What is a Passerine and why does it have a Tribal Bellydance Blog?

           

                Starting a blog is a strange endeavor.

                With the freedom to say anything, begin anywhere, it can be a bit tricky to narrow the "any" to the "this." There is a peculiar pressure to make the first thing you contribute to the global dialog something original, significant and meaningful. Three weeks after creating the blog I find myself with enough discarded first lines to happily nest a hamster for a fortnight. So this morning when I awoke I decided that's it, today I blog. And out of all possibility, best to begin with introductions, and perhaps an explanation . Who am I, and just what makes me identify with a small bird when it comes to talking Tribal?

        Small bird? Yes, that is what a passerine is, and I promise by the end of this blog you will know why this is the Blog of the Passerine. 

       The explanation however, requires context, and that leads nicely to the who am I. My name is Marius Griffin,  and I have been teaching and directing Rashenkoti Tribal Bellydance for 15 years.    

      My actual roots in formal dance begin much farther back than that, 1969, in fact. At age three my Grandmother who had taken over my upbringing put me both onstage and in classes, I really am not sure which came first. It was the natural thing for her to do, she being a dance teacher, as was her own Mum. My childhood was built around dance classes, performances, musical theater, regional and amateur, with 3 years as part of an improvisational theater group thrown in. And if I wasn't onstage I was somewhere behind it, or under it painting a set, tracking down a prop or just pestering the techies. Dance Theater was more than the family business, it was at the center of our lives.  What I absorbed during those years is part of what enables me to do what I do, and do it well. 

My Grandmother taught me very well.

           Despite the shiny surfaces, growing up in the theater world was not my ideal. I did as many folks do,I rebelled, and broke away from performance in my late teens. I did not take up formal dance of any kind for another seven years. It was a busy seven years though, ending in a bit of good fortune that would change my life in a very big way. Well falling in love always does that, and I fell in love with Tribal.

        I became aware of Tribal  in 1991, soon after the birth of my first child.  The experience of pregnancy, along with having a new small daughter completely changed my relationship with my physical self.

       I had spent many years dieting without regard to health, that is with a total eye to appearance and no concept of feeling or being well.  I thought of my body as a thing to be controlled and shaped into acceptability. What I understood after the birth is that I am my body, and that being alive and physical is a very great gift.  The fact of my new daughter really shook my ideas of the value we place on image. The very possibility that she might someday question her own value based on the sizes of her thighs was not to be tolerated. I knew I needed to show her a mother who did not hate her body, because you cannot give what you do not have.

       If I wanted my daughter to know she was beautiful and valuable just as she is, I would have to know it myself. 

        I had begun this process by educating myself about the industries and culture around women's bodies. While a good start, it was still to much of the mind to be of much use in connecting me to my body self. I may not have cared much for the performance world but I had loved dancing itself.

          I had friends at the time who did Cabaret style bellydance and I began to toy with the idea of taking it up. But as much as I found it beautiful in many ways it just did not feel like my dance.While looking for a teacher that suited me I was lucky enough to be introduced to Mitch Mareks. Although she had not taught up to that time she did have 18 years of active dancing in the Cabaret ala Hippy style of California, and her current passion was  Fatchance Bellydance.  She agreed to teach a group of us and it quickly became clear to me that I had found what I was looking for.  

      Happy as I was to be learning such an amazing new form I had yet to actually see a Tribal performance.  It was very different then , there was as yet to be the seminal and still for me the best Tribal recording Tattooed One. The internet had yet to fully manifest, you couldn't just trawl through Youtube. If you wanted to see it you had to go find it.

       That opportunity came for me when my best friend and I were able to see Fatchance in a restaurant setting. I wish I could somehow convey the excitement of seeing them for the first time. There was literally nothing else like them. Totally original in look it was even more shockingly joyful in feel.  There they were, strong, proud, graceful and dynamic, dancing first for themselves, second with each other as equals, and only after that for we who were privileged to share by watching. I was deeply touched , and my life actually changed. I know it sounds cheesy, but I'm a Yank, we talk like this.  More importantly, it is absolutely true. The 18 years I have given to my practice attest to that. 

           In 1994  I moved from California to Ireland. To say I understand the experience of culture shock is to speak very softly of it.  Things were very different here then.Far less resources meant people were still emigrating out of,not into Ireland. Of the many differences between Santa Cruz and Cork city was the almost total lack of Bellydance of any kind. There was a lovely woman who came over from Kerry every month or so to teach in the Cabaret style, but no ongoing groups or classes.

       For me dance was Strictly Tribal, and there is no lonelier thing than a Tribe of one. I Still had my Tribe back home, but aside from trying to channel to them while shimmying round my kitchen, I was going to need  people to dance with. I began to teach with the simple intention of finding friends to dance with. I was able to apply my experience teaching in other areas as well as my work assisting in my Grandmothers classes and performances in beginning  what has become the main work of my life.  I have learned as much teaching over the years as I have been able to share.  Rashenkoti has been as fundamental to me  as where I stand. I am truly grateful.

I am blessed to have danced with many many wonderful women over the years, in six different countries and for many many kinds of celebration.  And again, I know it sounds corny, but it is as simple as I can put the truth.

Sooo, small birds?
         Well I left California  before the first great explosion or Tribal Diaspora as it were. We didn't  call it ATS yet, and the word Fusion wasn't even a gleam in somebodies eye.  It was just Tribal. I arrived here with some music, a couple of video tapes and what I knew. I was  isolated for a good four years or so, hearing things on the grapevine, running into another  teacher  now and then but mostly getting on with it. As any living language does, my dance evolved and began to grow, taking on an accent of its own. When I began to take notice of what had been happening Stateside I suddenly felt like one of Darwin's Finches. You know, the birds he studied in the Galapagos islands that helped him both comprehend and explain his ideas about adaptation.  The birds are very similar, but on each island they have changed what they needed to in order to survive.

     What we do is not exactly the same as anything  I see going on in the Tribal world. Much closer to Tribal Pura than Fusion, it still is its own variation, adapted to this island.  It is as much a form about the joy of practice as the pleasure of performance.  Like Darwin's Finches I and Rashenkoti have met the place we came to and found  a niche in it.  

 

But the Blog of the Finch, well I just couldn't.

Marius Griffin

March 22, 2010