[From an interview with Morocco conducted by Dr. Barbara Sellers-Young, PhD at the request of the Oral History Archives of the Dance Collection of the Lincoln Center Library of/for the Performing Arts in New York City]

Read about Morocco's first Oriental dance job audition!

...Most of the other clubs on that strip - on 8th Avenue [NYC] in 1960, there were thirteen clubs in a three block radius owned mostly by Greeks, with a couple of token Turks, had been there for some time: 10-15 years at least. The musicians were Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, and from nine thirty in the evening until four in the morning, seven nights a week, they had music, singing, dance.

The audience consisted mainly of whole families that would come, from the grandparents down to little babies in the baskets, or the guys who were working in the fur trades in that area. That section of town was where the fur market and the flower market met, and still do. (Most of the fur factories in that area are gone now, due to the turn-down in the popularity of fur coats, redevelopment in the area and much cheaper labor in the Far East….) Back then, it was a big, thriving business, employing hundreds. The workers in those markets were almost entirely Greek with some Turks and a few Arabic speakers and Armenians, so that was where the clubs with entertainment from that part of the world were, the restaurants, then the people of those ethnicities, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Moroccans, etc., would gravitate towards those clubs, because they were homesick. They wanted their music. You didn’t exactly hear it on the radio, in those days.

In addition, the movie "Never on Sunday" had just come out. It was extremely popular and made Americans aware that such a thing as bouzoukia, where they played Greek music, existed. So, you would have this interesting dichotomy in the audience of the “realies” and the “civilians”. You knew the civilians because they would come in gawking, looking totally incredulous, and say, “Play Never on Sunday!” The rest of the people would turn around and look at them as if a cockroach had just walked into the Four Seasons, and was slowly making its way across the floor.

Also, in those days, since you were dealing with people from lots of different cultures, a lot of whom were illiterate or whose languages had different alphabets… you didn’t have signs out front saying who was performing. You had a big picture window and all the musicians and singers, and the dancers dressed in slightly formal party type dresses, would be sitting on the stage all night, when they weren’t dancing or singing, so that whoever came by could look in the window and see who was performing that night in that restaurant, and decide whether they wanted to enter or not.

Another interesting factor was that at that time in New York, there were some very strong cabaret laws. It was a result of the crackdown in jazz and b-girl dives in the mid-1950s, when there were lots of women who were forced to sit and drink with customers and sometimes become prostitutes. There was a lot of corruption in the clubs on 52nd Street, and various other places in New York City, and the overreaction was that anyone who was going to work in any toilet that was owned by the Mafia that sold booze, you had to be photographed, fingerprinted, never even been convicted of a misdemeanor, and if you were female working in those places, unless you were a waitress, coatcheck or cigarette girl, you couldn’t talk to customers. You couldn’t sit at the table with customers. If your own mother came into that place, if you were working there, you couldn’t sit at the table and talk to her. Now, this was very good for the female performers. That meant nobody could pressure you, at least during the working period, to do anything you didn’t want to do or sit and talk or drink with a bunch of strange guys.

Since I didn’t drink or smoke or do any of those silly things, I sat on the stage all night and watched the other dancers, the singers, who would very often dance during the musical breaks, between verses, and the people in the audience who came, mainly to get up and do the dances from their home towns. You saw all these people dancing together in a way that was totally unlike American social dancing. It was fascinating. There we were, sitting in the middle, of what was to me, all this wonderful music. As much as I loved Flamenco, as deeply as it reached me musically, I was hearing music that, sorry for the bad pun, struck an even deeper chord. I don’t know why or how but especially when they were playing the rhythms and the songs, that I found out later, were the older Turkish and Arabic songs as versus the Greek and the more modern stuff - although I really love that too - it really resonated. The things in the Greek music that resonated and the Turkish and Arabic music, were what they called the heavier rhythms, the deeper, more emotional rhythms. I was just fascinated with it.

Another wonderful thing in that era was that they were too cheap to hire drummers, so we had to drum for each other. Whether we knew how to or not, you would be passed the drum that is shaped like a vase that’s called darbouka and derbekki in Lebanese/ Syrian Arabic, tabla in Egyptian Arabic, and it’s dumbek in Turkish, and trabouka in Greek. Looks like an upside down vase. If you were handed that drum, you had to play it. Since, because of Flamenco, I was used to complex rhythms and counter rhythms, I learned to play it pretty quickly.

BSY: Did you learn how to play it by just watching?

M: Watching. You look, you learn, you got the job. And then seeing whole families get up and dance together. You didn’t see this in any other clubs in the States. You didn’t see parents and children and grandparents holding hands and dancing in circles in America in the 1950s and 1960s. You heard that there used to be barn dances, that there used to be square dances, but you assumed that it was only the older people who did it. You had social dances where a man and a woman danced together, and sometimes it was okay for two women to dance together, but never two men.