Personal dance developments and insights

I was sitting and wandering today through the rain in a park, then I put this song on and felt sorrowful and the need to dance Zeibekiko; it rains so little in Tbilisi that I cannot resist to embrace.

I have these shoes (Capezio Jag) for almost 1 1/2 year now and they are great for comfort, breathing and flexible (split sole): http://www.dance-shoes.nl/jazzschoenen/1128-capezio-jag.html




There are many shoemakers in Tbilisi but it is related to more hard substances and other materials than this import, as I have discovered asking many if they could repair my shoe through which a gap has become to manifest at the place of my big toe, due to spinning.
The shoes for dancing they make here have more thickness and potential to widen since, to train to stand on the knuckles of the toes, they use leather within the shoes and the 'best' eventually do without. But since I do not have this need (no professional or intent as need - different need) I keep it with these.








Had it made today, a tailor has the better material for it.

I know the feeling!

I too still wear mine with holes on both that I've had since a decade. They have travelled with me so much, they are part of my good luck and I can't bear to throw them.

cool.

The extension of your rememberance, the feeling of your (undergone) becoming - valueing the intent and recognizing the cultivation. I was so happy when the woman made the hole, expressed through many a didi (great) prior the madloba (thanks).

Strange, such attachments though.

How the environment cultivated racial psychology and dance movements making use of Nature.

And warrior dances, sometimes incorporates the balanced swaying involved in avoiding the enemy's blows.
Same for verbal sparring.
Only, some, fear gripping their heart, do nothing but twist and turn, hoping to avoid the final stab, never succeeding in affecting a scratch on what attacks.

Performance martial arts is meant to exercise and prepare the fighter for the real thing, but when all it is, is a performance, one needs no opponent, or a reality at all.
One spars with the ghosts in one's mind, and damns the real deal as another illusion.
You will find many of these types in philosophy forums, and/or in lecture halls, and schoolrooms.
When the performance is over, and a satisfactory effect has been made, in theory, they retreat to the reality of their safe, predictable world, which they hate, and love.

Hating it they belittle it; loving it they keep going back.

I encountered Nietzsche's fondness of dance.

My thoughts:
Dance is the ultimate expression of human absurdity and also of control. It is the greatest expression of a free (careless, light.. but also full and "intense"... there is no other word I know close to describing it) will, for it requires a will to perform, it takes the body to physical task and is yet unbounded by any practical survival telos or purpose. It is a celebration and soulful enjoyment of self.

Dance is repulsive to those without substance or esteem. They are resentful of one who is not bounded as a slave, resentful of those who do not have their will claimed by another. Some are literally incapable of dancing without artificial, socially accepted, means of lowering their inhibitions.

Structured dance is the imposition of purpose onto yourself. In most cases, a social purpose. I would guess the ability to perform a dance of a culture is considered more aristocratic there than anything but the basics of language and politics. It would maybe even be sad or insulting to know a person has mastered the dance of your culture and yet knows nothing else of it but the dance itself.

Slaughtz wrote:

I encountered Nietzsche's fondness of dance.

My thoughts:
Dance is the ultimate expression of human absurdity and also of control. It is the greatest expression of a free (careless, light.. but also full and "intense"... there is no other word I know close to describing it) will, for it requires a will to perform, it takes the body to physical task and is yet unbounded by any practical survival telos or purpose. It is a celebration and soulful enjoyment of self.

Dance is repulsive to those without substance or esteem. They are resentful of one who is not bounded as a slave, resentful of those who do not have their will claimed by another. Some are literally incapable of dancing without artificial, socially accepted, means of lowering their inhibitions.

Structured dance is the imposition of purpose onto yourself. In most cases, a social purpose. I would guess the ability to perform a dance of a culture is considered more aristocratic there than anything but the basics of language and politics. It would maybe even be sad or insulting to know a person has mastered the dance of your culture and yet knows nothing else of it but the dance itself.

You spoke my soul.

Slaughtz wrote:

I encountered Nietzsche's fondness of dance.

My thoughts:
Dance is the ultimate expression of human absurdity and also of control. It is the greatest expression of a free (careless, light.. but also full and "intense"... there is no other word I know close to describing it) will, for it requires a will to perform, it takes the body to physical task and is yet unbounded by any practical survival telos or purpose. It is a celebration and soulful enjoyment of self.

Dance is repulsive to those without substance or esteem. They are resentful of one who is not bounded as a slave, resentful of those who do not have their will claimed by another. Some are literally incapable of dancing without artificial, socially accepted, means of lowering their inhibitions.

Structured dance is the imposition of purpose onto yourself. In most cases, a social purpose. I would guess the ability to perform a dance of a culture is considered more aristocratic there than anything but the basics of language and politics. It would maybe even be sad or insulting to know a person has mastered the dance of your culture and yet knows nothing else of it but the dance itself.

Very nice.

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While Tolkien was heavily inspired by Nordic folklore, his ubermenschen depiction of elves is incredibly different from the one in folklore.

The elves of Scandinavia are beautiful to be sure, beautiful, terrible and cruel.

Like most other creatures of myth they were rarely, if ever, seen in daylight. The fair folk lived underground, in the hills and mountains and only emerged in the early mornings or late evening when the sun already set. Instead you would most likely stumble upon them in the early morning dancing over fields covered in morning dew and mist.

You would hear them before you saw them, hear their music and their laughter, but if you were unlucky their music would stay in your ears forever. And then you saw them, pale, beautiful girls in white dresses twirling through mist. You would want to follow them, to join in their dance, but any human who danced with the elves would inevitably fall seriously ill and die just a short time after.

Even if you never encountered the actual elves, you could probably find signs of their presence, the most common one being the ‘’fairy ring’’, a circular formation of mushrooms, left by the fair folks dancing.

Most people took great care to maintain a good relationship with the elves, because they could make your and your families lives miserable if enraged. People would leave needles, coins and other trinkets for the fair folk. In fact, archaeologist has found sacrificial sites, meant for the elves, in Scandinavia that date back to the Iron Age.

Muro Gagoshidze; Georgia's best dancer.

To dance in certain manner alike a wild predator animal is to ''possess'', to have cultivated, your body into shape, the shape is the expression of strength as organic strength Always pressures plainess into symmetric proportions.
Out of shape is out of strength; mentally / physically.

This dancer shows strength in feeling the rhythm, being able to keep up with the pattern, expressing the movements as no other and expressing the emotions; to let go, for how one can dance if one is weak or afraid to fall.

Ukrainian dances, to me, may be the most colourful in expression; the music, voices, emotions, movements, storylines - not to forget their traditonal clothes, their traditional garments are as divers as they are beautiful; often with crowns of flowers on their heads. I like their mentality as a people so far the best as travellers, they don't come for tourism but to explore the nature and culture and practise it.

To go, in Nordic terms, Berserk; though it has to do with 'becoming a bear', obtaining its strengths (for in battle), becoming less vulnerable. Just like Hercules had its lion head to be-come the lion.

Wikipedia wrote:

The name berserker derives from the Old Norse berserkr (plural berserkir). This expression most likely arose from their reputed habit of wearing a kind of shirt or coat (serkr) made from the pelt of a bear (ber-) during battle. The bear was one of the animals representing Odin, and by wearing such a pelt the warriors sought to gain the strength of a bear and the favor of Odin.

Source to Varangian guards in Constantinopel, Byzantium, tells about Goth dances and group songs as rites to go Berserkgang.
http://www.friggasweb.org/dancetxt.html
https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/t1394p40-cultural-dances#30814

Beside dance and song, they bit their shields and clashed their swords and axes; becoming animal in movement and behaviour; to attack self is to ignite rage by paining (which you won't feel) and stressing your body parts and jaws in agressive manner.

Wikipedia wrote:

To "go berserk" was to "hamask", which translates as "change form", in this case, as with the sense "enter a state of wild fury". One who could transform as a berserker was typically thought of as "hamrammr" or "shapestrong".

Odin / Wodan (god with many traits and relations, too related to rage / madness); old-Nordic 'odur', in Dutch 'woede' (rage / fury), in Goth 'wods' (possessed).


Dionysian too is to transform into a state of frenzy, animal-like, madness.

Wikipedia wrote:

In Euripides' play and other art forms and works the Dionysiac only needs to be understood as the frenzied dances of the god which are direct manifestations of euphoric possession and that these worshippers, sometimes by eating the flesh of a man or animal who has temporarily incarnated the god, come to partake of his divinity.

Wikipedia wrote:

The Dionysian Mysteries were a ritual of ancient Greece and Rome which used intoxicants and other trance-inducing techniques (like dance and music) to remove inhibitions and social constraints, liberating the individual to return to a natural state.

Quote :

askoliazô (dancing as at the Askolia) ; the Athenians had a festival, the Askolia, in which they would hop on wineskins to the honor of Dionysos [Scholiast on Aristophanes, Plutus 1129]. The creature [goat] appears to be a natural enemy of the vine. In any event an epigram appears addressed to a goat that goes like this : `devour me to the root, yet all the same I will bear fruit; enough to pour a libation for you, goat, as you are being sacrificed.' [ Greek Anthology 9.75]
`Dance on a wineskin' meaning [to dance] on the other [leg]; strictly askôliazein is to hop on wineskins for sport.

http://www.theoi.com/Cult/DionysosCult.html

http://www.carnaval.com/greece/dance/
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1088242?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents


To dance improvised in agressive manner and be possessed before battle, to attack self, chant and cry - all is related to becoming an animal or to be possessed by ancestral spirits; to project thoughts and movements upon the enemy prior actual confrontation, making you invulnerable for pain and angst.

Often my teacher says to me 'be like animal, Georgian dance is like animal'; though I am too soon out of breath relating to, since me being here, not having ran often enough, decreasing my lung capacity (though practising flute will compensate). It is about expressing energy, strength, which is shape and thus taking space around you - I need to work out more, again.

Once you become strength you are possessed and will feel as such long after dance, even the next day present in your mental processing and expression.

I filmed a few dancers in class practising their solo

Attempting to lift my feet in the snow to dance Greek Zeibekiko in Mestia, Georgian mountain area; I gave a wine libation to Dionyzus but could not finish the song nor do any tricks as the snow itself gave next to the music, a sip of wine; a feeling of drunkeness.

In Lesvos I was in great shape though.

The snow gives you the drunken man's movements, which goes perfectly with zeibekiko.

I've seen many dance exactly like that, on a flat surface....because of alcohol

Exactly, normally I can't fully take on this state of drunken movements unless I would completely surrender to the moment; I will mostly have elements of enacting a eagle, slightly drunken maybe, more agressive.

Quote :

Zeibekiko (Greek: Ζεϊμπέκικο) is a Greek folk dance.

The name is derived from Zeibek warriors of Anatolia.[2]

The dance is of free choreographic structure. A solo dance strictly masculine and is considered in some cases offensive to be interrupted by another dancer. Occasionally dancers perform feats such as standing on a glass of wine or a chair or fireplace, or picking up a table, adding a sense of a little braggadocio and humor.

Has no steps. Is a hieratic dance with inner tension and sense that the dancer must know and respect it. It is the physical expression of defeat. The despair of life. The unfulfilled dream. Is the "do not get through." The evil you see it coming. The complaint of souls which were not adapted to the class of others.

The real man is not ashamed to reveal pain or weakness, ignores the social conventions and shallow respectability.

http://www.itsjustme.net/177665/2834315/posters/tribute-to-rebetiko-greek-music-zeibekiko-dance

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"Tragaki describes the zeїbekikos dance in the following way: ―

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"Zeїbekikos is a celebration of masculinity danced in movements and gestures expressing an authoritative yet introspective performance of pain and self-contained pride that metaphorically reasserts with the mangas‘ dominance of public space" (Tragaki 2007, 40).

Vassiliou described the zeїbekiko and the way in which one should feel the zeїbekiko dance:

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"The zeïbeikiko, the dance rhythm that characterizes the man that is lost in the psychological state that is created by the sounds of the instruments, lyrics and rhythms. The dancer many times feels that he wants to take off, to fly, to not step on the earth, he believes he is alone and like another Atlas, carries on his shoulders all the troubles and worries of the world. He wants with one move to throw off all that which weighs on him. And there is little connection with the zeїbekides dance that was foremost a war dance and that had a different ethos. There may exist a rhythmic relation. But it is too small of a relation to call the contemporary zeїbekiko a barbarian dance... The rebetis dancer has self-respect, he has rules even when the dancer has had too much to drink and under hallucination he respects those around him. Rarely does he bother someone else. Mainly he is lost in his own thoughts and in his own psychological world. There are times when the musician (and singer) align their voice and their playing on the figures and steps of the good dancer."

[Yona Stamatis, Rebetiko Nation]

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"A decade after the arrival of the refugees, a new style of music had evolved which incorporated elements of the popular music that the refugees had brought with them from Smyrna and Istanbul, but was purged of many of its ‘oriental’ elements. It was the bouzouki-based music called rebetika. As Dinos Christianopoulos wrote:

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"It was immigration... that established the rebetika. From then on, all that was needed was an internal cleansing: the foreign elements had to go so that the content of the songs could conform to more broadly popular themes, for the disgusting tendencies to disappear and the disparate voices to be absorbed so the rebetika could expand more broadly." (Holst 1977:158-63)

The song lyrics of the rebetika provide one of the best guides we have to the lore of the tough underworld characters known as the manghes, and the often violent milieu they inhabited. At what stage the space of the dance floor became inviolable, we do not know, but at least from the 1930’s on, exclusivity seems to have been demanded and expected by the dancers. With some exceptions, especially that of female singers, the world of the rebetika was a male world and its protagonists led a harsh, sometimes illegal life on the margins of society. Smoking hashish was a relief from the poverty and privations of that life, and the hashish dens of Piraeus were a popular gathering place for the manghes or tough-guys of the slums. A fair idea of the mentality associated with the world of the rebetes or manghes can be gleaned from the lyrics of a zebekiko written and recorded by the refugee composer Anestis Delias called ‘The Koutsavakis’:

Quote :

"Hey mangas, if you want to use that knife of yours.
You’d better have the guts, show-off, the nerve to take it out.

That stuff don’t wash with me, so hide your blade
Because I’ll get high, show-off, and come to your place.

Go somewhere else and strut your stuff
Because I’ve smoked too, show-off, and I’m mighty high.

I told you to sit down nicely or I’ll zap you
I’ll come with my pistol, show-off, and I’ll straighten you out."

The street-smart swagger of this song, with its talk of knives, guns, and hashish, is a far cry from Zorba. Its language is full of underworld slang, and seems to be addressed by one member of that milieu to another. And yet is it a commercial recording, made by a major record company. How can it be that such a shady song is being marketed to a broad audience? The answer, no doubt, has to do with immigration and urbanization.

Like flamenco, that grew out of the poor back streets of southern Spain in the late 19th century, and tango, which emerged in Buenos Aires the first decades of the 20th century in Argentina, the rebetika reflected a sudden growth in the Greek urban population caused by mass immigration.15 Concomitant with rapid urbanization was an increase in crime. The hybridization of musical styles that followed led to new musical forms that have links, at first to the underworld and to the most marginal groups within the city. All these forms could be termed ‘urban Blues’ and all have a strong basis in dance. The guitar, the bandoneon, and the bouzouki, at first regarded as low-class instruments associated with disreputable music become increasingly identified with the nation, and the dances associated with the music become popular.

In all three cases – tango, flamenco, and rebetika – there was an element of risk, a pleasurable frisson associated with frequenting the places where the music if the lower classes is performed, and in all three cases, they gradually became desirable destinations for the middle classes because of it. The record companies took advantage of the Athenian interest in tough-talking rebetika songs, and began recording songs about jails, drugs, and knife-fights. These proved popular with an audience much broader than the world of the manghes.

One of the earliest accounts we have of the performance of the zebekiko is found in the short story ‘Vassilis Arvanitis’ by the writer Stratis Myrivilis, a native of Lesbos. He describes watching itinerant musicians from Turkey, probably gypsies, who would visit the villages of Lesbos bringing their drums and zurnas with them. Here is his description of something he witnessed in his childhood, i.e. at the end of the 19th century.

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"When the young men were in the mood – when their blood had caught fire and the lutes and the fiddles could not appease the unbearable ache in their hearts – then they would send for the Anatolian pipes and drums. I think it must have been the ancient blood which would awaken within them and desire those primitive rhythms: a forgotten keepsake from the prehistory of our race whose ancient motifs would be revived by these echoes

...the sound of this music made the young men lose themselves in Dionysian passion. Dark nostalgia would awake in their turbid souls and they would become serious and draw their daggers and draw their daggers to dance fearful Pyrrhic dances. ‘Hep! Hep!’ they’d shout and their sharp knives would flash in the sun.

Solemnly they would dance a slow zeybekiko, all together in a large circle which rotated majestically around the musicians. Though drunk to the point of madness, the rhythm of the music would control their ecstasy with its strict discipline. We children would watch the pointed blades passing over their throats, behind their necks, across their chests, and below their knees... Breathlessly we would wait of the analyes to begin.6 When their ecstasy had reached its peak they would raise their daggers and, with a shout, plunge them into their calves or their thighs. And they would continue their dancing" (68-9)

Myrivilis remembered with awe: ‘Sometimes there wouldn’t be a drop of blood on the knives.’

Here, what is interesting is that the dance is clearly both foreign and exotic to the children of the village on Lesbos where the author grew up, and this despite the fact that various zebekiko dances were performed on the island. The controlled ‘ecstasy’ of the dance is released in acts of self-mutilation that are fascinating to the children.  

Zorba is presented as a tongue-tied man of action, needing the release of the dance to express his deepest feelings. As he says: ‘I have a lot to tell you, but my tongue won’t get around it... So I’ll dance it!’ (343). The dance he chooses is the zebekiko, a dance he describes as ‘fierce, palikarisio, (heroic) something the komitaji danced before a battle.’ (1946:342), but which is presented as merely cathartic and rebellious in the novel. The narrator has a vision of Zorba

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"...as an old partisan archangel... Because this dance of Zorba’s was all provoca- tion, stubbornness and rebellion. You’d think he was calling out ‘What can you do to me, Almighty? You can’t do a thing to me, just kill me. Kill me, and I don’t give a damn. I’ve had my revenge, I’ve said what I want to say. I managed to dance, and I don’t need you any more" (1946: 343).

Whether the Kazantzakis was remembering the real Zorba’s dancing or imagining an archetypical dance that expressed the sort of abandon and ecstasy he so admired, Zorba’s zebekiko is presented, in the novel, as an expression of the Greek working- class soul. As he dances, the narrator sees ‘for the first time, the Daemonic revolt of man, defying weight and matter, the primal curse.' (343). Kazantzakis’ fascination with the primitive (linked to the oriental)9 element in the Greek psyche, with the man of action whose body acts as his tongue, is literally embodied in the zebekiko danced on the beach.

According to the novelist Kostas Tachtsis, writing in 1964, but looking back to the years of the German occupation, the zebekiko took on a broad national, rather than underworld, or lower-class character, during the period when Greece itself took on the appearance of a teké (or hashish den):

Tachtsis wrote:

"Suddenly all Greeks, whether they were pick-pockets, or lower-middle-class or middle class, found themselves in a situation that put them on the same level, made them almost the same as, the pre-war underworld. There were no more starving and well-fed, no more masters and slaves; everyone was hungry, everyone felt the need to weep for their fate, something that, in any case, the Greeks came naturally to the Greeks from the time of the Romans. All the houses suddenly became ‘hashish dens’ – not literally, of course, but in essence. Everywhere the same atmosphere of illegality prevailed, constant fear, wretchedness, and death... The zebekiko found ground to develop, and it developed rapidly. Suddenly, it was no longer the dance of the underworld, but of a large number of Greeks, especially in the urban centers/ clubs. Many of the songs which were first heard just after the War were written during the Occupation, and differed quite obviously from the pre-war hashish songs (hashiklidika)."

Tachtsis explains the rise in popularity of the zebekiko as a function of the miserable conditions that prevailed in wartime Athens. Tangos and waltzes were, he said, still around, but because they were all ‘milk and honey’ they were out of character with the times. It was not uncommon for the Germans, he remembered, to drive around the poorer neighborhoods of the city, waking the inhabitants with ‘light’ songs about love, flowers, and moons blaring from their vehicles. The traumatized inhabitants reacted by embracing the zeibekika and the rebetika as a whole as symbols of resis- tance. Tachtsis was quick to note that there was nothing official about the songs as resistance. On the contrary, the Left-wing resistance fighters were singing Russian songs, even German tunes to which they had attached heroic Greek words. No, there was nothing heroic about the rebetika, but in the underground tavernas of Athens, when they’d drunk some wine or smoked some hashish (according to Tachtsis, despite the absence of food, wine and hashish were freely available during the Occupation), the ordinary Greeks sang the rebetika and among the rebetika, mostly the zeibekika (op. cit. 206). The reason for this, in Tachsis’s opinion, was that these songs spoke of the ‘poison of life.’

It is the zebekiko, in his opinion, that had a ‘revolutionary’ quality that made it symbolic of the urban Greek resistance to the foreign Occupation. When the war ended, despite the re-emergence of popular European dance music like tango and waltz, the zeibekika continued to be popular and began to be played constantly on the radio. In Tachtsis’ opinion, the commercialization of the music, combined with the use of rebetika elements by song writers from a different social milieu led to the complete degradation of the zebekiko/rebetiko:

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"A splendid robbery took place before our very eyes: the right of the people at least to bewail their fate. The zeibekika became things of the establishment, they were cleaned up, they lost their bite/point, their meaning, and became, in their turn, the Occupation tango of the times."

Tachtsis is writing of a time when the arhondorebetes (bouzouki virtuosi) were in vogue and conspicuous consumption at the bouzoukia was at its height, but although the middle classes of both sexes may have participated in the gentrification of the rebetika, there was still an element of the disreputable and even the dangerous about bouzouki clubs, especially as they became stratified into the cheaper bouzouki- houses and the more expensive ones where established stars performed. Drinking had long since replaced hashish-smoking as the stimulant used to produce kefi, or high spirits, and was known by the frequenters of bouzouki-houses to make patrons more aggressive.

The aficionados of rebetika, like those of any musical style which is regarded as raw, authentic, and shady (flamenco, fado, tango, blues) tend to privilege the time they first heard the music as the ‘pure’ phase of the music. They ignore the fact that all such styles are all hybrids and by virtue of the fact that they were being performed for an audience, most were already commercial when they heard them. This is not to say that Tachtsis was wrong in equating the zeibekika of the Occupation with a symbolic form of resistance, but it should make us skeptical about his reaction to the music and dance of the post-war years.

In fact, as Petropoulos (1972), Petrides (1972) and other observers make clear, however well the bourgeois Greek learned to dance a zebekiko, it was one skill in which the working-class Greek had the upper hand. By initiating his ‘boss’ into the pleasure of the zebekiko, Zorba reversed their status, making himself the dominant male. According to Cowan, the working-class mem- bers of a northern Greek town were still able, in the 1980’s, to use the dance to challenge ‘the dominant model of masculinity, that of the patriarch.’  

Old musicians were resurrected to perform their former successes, young musicians learned to play and sing in the pre-war style, and the venues were generally small clubs in central Athens where customers listened and no-one danced. Because these venues were what generated so much of the interest in rebetika and the writing about rebetika that took place in the 1970s and 80s by foreign observers and Greeks, we tend to think of them as central to the rebetika scene. It is unlikely that veterans of the pre-war rebetika world like Tsitsanis and Sotiria Bellou, who were still performing regularly in an outer suburb of Athens, saw them as particularly interesting, or that they influenced the music played in dozens of bouzouki clubs, some of them low-class ‘dog-houses,’ some very expensive, in every urban center in Greece. These were places where Greeks went to dance, and where zebekiko was still the dance in which a man showed off not his skill in the dance as much as his ability to embody an intense, masculine self-expression. For the privilege of doing so, and doing so in a space that was his alone, a man was willing to pay a substantial amount of money to the musicians. It was not in Plaka that the lore of the zebekiko was preserved, but in the bouzouki clubs of Kavala, Corinth, Salonika and the Mesogeion.

We begin to understand the significant of the Celtic motto Nick Papandreou used at the beginning of his story: ‘Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.’The Irish, who knew the sorrows of poverty and emigration as well as the Greeks, believed just as fiercely as in the importance of dance.

A Canadian novelist, Jane Urquart, has a great deal to say about the importance of dance to the Irish as she describes the struggle of a group of emigrants from the same famine make a life for themselves in a town called Port Hope. The immigrants in Away continue to take an active interest in Irish politics. In one scene, a newly-arrived a young Irishman enthralls the community with his dancing:

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"He skidded to a momentary stop in the center of the floor, then exploded into a jig that was at once an expression of vehement gaiety and furious lament... it was as if Aidan Lanighan were at once creating and annihilating the room, taking it with him into his own space... In a miracle of tone, stress, time, pause, tempo, silence, and thrust, the histories of courtship, marriage, the funeral, famine, and harvest were present in the inn."

Like the inviolable space of the dance-floor once a parangelia has been made, the zebekiko both attracts and excludes the other. Although it is the only solo dance in the Greek repertoire, and in other ways untypical of Greek dance, it has come to stand for all Greek dance. If you cannot dance a zebekiko, as Andreas Papandreou understood from his father, Yorgos, and Nick understood from his, you risk not being handed a sword to fight with." [Gail Holst-Warhaft, NATIONAL STEPS: CAN YOU BE GREEK IF YOU CAN’T DANCE A ZEBEKIKO?]

Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 14: Nostalgia for Being Otherwise

A symbiotic harmony is needed to form a balance between body, mind and head; as you can see in the video, his face turns before his body has made the turn in order to have a focus upon a specific point to not become dizzy, out of balance. To lose focus, or not trust your spin and body - is to fall.

Me in Moscow (June 2014), AssaParty, attempting to dance first time in life (lol) - after class they had a 'dance battle' and they pushed me in the centre as first to go, or try. The losers (my side) had to do 100 squats.
From second 0:50 you see a true (Chechen) dancer who dances since childhood, blown away.

Very good, I couldn't do any better. Though I don't see whats the point in doing 100 squats (weightless or weighted), even doing more than 10-20 pull ups and push ups without adding weight is unproductive.

Mere symbolism of defeat, you need something to distinct winners from losers - even if it is just the consumption of time. Beside, how they dance and practice is beyond acrobatic imagination (if you could see them for real), they have no need for what you imply.

Well yeah, you can't be everything at once. Though what I was actually implying was a bit off-topic (fitness fallacies), doing huge repetitions leads to strain injuries, destroys joints, no matter what the exercise is. I didn't consider squats as a punishment, more of a benefit to do better next time.

And yeah dancing is not about who jumps the highest or spins the fastest.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/303432587/Folk-Dances

War, love, music and dance; they go together.

Songs that express a history and be-longing are forged often on the battlefield hence the rootlessness of Modern music, roots in ‘wanting to forget’; so are specific dances forged on the fields of battles that integrate movements of defence and attacks in their expression or is a practise in itself alike martial arts prior any fought wars.
When the rhythm of the music, vocals and the instruments used and how they are used lead the dance, as they instigate feelings of joy, rage, nostalgia and so on; you understand the relationship between making and expressing - in one African language they still have no distinct words for ‘’singing’’ and ‘’dancing’’, they use the same word, by common sense of discriminatory clarifications it is unpractical, but if looked at the brains, they react the same upon listening to music, making music and dancing, so in the essence they correlate to each other and the root and reactions are without separation.

A dance of war in itself does not need music from an external performance, the rhythm can be made by stamping feet, cries of rage, chanting mantras and attacking yourself; this is what the Haka of the Maori represents, a possession of madness, to attack your own life to fight as if already dead, wanting to tear yourself a part, to not feel but maddening rage which you have to project upon the enemies.

Folkdances are representations of climates, emotions, ideals, work, animals, ancestors and monumental feelings; just like symbols are and many other forms of (classical) arts; though in Modern context everything has been degraded, abstractly specialized and incorporated in Modern ideals and mis-understandings, falsified historic perspective (political) with specialized lenses (partialization) and depths (linear thinking and disharmonic connections) and in specific colours (emotional appeals).

The Modern dances, on a jungle beat with Western melodies; a mix of African and Western movements and musical tastes (love for sugar is universal, specific tastes are isolated); though the essence being dominantly African and the technology used European, testify this mongrelisation in society; between the classes, races, perspectives and ‘priorities’.
While folkdances are about wholeness, becoming wholly with the enacted animal, with the rhythm and sounds instigating feelings and (intended) movements, with the past, to be possessed by ancestral spirits, environmental phenomena or to honour your sweat and blood spilled during your (non-Modern) work; they have rules, traditions, laws, divine intentions and holy connections – the Modern dances testify the separation between parts, disconnecting the organs, body parts, mind, music and environment from the wholesome symbiotic harmony; specialized intentions for specialized body parts like shaking assess on the rhythm of vile words intended for sexual fetish (specialized) attraction and gratification. A ‘letting go’ without possessing except to possess immediate ‘’pleasure’’ without cost/benefit factors.

Folk and classical dances, arts, crafts, songs are about wholeness which relates to holiness; knowing thyself. A people with warlike folkdances are invulnerable to death and having the odds against them.

The hands are supposed to hold a big knife, hence the positioning

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Moscow, June 2014; I sucked though.