My Visit to Cyprus

was meeting the two scholars who were presenting on the same panel as me: Stavros Stavrou, a professor at Cyprus College, and Julian Vigo, a professor at the University of Montreal. Stavros may be familiar to some of you from his articles on the politics of dance published in Habibi magazine. Check out his article in a recent issue of Habibi entitled, "The Censured Terpsichore: Greek Cultural Politics and the Legacy of Oriental Dance." Therer is a wonderful photo of him performing a tsifteteli in front of an audience of academics at the International Congress on Dance Research in Corfu, Greece. We were really excited to meet each other and became instant friends because of the fact that you just don't meet a lot of people in academia who are scholars and dancers and equally passionate about both things. Needless to say, we talked nonstop about dance the whole time we were together! The other person on our panel, Julian Vigo, presented a wonderful paper looking at stereotypes of Arab women as innately oppressed, compared to "liberated" western women, and how this narrative ("they need to be saved") is used strategically to justify western imperial activity in the Middle East. I think her work is very pertinent in today's political climate. Our panel was one of the liveliest at the conference and people kept approaching Stavros and me afterwards asking why we didn't perform! All those scholars were just dying to see some live dancing!

Speaking of dancing, Stavros brought me to dance class with him and introduced me to his Oriental dance instructor Sylvia, a Greek Cypriot woman with an extensive history in several forms of dance including training in Merce Cunningham technique in NYC. Her warm-up was great and her dancing fluid, strong, and very skilled with incredible shimmies (and all this in high heels!). Sylvia was excited to have another dancer in town and invited me to teach two intermediate/advanced classes at her studio. Her studio was lovely and spacious and her students gracious and appreciative. One of her students, Despo, invited me to stay with her and her family for a few days in her beautiful nineteenth-century apartment which she had decorated with many of her paintings, including some of belly dancers. Overall, the Cypriot people I spent time with were extremely hospitable and kind--they wouldn't let me pay for anything when we went out and I was invited into people's homes and treated very well. Another highlight was being taken out to a little cafe-bar by Stavros and Despo and listening to an incredibly soulful band that played traditional rebetika and songs from Asia Minor, and that included a very talented female vocalist-guitarist. Being on the Mediterranean and experiencing the interesting mix of Turkish and Hellenic culture (something that would have been even more possible before taksim, or the division of the island in 1974) was a refreshing change of pace. On a bitter-sweet note, I happened to be on the island at a rather historic moment since the Green Line separating the Turkish occupied north from the Independent Republic of Cyprus to the south had just been opened and refugees from both sides were able to return to see their old homes and properties for the first time in several decades. Emotions were very high and it was impossible not to be affected by this even as an outsider. I did spend a day in the north in the medieval port town of Kyrenia and was struck by the abundance of Turkish flags everywhere the minute you cross the border. The few individuals I spoke with seemed friendly and helpful and it was sad to think of the hatred and mistrust that people on both sides of the Line have harbored for each other due in part to the machinations of governments and extremist politics. On a hopeful note, at the conference Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot women who had formed a cross-border research organization were able to present their work together and it seems that the more possibilites for contact that arise, the more potential there is for friendships to emerge.