Dancy done

[bethlakshmi]

Yeah!

Got to see dancing ladies last night. FINALLY.

Mostly it was wonderful to see the gang. That was definitely my favorite part. The day's topic was Karshlama - a 9-beat Middle Eastern rhythm. Specifically how to dance to it, given that our improvisational experiment called "The Road Show", uses this beat for one of the songs -- a song called "Rampi, Rampi".

I'm gonna jot down a few notes... on about your business, unless you're a big dance geek.


So... you're still reading? I warned you this was gonna be geeky.

Karshlama is 9-beats, and it has a reeling feel to it:
D-t-D-ttt

Which is:
*1*-2-3-*4*-5-6-789

Where the numbers in stars are the D=doum (see Jas' Drum page if the drum terminology has lost you). The 789, are the three teks at the end.

This means you can do a lot of dance combos:
- slow, slow, quick, quick, quick
- slow, slow, pause, pause, pause
- quick-quick-quick, quick-quick-quick, some-thing-else
- quick-quick-quick, quick-quick-quick, breathe-breathe-breathe

Some of the combos we did:

NOTE: R=right, L=left

- 2 repeats of the rhythm:
- Doum - 2 right hip ups
- Doum - 2 left hip ups
(end measure one)
- D-t-D - right-left-right hip
- ttt - step left, pivot
(end measure two)

- 1 repeat of rhythm:
- doing a body "slither" - a vertical figure 8 of both chest and hips
- Doum - step R
- Doum - step L

- 1 repeat of rhythm:
keeping a slightly bouncy quality, powered by the L foot
- D - R foot back
- D - R foot front
- ttt - step R, replace L, step R

- 1 repeat
- D-t-D - step right, rock back, step R, angling R
- ttt - float pivot to angle L
- repeat on other foot.

We also did:
- 3 pt. turns, which a final floating step
- grape vine with a hop on the fourth step


The first two are probably my favorites, but they are all nice "what do you do with 9 beats?" solutions.

Comments

[mermaidlady]

Taj choreographed a folkloric cane dance to "Shishiler", which has a "rampi, rampi" chorus. Same song? It might have been a 9 beat rhythm, but I'm having a hard time remembering it all...

[lakshmi-amman.livejournal.com]

Since this is improv dance to live music, it's never the same song twice. :) We tend to follow Rosa's lead in how we arrange it. She and the other violinist, Lynne, work out a general plan ahead of time, and the drummers and sometimes-singer (me) follow along. We ended up codifing the phrase "habibi!" for Rosa to yell when it's the last round of the chorus.


We work off Mimi Spencer's "A Near Eastern Music Primer" book which has a version of Rampi, Rampi that you hear quite often in live ME music sets at Pennsic - as the late Ms. Spencer is very well beloved.

I could hum it for you, but that doesn't do very well via LJ. I can remember to drag out the music book sometime when I come to your place...

[dreda.livejournal.com]

I <3 Rampi, Rampi.

Since you're dancy-geeking, and I'm thinking about drums, how about sevens? Nine-beat rhythms make sense to me, because mapping a hiccup onto the end of a nice square eight-beat feels not weird - but sevens...I just can't map, and I think that's why I have such a hard time playing them.

Maybe I should bring my drum notes to May Day as well. ;)

[lakshmi-amman.livejournal.com]

I love 7 beats! But I have broken down my brain until it'll accept nearly any flavor of modern or medieval, Western, Middle Eastern or Indian thing as music. :) Playing it may be a different story, though...

For me... I have to break down the tendancy to want to do Indian 7 beats, since the emphasis is a bit different, and I dance to an Indian 7 beat song which I really love, so my brain automatically wants that kind of 7 beat.

Indian music is defined by the constructs that make it up. Nadanam (http://www.nadanam.com/bharatnatyam/b_tjg.htm) does better than I ever could at explaining. For a 7-beat rhythm, I'm most used to tishra jati triputa tala. That translates to:

1 three beat leghu, 2 drutam

where a leghu is clap, + n-1 counts,
a drutam is a clap and a wave (so you could call it a "2 beat leghu" but you wouldn't. Why wouldn't you? I don't know, because that's just how it's done and if you do it any other ways, little Indian gnomes will come and beat you up in the night.

So... this decomposes to:

clap-2-3-clap-wave-clap-wave

Now... I hestitate to transform that to drum beats. For one, Indians don't use doumbeks or darbukas to my knowledge - they prefer mridundams (a cylinder with heads on each side) or tabla. But... if you doumbek-i-tized it, it would be:

D--D-D-

And then of course, you'd do infinitely more complex things interweaving the basic structure with all sorts of complicated techniques. Like:

DtkDtDt

But that'd be very Middle Eastern... I'm not familiar with Indian drum technique... I don't think they stick to just one measure at a time - a sequence can span multiple measures, and come back and meet the flow later. That's one reason why dancers will have a nattuvanar playing tala with the beat the dancer actually has to follow.

---------------------------

Now... Middle Eastern-wise I actually had to go look at Jas's Page (http://www.khafif.com/rhy/rhythm.html), as he's the best drum site I know of... He has the phrases working both ways:

kalamantiano is like the Indian 7 beat above - 3+2+2

laz is the reverse - 2+2+3 - most folks I talk to think of this as what 7 beats should feel like.

and then even further down the page, he does rachenitsa:

1-+-2-+-3-+-4-|
D---D---D---k-|
D---T---T---k-|
D---k---D---k-|

Although he explains this as a 2+2+3 - the way I see it is as a reverse of the 8->9 idea. If a 9 beat is

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and breath
repeat...

Then this is

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 (quick like a bunny)
repeat...

as if you cut off the last part of that otherwise reasonably square 8/8 measure. Since this was a common problem I had learning to play the violin, it makes a lot of sense to me... but maybe I'm a mutant. So that's another way to see things...

[simoon.livejournal.com]

This is wonderfully useful!!!

Thank you!

-Carol.