Arts & Entertainment

Troupe to Bring Flare of Middle Eastern Dance to Dearborn Festival This Weekend

Middle Eastern Dance Ensemble will take the stage Sunday evening during Dearborn's 16th annual Arab International Festival.

Aida Al Adawi wants it to be clear: What her troupe does is not belly dancing.

While Adawi and her Middle Eastern Dance Ensemble–formed by the California native in 1988–perform the type of folkloric, Arabic dance commonly associated with belly dancing, the group does so with a much more classical flare. As Adawi said, there are no bellies or bare legs involved, forcing viewers to focus on what’s really important: the dancing.

“I studied (dance) as an art form, and for me it was all about being a three-dimensional vision of the music,” Adawi said. “You can’t separate the dance out from the culture.”

The Middle Eastern Dance Ensemble will perform at 6:30 p.m. Sunday during the . The Dearborn event has been one of the troupe’s largest yearly gigs since the festival began in 1996, and has an atmosphere that Adawi called “delicious.”

Adawi, a classically trained symphony musician and current dance instructor at Oakland University, teaches the ensemble at her home studio in Pontiac. She also collects antique Arabic books and artifacts in a “mini museum” to help integrate Arabic history and culture into her instruction.

“Here’s this culture that has brought so much joy and meaning to my life and I can actually give back to it,” said Adawi, who is Hungarian. “It’s so win-win.”

It’s Adawi’s simple yet effective teaching style that distinguishes her from other Middle Eastern dance experts, according to longtime dancer Patty Livernois. Adawi treats her students like they’re 2-year-olds, she said–but in a good way.

“The way (Aida) put it was, ‘Two-year-olds have no fear of anything,’” Livernois said. “She calls it the ‘Duh’ method. And it works. When you go to class, you just kind of forget about everything else and focus on what you’re doing.”

Along with the classical dancing, the ensemble makes its authentic costumes by hand and plays traditional Middle Eastern instruments as accompaniment. It also performs annually at the Michigan Renaissance Festival, conducts traveling workshops and is looking to perform at assisted living facilities in the area, Livernois said.

The overall experience with Adawi and the dance troupe has been a liberating one, she said.

“I was the type of person who (Aida) basically had to take off the wall, get me out of the corner,” Livernois said. “I was not going to be up on stage. Now, I’m at the front of the stage with everybody else.”

Adawi, who lived in Dearborn when she first moved to Michigan in 1982, has worked closely with the for more than a decade. And she directs the Children’s Tent at the Arab International Festival–a job she doesn’t take lightly.

“Arabs are all about family; they’re all about their children,” Adawi said. “So for me, the Children’s Tent must be the hub of the Arab Festival. We have free crafts all day long.

"A lot of times we’ll get (kids’) mothers and their grandmothers, because they didn’t grow up with a lot of this stuff. It’s just so fun.”

The Arab-American audience is what makes this weekend’s festival such a unique performance for the troupe, dancer Kellie Wright said.

“The people there recognize tons of what we’re doing and even sing along,” she said. “It was nice to be appreciated for that style, because we don’t really do what mainstream America would expect to see.”

Wright travels out of her way to dance with Adawi and the ensemble–even when there are plenty of Middle Eastern dance studios closer than Adawi’s Pontiac home. As Wright put it, the decision is a simple one.

“It’s a nice escape,” she said.

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