Esraa Warda is decolonising dance and reviving the rebellious roots of Rai
Copyright © Tamara Hijazi.
Words by Dalia Al-Dujaili.
From the Kawliya dance in Iraq to hijabi pole dancer Neda M. aka ‘Hijabiluscious’, dance has proven itself to be an act of political resistance and social action. Brooklyn-born and raised Esraa Warda understands this all too well. The dancer’s practice is inherently concerned with women’s private spaces and a disinterest in appealing to a hypersexualised male gaze. She found herself dancing among other women in typical living room settings where she learnt “directly from the source” and thus, she adopted the traditional way the Algerian rai (pronounced ‘rye’) dance is performed. The irony of sitting on her sofa, the sunlight of an unusually warm October day streaming into the airy living room of her Brooklyn apartment, is not lost on me.
Esraa’s dancing, along with Cheikha Rabia’s vocals – the iconic Algerian folk singer – is as much interested in preserving the slowly declining visibility of marginalised Algerian culture as it is in empowering herself and her students. By focalising the women-led traditions, the act of seeing Esraa Warda and Cheikha Rabia on stage is by nature an act of decolonisation, an antidote to orientalism and self-exoticisation – “Princess Jasmine type shit” as she calls it – and the patriarchy’s stronghold over women’s dance.
Popularised in the Algerian city of Oran, rai emerged in the 1920s as a countercultural movement, juxtaposing the classical poetry of traditional Algerian music. Because of the amount of time that women would spend indoors together, the genre thrived in economically deprived and highly populated urban areas. This oppositional nature, as well as the use of street slang and themes of bawdiness, made rai both hugely popular among the common people and hugely unpopular among the upper echelons of Algerian mainstream culture, resulting in a distaste that remains to this day. Esraa and Rabia are just two of the many practitioners on a mission to reinstate the artistry of rai and assert its rightful place in North African culture. “You’re kind of like a punk rockstar,” I tell Esraa as I am reminded of the UK's 1980s punk movement, similarly censored and repressed for its politically disruptive attitudes. “Cheikha Rabia is the punk rockstar. She’s an 78-year-old punk rockstar,” she replies.
“I was never taught that dance was for other people, but I learned dance was a way to communicate amongst other people… to your family, your cousins, your aunts, and so forth. So for me, it always was a communication tool,” Esraa tells me. “It was a way to also connect with my body and it was the only dance form where I felt that my body made sense. Moving in that way. Everything just kind of clicked for me.” With the gendered segregation of community gatherings such as weddings came the rise of a women’s economy in Algeria where women would perform for other women, Esraa tells me, resulting in an ecosystem which was controlled entirely by women. This ecosystem was made up of “transmissions of women who learned music and studied music and then taught other women in their community… You could easily work gigs for a couple of months and never see a man, unless maybe he's your cab driver,” the dancer continues.
Being in a women’s ecosystem has helped Esraa take ownership of her sexuality whilst also desexualising her body’s movement in the dance. “I like to vibrate my hips and some people don't like to do that because there's a certain sense of shame attached to it. I'm very adamant about keeping that, even though I don't want my ass to be the main centre of attention of who I am and what I do in my dance. But I also want to make it a point that it's a part of my dance and it's a part of my culture, and I'm not going to be ashamed of it.”
Whilst it’s important to Esraa to stay true to the roots of rai dance and music, she’s also aware that by simply staging her performance for an audience reinvents and modernises the dance, since its origins are the “informal living room spaces” made up of family members and women from the community. She wants to validate both spaces; “Putting [rai] on a stage in the Western marketplace for music is also very beneficial for us to keep practising, promoting and preserving our art forms.” Because Algerian culture is, to an extent, hidden away from global commodification and the diluting effects of globalisation, the culture has been able to keep thriving and persevering in the confines of private spaces. “The private sphere is super important. But that's the big question,” Esraa asserts. “Should you take something that's usually done in community, privately, and then put it on a stage? Because that would go against the context of where it actually comes from.”
Growing up, Esraa travelled back and forth between Algeria and New York, with a foot firmly rooted on each land and a heart connected to many communities, which evidently plays a vital role in both her artistic practice and her teaching. “Nothing bothers me more in this world than feeling unconnected and ungrounded in the dance world. In the United States, [dance] is very commercial,” argues Esraa, “and it's bastardised.” With the rise of online dance classes during the pandemic, the availability of dance also brings the complication of learning the art form of a community of people with which the student might have no contact. “You could completely disassociate the art form from a community,” Esraa reasserts. “The fear of that ever happening just irks the shit out of me. Lecturing on her culture and teaching dance has therefore become a key for Esraa in contextualising dance. Being “so far from the time and the place and the environment in which these traditions come from,” she says, “we constantly need to be re-centering and recontextualizing – especially for people who are not from these cultures.”
In a city like New York, it’s harder to disassociate from diverse communities than it is to integrate. Esraa’s practice is not only powerful for its ability to strengthen ancestral Algerian culture outside of its region, but also for its ability to engage all types of individuals into a community activity. “All of us have like identity markers, right? Some of us are African, some of us are Muslim, some of us are indigenous, some people are queer. And we feel that these categories automatically put you in a community of the same category. But that's not really the case. So I believe in a community of people who believe in the same principles, that's what my community is. People who actually believe we need to actively work on building a non-bigoted world.”
So for Esraa, there might be no other place that is better suited to her than Le Guess Who? Festival. Taking place in Utrecht, Netherlands from 10th-14th November, LGW? has a startlingly global line-up and could well take the lead for the most diverse festivals currently running. It’s the perfect place for Esraa to embody her ethos of engaging in a community event where people of all backgrounds share the same principles. For LGW? Festival, she’s excited to share with audiences a “very old school” style of rai, the ‘ghasba’ style, which refers to the flute (ghasba) used in the performance. For a highly mechanised age, it’s refreshing to see performers engage in a deeply original style instead of remoulding the dance around contemporary sensibilities. “Doing a very rooted performance for a very globalised festival is what I'm really excited about,” Esraa claims.
Having performed many times with Cheika Rabia, “an icon. But like a diamond in a rough kind of icon,” as Esraa sees her, she’s excited for LGW? Festival to propel Rabia into the “visibility that she deserves. In particular, for the Algerian diaspora,” notes Esraa, “because a lot of our biggest icons don't live in Algeria anymore,” owing to the lack of supportive infrastructure necessary to grow on a macro level as an artist. The dance hopes that the showcase will mean that one day, they can be invited back to perform collectively in Algeria.
In addition to Le Guess Who? Esraa will be playing at globalFest in New York in January and working on the Rhythmology CD Project which Esraa created with Algerian percussionist Salim Beltitane. “The reason why this is such a big deal is because there's never really been an official resource for people to actually learn rhythms from this region. Most people have had to learn it orally, through other musicians or family members,” Esraa explains. “It's very common for an Algerian person to spend their whole life listening to certain rhythms and never know the name of them, or never know how it was played, for instance. So we wanted to actually create another African music resource that's created by North African people, not by Western people who just misinterpret our shit all the time.” The project will be going on tour in the US next spring, to provide dance and music workshops around the United States.
Find out more about Esraa Warda here and Le Guess Who? Festival here.