- Name: THL Adelisa Salernitana
- Project: Arabic-Sicilian Scarf Dance
- Location: Barony of Buckland Cross
- East Kingdom Wiki Link: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/wiki/Adelisa_Salernitana
- Website/Blog Link: https://siquillya.wordpress.com/2025/03/22/arab-sicilian-scarf-dance/
- Category: Performance
In the First Bardic War, an online event in May 2021, I entered the Non-European dance category with my recreation of a scarf dance as depicted on the muqarnas ceiling of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. Scarf dancers were a stock image of the muqarnas ceilings and frescoes of 12th century Muslim Middle East and Mediterranean, along with musicians, drinkers, hunters, and wrestlers. For the garb, I chose to go with a richly figured silk tunic and white linen underpinnings. Everything was handsewn by me. The silk, a very lightweight woven jacquard, came from a vintage silk sari. The trim at the bottom, a heavy woven band of silk, came from another sari. The collar trim, which was woven with metal threads, came from the pallu of the jacquard sari. The pattern of the sari, a scrolling foliate, is not too dissimilar from some of the patterns of the material depicted in the Cappella Palatina muqarnas.
For the dance, I have looked at the images and I chose moves that are reminiscent of how the dancers are depicted. There are no extant choreographies from the period to refer to. There are modern Andalusian scarf dances from North Africa, and I have referred to some long-ago lessons with Amel Tafsout. For arm movements, I referred to my experience with Persian dance taught by Dr. Laurel Victoria Gray and Autumn Ward. I had done Middle Eastern dance for approximately 20 years at this point, from Egyptian cabaret (with Habiba of Philadelphia), ATS, Turkish (workshops with Artemis Mourat and others), and fusion. There is little agreement in the bellydance world where certain moves originated, and until Jamila Salimpour started codifying moves in a ballet-style system starting in the 1940s and ’70s and started teaching her system, there was no “official” technique and certainly nothing to indicate how moves were done in the medieval past. For me, I let the costume, the technique I managed to learn, and the music dictate the way I moved.
The music posed another challenge, as there is no extant 12th century Arab Sicilian music. Indeed, the earliest documented Arabic song still used by dancers today is the muwashshah “Lama bada yatathanna” (the poem is thought to have been composed in period, but the music we know today may have been composed in the 1920s). But many Arabs in Sicily wound up emigrating to Andalusian Spain after the Normans conquered the island, and their descendants emigrated from there to North Africa after the expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella. However, the trading families had communications with kin in North Africa all throughout period. This gives the Andalusian music of North Africa very deep roots, and some of the nubat (orchestral pieces, singular, nuba) can be traced to within the medieval period. The main problem is most nubat are about an hour in length in full performance, and most excerpts from these nubat are about 15 minutes or so. Enter the group Calamus, and their 1995 recording “The Splendour of Al-Andalus.” Track 10 yields a piece called “Quddam,” an excerpt from a nuba from Morocco. It’s a sprightly 6/8 rhythm, and easy enough to dance to. I hope all the elements give the viewer an idea of what medieval “Middle Eastern” dance in Sicily could have been like.
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiAkJac3KOE
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