Hello! And thank you for
your interest in Drop the Prop, my
groundbreaking series of online Egyptian dance workshops! The topic of my first
workshop is ' Dancing
to Mawwal.' If you’ve already
purchased this series, great! Read on to learn more about the history and
development of mawwal (plural is mawaweel). If you
haven’t, now’s your chance. Just click on this link,
create an account with Teachable, and login to the workshop.
I imagine ‘mawwal’ might
be a new term for some of you, so let me briefly define it. Mawwal is
the improvisational singing that usually occurs in the beginning of an Arabic
song with little to no musical accompaniment. Think of songs like Bint
Il-Sultan; Mawood;
and Inta Omri.
Each contains a mawwal towards its beginning that you can probably
recognize.
So what?, you might be
thinking. Why dedicate an entire dance workshop to such a topic?
Because…
1. …it’s obscure. No one teaches this in a live or
virtual setting, because…
2. …it’s challenging. Most dancers
don’t know how to dance to mawaweel. Either they don’t understand
Arabic, or they find dancing to music-less lyrics counterintuitive. A lot of
times it’s both. Most will edit them out if they’re dancing to canned music, or
else leave them (or tolerate them when dancing to live music) but meaninglessly
flail around until the music kicks in.
