DANCING WOMEN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume V, Issue 40, 4 October 1890, Page 7

DANCING WOMEN.

HE dancing of most of the Southern European nations is distinctly fervid, but it is as water unto wine when compared with the unreluaggUKX strained attitudes of Egyptian dancing gills ’ All travellers concur in admitting that nothing in other lands can compare with the dancing of the Ghawazi,as the girls are called whose pleasing and graceful motions are so famous. These Ghawazi belong to a class which existed as long ago as the time of the Pharaohs, and whose traditions have descended unchanged and unbroken to modern times. The dancing girl of the desert, is a warm, passionate, pulsating creature whose audacious postures sometimes shock timid AngloSaxon travellers who stop to see her as they journey up the Nile. From childhood she has been trained to these plastic poses, which the dwellers in the desert look upon with pleasure. It was from these Egyptian dancing women in the ages past that the Grecian Bacchanals borrowed the wildest and most reckless attitudes for their fetes. Egypt is the mother of all things, of learning and of dancing. The traveller who has been on the borders of the Soudan at Assouan (-the ancient Syene) is pretty sure to have seen the Egyptian Ghawazi in their glory, and if he has seen them he will never forgot them. He remembers landing at Assouan in the warm, scented night, and going, in company with ladies and gentlemen haunted by the same curiosity as his own, and escorted by the crew of the steamboat, carrying lanterns on long poles, to some quaint Egyptian dwelling, festooned with palms and coloured lanterns. While seated on a divan covered with soft rugs, and luxuriously enjoying a performed cigarette, he has seen avision of delight—beautiful girls, slim, graceful and pretty of feature, approaching in a group of native musicians armed with tom-toms, tambourines and lutes. He remembers how he noted the great liquid eyes of the girls, which sparkled like dancing water ; their creamywhite skins, their gowns of filmy, almost transparent material ami their golden necklaces. Or he remembers the dusky Vepus, clad only from the hips downward in a skirt of gauze. Above the waist line she was free, except for a little Turkish jacket that passed beneath hei bosom and was held in place by a strap over the arm. Sometimes these Egyptian women dance while holding swords in their hands, ami they whirl the flashing blades around in such reckless fashion that they dazzle the eyes of the Franks who gaze upon them. Voluptuous, too, are the Spanish dances. They have in them all the sinuous grace, the daring effrontery of the dances of North Africa, Spain’s near neighbour. But they are also characterised by more fierceness, suddenness of motion, rapidity in change of gesture. The dancing of the Spanish gipsies has in it the fire and fr£hzy of the proud Moorish race combined with the subtle sensuousness of the Egyptians, from whom the gipsies come in direct descent. The wanderer among the hills around picturesque Granada has often come upon a gipsy camp, and in a moment been surrounded by a throng of dusky damsels, each clamouring to tell his fortune. He has listened to the astonishing adventures predicted for him by these children of the sun, and, when tired of their stories, has, with a few pieces of silver, paid them to dance for him to the sound of the castanets in the shade of some ancient oak. What dignity, what wild grace in the movements of these beautiful women, clad in fantastic, parti coloured garments, with jingling ornaments attached to their short skirts I How they bound and bend, recline and arise, supple as panthers and alert as birds in the air. The gipsy dancers of Spain, once seen, are never to be forgotten. And the bolero, as the Sevi lianas dance it at one of those wild bailes in Andalusian evenings, when sky and earth are hot and the perfume of flowers penetrates in every recess ! How the pulses throb at the sight of the joyous bolero, with its eadenced steps, its leaps and bounds interpersed with languorous attitudes and capricious turns of wrist ami ankle, and proud an 1 coquettish archings of the wrist and neck. He who has not seen the Spanish woman dance the bolero—he wo ha vista nada (‘has seen nothing’), as the Spaniards themselves say. Then there is the wild, the weird, the uncanny, the extraordinary fandango, as it is danced in Spanish countries in South America. Here is a dance which combines absolute freedom of limb with a certain winsome grace and diablerie. He who has seen the fandango (lanced by the light of the moon in some coast town of Spanish America, the pretty women of mixed blood Hitting in and out among the tall Indians, negroes and caballeros with jingling spurs, will in after years love to linger over the recollection.