Why we do what we do?, posted by Meroe

Over the course of the past twelve months a number of people have asked us why we do what we do? What have we got to do with the Romans? These are both very good questions, so as we’ve got a bit of a quiet spell coming up, I thought it would be a good idea to post a response.

When we are in Roman-mode, Ya Raqs are all about trying to represent the music and dance from the Roman Empire; doing our best to give a flavour of the very cosmopolitan world that was the Roman Empire. Roman dancing would have been very different to what we think of as dance today. It was often much more acrobatic and would be closer to what we would consider gymnastics than to dancing. But the Romans were clearly aware of the more colourful and exotic dancers that inhabited parts of their empire. In 30 BC the Roman writer and poet Martial says that dancers from the Nile were sent to Rome and in 60 BC the Romans imported dancers from Syria into Rome.

From AD 206 there is a wonderful account from Egypt of a contract from "Year 14 of Lucius Septimius Severus Pius Pertinax and Marcus Aurelius Antonius Pius, Augusti, and Publicus Septimus Geta Caesar Augustus”. This contract is with a dancer called Isadora and states that “I wish to engage you with two other castanet dancers to perform at the festival at my house for six days beginning with the 24th of the month of Pauni [May 26-June 24] according to the old calendar, you receive as pay 36 drachmas for each day and for the entire period four artabas of barley and 20 pairs of bread loaves and whatsoever garments or gold ornaments you may bring down, we will guard these safely; and we will furnish you with two donkeys when you come down to us and a like number when you go back to the city.” - so pretty much pay plus travel expenses, which is what we would expect today.

Examples like this are rare and the reality is that these musicians and dancers would have been from the lower levels of society and therefore their names and their stories do not always survive into the written record. There are, however, some tantalising pieces of evidence that help to link us as dancers, not only to the Roman period in Britannia, but more specifically to the Leg XX in Deva.

The Roman army drew its soldiers from all over the Roman Empire, but each legion tended to contain a large number of recruits from a single province of the empire. A sizeable proportion of the Twentieth Legion – which is the legion based in Deva (Chester) – are thought to have come from Syria. We know that Syrian dancers were particularly favoured among the Romans. There is no evidence to suggest that dancers from Syria actually made up part of the camp followers in Deva, but what is almost certain is that some of the soldiers based there would have been familiar with the music and dance of Syria – their home country.

So is there any evidence of North African dancers in Britannia – well the answer is we are not sure but there could have been. In York there are the remains of the “Ivory Bangle lady”, which gives us our second piece of tantalising evidence. Her remains were discovered in 1901 in York (Roman Eboracum). Her grave dates back to the second half of the 4th century and she was buried with jet and elephant ivory bangles (hence the name) and blue glass beads. Analyses of her remains have concluded that she originated from North Africa, possibly even Morocco or Tunisia. There is no suggestion that she was a dancer, in fact it is probably more likely that she was from a much higher social class than a mere dancing girl. But what is interesting is that even as far north as Eboracum there were people from North Africa and, just like the Syrian soldiers in Deva, the Ivory Bangle Lady would almost certainly have been familiar with the music and dance from her country of origin.

Ya Raqs aren’t pretending to be Roman dancers, but what we are doing is giving a flavour of the diverse range of music and dance from part of the Roman Empire – in particular Egypt, North Africa and what is now the Middle East. The music we dance to draws on rhythms that would have been familiar to the people from parts of the Roman Empire; the instruments that those rhythms are played on would also have been familiar; and the dance moves are, on the whole, as old as time, handed down through the generations and depicted on tomb scenes, and pottery, from the period.

As for the costumes – well that is the subject of a whole new discussion and something that we should perhaps come back to another time.