Unveiling the Dance: Arabic Dancing in an Urban English Landscape.

This ethnographic thesis presents an overview of dancing within Northampton, England, with a detailed study of one particular dancing community within the selected landscape. As such, it has three interlocking aims. Firstly, to develop an appropriate methodology that will assist in this discovery; secondly, to develop an appropriate method of textual and visual documentation; and thirdly, to select and examine in-depth the dancing of a group of English women engaging in Arabic dance through an application of a particular theoretical underpinning involving the notion of dancing as a reflexive or ritualised performative practice. I will suggest that this is a cultural process typical of dance in an urban environment in a pluralist and globalised culture. An ethnographic video and extended unedited video footage accompany this thesis. In Part I, Chapter One provides an overview and contextual information, placing the thesis within the academic arena of the study of dance as both experiential and a product of its socio-cultural context. Chapter Two explains the particular methodology and the role of video in the representation of dancing. Part II develops a series of narratives based on a singular case study of Arabic dancing, firstly by examining the academic and populist material on Arabic dancing where a constructed history appears to be based on a problematic evolutionary premise (Chapter Three), then detailing the ethnographic data of the participants, movement vocabulary, extended evidence from interviews and discussions with the informants and a precis of five dancing contexts or events (Chapters Four and Five), then moving on to explore the particular notions of femininity (Chapter Six) and spirituality (Chapter Seven) found in the case study as distinct from the populist texts. Chapter Eight continues the multiple narratives with a focus on dancing networks and dancing communities. The Conclusion returns to the primary themes from Chapter One in order to highlight areas for future comparative research on other dance forms found in contemporary urban societies.