Aspects of Arabo-Islamic musical culture in Greek zeibekiko

by Ed Emery [Institute of Rebetology, London]

This is not a rigorous academic paper. It is an attempt to map a terrain within the limits of my possibilities. It will be further developed at a later stage.[1]

When  the choreographic lexicon of Greek zeibekiko dance (along with hasapiko the main expressive dance associated with the definition-resistant genre of rebetiko) is viewed alongside that of Zeybek dance from Turkey, it is immediately apparent that they have a shared vocabulary. This shared vocabulary includes elements such as gesture, step, improvisational impulse, display of male prowess, the sub-texts of existential suffering and ecstatic transportation, and the physical and emotional support of bystanders.

There are various theories as to how zeibekiko dance arrives in Greece and comes to be a �rite of passage� dance in the Greek male�s statement of his identity. The Autobiography of Markos Vamvakaris explains how the Greeks of Syros would go to dance schools to learn it as an exotic dance, to be danced in costume with various military trappings at Carnival time.[2] Another account explains how the zeibekiko was a manly dance of the dayides of Constantinople, and the Zeibekiko politiko recorded by Dalgas in 1929 is already expressing a nostalgia for a lost world of narghil� smokers, knives, guns and zeibekiko.[3] And zeibekiko certainly features as a traditional local dance in the Greek island communities bordering on the present Turkish mainland.[4]

In Xenophon (400 BC) we have an account of men dancing with their full military accoutrements, which indicates that (as might be expected) this sort of thing has gone on for a very long time.[5] And in the video archives assembled by Ali Fuat Aydin we have ample evidence of Anatolian parallels (and arguably origins) for the kind of dance that Greeks do today.[6]

In my view it would be productive to move away from the largely fruitless discussions of origins (whether Hellenic or otherwise) of Greek zeibekiko, and to examine the building blocks that constitute the dance. In particular I shall propose that various elements of the performative ethos of zeibekiko are distinctive to the Arabo-Islamic area of musical experience.

The constitutive building blocks of Greek zeibekiko

What is striking is that until recently there has been so little research into the zeibekiko. In a sense it is marginal to academic discourse � which is strange, since zeibekiko is so very central to Greek male identity �  and this marginality joins its other marginalities: the fact that its discourse is created at the marginal overlap between Greek and Turkish cultures; that the Zeybeks themselves are a marginal and undefined people; and that the proletariat of Piraeus and Syros tekkedhes who created and popularised the Greek zeibekiko were  themselves marginal.

So, let us take a look at the constitutive elements of zeibekiko.

(a) Instrumentation: In the dance scenario, the characteristic Turkish instrumentation of zournas and davul does not really survive into the Greek rebetiko repertoire, since they are rural instruments for the open air gatherings. If they still reverberate it is as cultural nostalgia, as in the song �With zournadhes and daoulia�.[7] For Greece the characteristic instrumentation is the bouzouki and baglama. We should also note that the development of the musical text takes place in the modal framework of maqam.

(b) Improvisation: The dance steps, and also the musical text accompanying the dance (taximi), are improvised. The performative moment is not a performance of somebody else�s work (although a set song will generally be the text of that moment). Although the moment exists in a cultural continuity, it does not have a �past� as such; it is of the here and now. Nor is it intended to have a future life (recording; transcription; reproducibility). In fact it is resistant to appropriation beyond the moment in which it happens.

(c) Originality: The dance-moment and the music-moment are not pre-engendered blocks of creativity: the creativity lies in the moment, although the performance will certainly contain pre-constituted micro-blocs (motifs, steps, routines) which are generic and recognisable. There is no assumption of a formal purity of choreographic gesture, steps etc. The dance is idiosyncratic. Whereas in Greece there is no expectation of excellence in the dance movements (the notion of excellence comes in the fulness of emotional expression), there do exist criteria of what constitutes bad zeibekiko. Depending on the stance of the critic, these may include touristic dancing (balancing chairs, glasses of wine etc), women dancing, foreigners dancing, etc.

(d ) Ethos: The ethos of zeibekiko is that of the lone dancer, expressing his inner feelings. The semi-controlled abandonment of self. They are more likely to be feelings of existential suffering than joy. In early zeibekiko manifestations the dancer stakes his claim to the song-dance (parangelia) and will defend his right to that song-dance, if necessary to the death.[8]

(e) Ecstatic state: The dancer pre-prepares himself for the moment of dance. He enters into the �mood� of the dance. The dance cannot be danced �cold�. The mood is established by many factors. These include the incremental growth throughout the evening of a feeling of community and musical transportation among the audience (kefi). This feeling has to be maintained by the musicians. It is an act of social violence to break this feeling. If it is lost, people leave the gathering very rapidly.

(f) Mood enhancement: The semi-ecstatic state may be taken to a higher level of ecstasis by the use of narcotic substances. These take various forms, depending on the historic period, the cultural climate and the forms of prohibitionism in force at the given time. They include hashish, alcohol, pipe tobacco (the nargil� water pipe) and latterly the cigarette, which became the necessary cultural appurtenance of both dancers and bouzouki-players in Greece.

(g) Audience and bystanders: In practice zeibekiko requires an audience. Without an audience it would be like the sound of one hand clapping. The expressive isolation of the dancer resonates off the presence of the others as parea. Lately it has become fashionable for the dancer�s friends to gather round him as he dances, kneeling with one knee on the floor and clapping rhythmically to fire the creativity of his dance.

(h) Earthly contact: The gestural vocabulary of zeibekiko includes the striking of the earth � the characteristic sweeping hand gesture. This has its metaphoric parallel in the �ardiyyah� ground tone of modal music � the central tone to which the music returns, the characteristic drone presence within bouzouki music. In other words, this is an improvisation which can permit itself flights of fancy but which always maintains an earth contact. It is worth thinking that in earlier times zeibekiko would have been danced shoeless, giving a barefoot contact with the bare earth. [Vamvakaris relates that he got his first pair of shoes at the age of 16[9]*]

(i) Rhythm: The rhythms of zeibekiko are addressed by Panayiotis Agiakatsikas in another paper for this conference.[10] European observers have seen the dance as having �no beat but a continuous rhythm�.[11] This may relate to the far slower Turkish form of the dance, in which difficult dance gestures are maintained for agonisingly long periods. In its Greek version, however, the music has a very distinctive cyclicity. In the playing of Markos Vamvakaris and his associates there is the sense of a great rolling wheel of instrumentation, with various smaller cyclicities operating within it.[12]

(j) Musical rapport: As well as being duty-bound to maintain the state of kefi, good musicians are closely attentive to the expressive needs of the dancer. Today�s bouzoukists tend to take off into flights of self-absorbed virtuosity. This was not always so. The musicians would accompany, support, transport the dancer into his state of ecstasis. This called for a flexibility of rhythm and pace � depending for instance on whether the dancer is large-built and ponderous or small and light-footed.[13] 

(k) Physical pain: In early Greek zeibekiko the full achievement of the ecstatic moment was sometimes accompanied by the dancer�s use of a knife to inflict personal injury on himself, possibly with the drawing of blood (analies). This has since gone out of fashion.[14]

Arabo-Islamic elements in the zeibekiko dance of Greece

Having listed some of the constitutive blocks of Greek zeibekiko dance, I now move to propose that various elements of its performative ethos are distinctive to the Arabo-Islamic area of musical experience. [I should say at once that �Arabo-Islamic� is here an undifferentiated shorthand for Islamic musical culture extending across North Africa and the Middle East.]

There is by now a well-documented examination of the role of music in Islam, and particularly its role in the peripheries of Islam, where it plays an assistive part in the initiate�s achievement of divine knowing.[15]

In that account, the improvisational performance of music, and its performance with appropriate modes (maqam) and rhythms (iqa�), effect a transportation of the listener/auditioner to a higher spiritual state. Musicians and auditioners are not separate � they are part of one single constitutive creative moment. The ecstatic state has a general statement �  tarab � but also an exalted state � kayf, often referred to as saltanah, which may be translated as �modal ecstasy�.[16] In the dance traditions of Islam there are the �whirling� group manifestations associated with the Mevlevi. There are also the rather different rituals of individual ecstatic dance that take place to the accompaniment of music in the tekke of the other Sufi orders. 

The image of the lone dancer, transported by music and maqam into a state of ecstasy, dancing to the point of keeling over, and having fellow adepts who watch solicitously, both heightening the moment of transportation with clapping and calling, and then tending to the fallen initiate in his moment of falling down, is well established in Islamic iconography from the earliest times to the present day.

I suggest that the Greek zeibekiko, in addition to partaking of the specific culture of the Zeybeks, also participates in this wider sphere of Arabo-Islamic dance culture.

Today�s Greeks would neither expect nor aspire to be transported into state of divine knowing and ecstasy through zeibekiko dance. These days they achieve their moments of gnosis through the Orthodox liturgy. But in the not so distant past Greeks lived under the Ottoman empire, were in constant contact with Islamic cultural practices, and may indeed have been Muslims themselves.

Greek zeibekiko lives substantially within rebetiko. It is by now a commonplace � but nonetheless worth repeating � that many of the most cherished terms of Greek rebetiko culture are Islamic in inspiration � not only �derti� and �pseftiki dounya� [see below] but also phraseology such as �sto tekke mas�, �ela dervisi mou�, and latterly �Allah�. I have suggested elsewhere that the term �rebetiko� itself may plausibly be derived from �ribat�, the place of Islamic spiritual retreat associated with Sufism.

In our case, the closest parallels that we are likely to find between Greek zeibekiko and Turco-Islamic dance come in the musical practices of the Bektashi-Alevi sect, and the wandering poets and troubadours associated with that sect.[17] Although pursued for its perceived heretical tendencies, this sect was in no sense marginal, having for instance, a close connection with the Janissaries in Ottoman times. In Martin Stokes�s account a characteristic central theme is the �separation from the beloved� (wherein the divine Beloved and the lover may be interchangeable). Dance operates as a means of transcending that separation. Leaving selfhood (going into the state of ecstasis) one enters into the oneness of the divine. The poet expresses the pain of this separation, and rails against the false world of appearances that he inhabits.[18] For any student of rebetiko lyrics this discourse is immediately recognisable. The Turkish word for the pain of separation is derti, and this is imported unchanged into rebetiko as the archetypal expression of existential pain (�kai to derti mou sto bouzouki mou xechno�). The Turkish phrase for the false world enters rebetiko in half-translation, as �pseftiki dounya�. One might add that the Bektashis make use of the long-necked Turkish lutes (saz, baglama) which are among the precursors of the bouzouki.

Having earlier summarised the distinctive features of Greek zeibekiko, if we now restate them in abbreviated form it becomes possible to see clear parallels with Arabo-Islamic transportative dance culture, and particularly that of the Sufis:

A male dancer, dancing singly (but not necessarily alone). A pre-requirement of a state of heightened existential sensitivity (kefi), created by the music, but possibly assisted by alcohol or narcotics. The maqam frame of the accompanying musics. The steady cyclicity of rhythm, whereby the music becomes circular rather than linear (and the movement of the dancer as a turning upon himself [19]). The role of improvised instrumentals (taqsim) in establishing the mood of maqam. The presence of supportive bystanders � not an audience, but people who support the dancer in the transportation into ecstasy. Symbiosis of musicians and dancer in the moment of ecstatic expression. Idiosyncratic personal vocabulary of step, stance and gesture, drawn from an identifiable generic lexicon of dance. The dance as expression of existential anguish, having to do with man and his relation to his selfhood. Permissible moment of physical self-mutilation.

The gestural lexicon of Greek zeibekiko contains one particular moment which we could regard as a vestigial remnant of purely Islamic culture. This is what I call �the trope of the false stumble�. It is the moment when the dancer appears to stumble momentarily, as if losing control of his self, and then regains his stability.[20] It appears that this alludes to the achievement of trance-ecstasy, the falling-down moment of Sufi dance, when the careful hands of the bystanders help the initiate to a place of safety.

Padova � 28.vi.07

[6] The work includes An Account Of Fieldwork Researching The Zeibekiko In Turkey [Hydra Rebetiko Conference 2004] and The Modalities Of Zeybek Dance In Western Anatolia (with Cenk G�ray) [Hydra Rebetiko Conference 2005]. 

Twenty-one recorded tracks of Turkish Zeybek dance can be found at

CD1 "egenin gizi"

04.03.2006 � Recorded at Middle East Technical University � Ankara � Turkey

http://www.divshare.com/download/985919-8f4

CD2 "zeybek havalari"

14.07.2006 � Recorded at Middle East Technical University � Ankara � Turkey

http://www.divshare.com/download/986377-faf

CD3 "zeybek havalari-II"

06.04.2007 � Recorded at Turkish-American Association � Ankara � Turkey

http://www.divshare.com/download/986945-24a