My Dabkeh (Arabic Dance) Performance

So, remember when I was in Jordan in the summer and I'd sometimes talk about the Culture Clubs we had as a study-abroad group? Yeah, well, here's the final result of the Dabka/Dabkeh practice we'd have for 2 hours every Monday for 5 weeks. We messed up biiiig time, but oh well. It was the most funnest night I had at CLS, and everyone else enjoyed it as well. Oh, and in the beginning, few people were willing to sign up for this Club, but when they saw our performance, they aaaalll wished they'd done it :D The Culture Clubs were: Drama, Dabkeh, Cooking, and Calligraphy. The Calligraphy one proved to be the most useless one, it turned out, from what everyone was telling me. Because the instructor would be talking in Arabic the entire time in a different dialect and apparently didn't seem interested in whether the students were actually learning calligraphy or not. The Drama Club did a really awesome performance (I'll share their video later).  The Cooking Club seemed to be getting something out of their instructor, but most I knew weren't satisfied. And then there was the Dabkeh Club :D Mine! Ayyyyy-mmmmaaayy-zing! :) We had a really strict teacher who'd go, "What was that?" whenever you messed up a step. lol. So, since that was always humiliating, we tried never to mess up.

I joined Dabkeh for two reasons. One was that few were signing up for it, and I didn't want the instructor to feel like she was wasting her time. But the more important reason was that I knew I could learn cooking any time; I could take Calligraphy classes on campus - and I'm personally not a fan of calligraphy anyway, but if I ever had to learn it, I could; I could join a drama club/performance anywhere at any point in my life. But Dabkeh? I love dancing (not that I can dance!! I spend hours watching Attanr (traditional Afghan/Pashtun dance) dance videos and still can't get the moves right!), and I knew I could use the exercise :D Yes, there's a lotta Arabs where I live right now, and we even have a Dabkeh club here! Buuuuut it's not easy to find an excellent instructor for any dance, and the Instructor we had in Jordan is the best that the CLS Program knew about. She was/is truly excellent. 

Anyway, I'm gonna show you two videos here. The first one is a recording of the Clubs in action -- all of them. I was in Group A, and there were only 3 of us doing Dabkeh from Group A, so CLS didn't record that (Thank God! That would've been humiliaaaaaaaaaating - and you'd have been able to see Qrratugai in action, which ain't cool.) So the Dabkeh practice you see doesn't have me in it.

And the other video is of the actual performance on the Talent Show night. As we're all saying now as we watch this video and laugh our heads off, thank Goddd for the darkness so that we remain anonymous! LOL. Heck, that's the only reason I'm showing it here - you can't tell where I am and who I am or what I'm doing :p

k, so ... enjoooooooooooooyyzz!