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

[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...