[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]


...Then the first night I’m working [at the Arabian Nights] this group of five or six men came in that were slightly built with little mustaches and high cheekbones. Now, to a New Yorker in that day and age, to me they looked Puerto Rican. Okay, we’ve got a bunch of Puerto Rican guys, this is cool. They were sitting at the table and they’re (the musicians) playing this weird music that was very haunting that I really liked. One of the little guys gets up and he’s just kind of standing there looking like he’s drunk as a skunk, swaying and turning and hitting his feet in the air, and dipping and kneeling and I thought he was out of his mind.

I was about to say something when a second guy got up and starts doing the same thing as the first guy, except it looked like they were about to challenge each other to a knife fight. They were doing all kinds of moves that looked like they were miming having a knife fight but nobody had a knife.
I turned to the singer and I said to her,

“These men are crazy. They’re going to have a fight. Why don’t they make them sit down?”
She said to me, “You crazy morey, that's Greek folk dance. That’s Zembekiko .”
I said, “That’s a dance?”
She said, “It’s Greek folk dance. Don't you know nothing?”

Guess I didn’t! This was my introduction to a guy being able to dance alone or to dance with another guy in public and it was okay in that environment. In fact it was preferable to his danciong in public with a woman!!!

And it was like, Oh, all right, I’m going to sit back and watch this. I would see line and circle dances, where it was all guys dancing: they’d all be doing like this chorus step and the one guy in front would be doing all this acrobatic stuff. It was fun. It was wonderful. The audience was entertaining us. Much better than TV any day.

When they played the same kind of music for the audience that I was supposed to get up and dance to, when it was my turn to perform later, I’d be seeing that the freest dancers were the little kids, the grandmothers and the grandfathers. The younger women and men, the men would get up but the women would be sitting there and people would ask them to dance and they’d be shaking their head and wagging their finger, “Oh no, oh no.” But sometimes they’d get up, if it was a husband or a father, or with each other.

I wondered why it seemed as if it wasn’t as okay in that environment for a woman to get up and dance by herself or for two women to dance by themselves if they were younger, but it was okay for the guys.

When I would see one of the Grannies do a move I liked…. The bathrooms were downstairs -- some time in the evening she had to go to the can -- I’d follow her downstairs, trap her in the lady’s room, and say, I like what you did. Would you show it to me?

At first they thought I was crazy. Then they realized I meant it, then they thought I was cute. So, they’d go, “You really want to learn how to dance? Come to my house, we’ll have coffee, and my sisters and I, or my daughters and I, will show you.”

And I would. I found out that they were going to these places because they were homesick. Most of these people would never go out to a restaurant or a nightclub, or any place that sold alcohol, especially the women, in the cities or towns where they came from back home, but in the US, these were the only places they could hear their music. People who would never go to Bouzoukia in Greece, because it was beneath them, it was low class, spent every night in them because they were so homesick. There was no place they could hear the music in their language, and they didn’t realize what they had until they left it.

With these women, it was that their children and their grandchildren were trying so hard to become American that they didn’t want to hear about or learn any of those old-world dances. When they went with the family to the restaurants, they were going reluctantly. They wanted to be with their American friends, learning the Lindy Hop, and the Cha-Cha and the Mambo. The Twist was just coming out. It was amazing what some of them thought was the Twist!

Then here was this crazy foreigner, who looked like them, who wanted to hear their stories about the old country, and wanted to learn their dances. They adopted me, like a relative. So not only did we dance together, because this wasn’t something you learned formally. You just got up and did it, by watching them and trying to imitate.
Then they would say, “Okay, now you do this. What would you do here? This is different music. What will you do? Yes, that is correct…. no, that does not fit: it is too strong, this is soft music here. Soft music, soft movements, strong music, strong movements …. Listen with your body, your heart - not just your ears!”

Years ago, my dear friend and Flamenco partner from class, Hank, would put on Flamenco records, when I was first learning, and say,
“Dance to it.”
I would say, “I don’t have a routine to it.”
He would say, “You don’t need a routine. You know enough steps. You know these rhythms. You just make up something.”

So, I did. I saw that I could do it. I could improvise. These wonderful people, they gave me even more leeway, gave me “permission”: to improvise, to feel the music, to try and see if this fits or that fits. When it worked they would tell me. When it didn’t work, they would tell me and try to explain or try to show me why.

I learned why the young women wouldn’t get up as much in the restaurants, when they certainly did so eagerly at home. There were young women who were fabulous dancers at home, but you would not see them dance like that in the restaurants. When I asked them why not, when all the men were showing off like such roosters? (Rooster is the perfect word for it, because they really were strutting their stuff for the ladies!) It was fascinating to watch. It was on an even more open level than Flamenco.

It was almost like I was walking down the path and this was further along on the path. Years later, because of knowledge of linguistics and words, and learning enough of Arabic and knowing enough Spanish, that I began to put two and two together and realize that Flamenco came from the Moors, the Moroccans who were in Spain . The word Flamenco comes from Arabic. So, know it or not at that time, I was going back to the ancestor of what I had been doing.