay el Assal is one of my favorites. It was originally sung by the Lebanese singer and actress Sabah. She is considered one of the greats. Here is a clip of her singing it complied with some gorgeous photos of her throughout her lifetime. She was a glamorous figure until the end! There are many belly dance versions of this song today.

In other news, I am working on the schedule for my Virtual Summer Belly Dance Classes. Please sign up to be notified of these and future classes as soon as the information is available. Thanks so much for your support and happy dancing.