To the foregoing generality exception must again be made of the dancing in cafés. While it conforms to the structure of a picture-complete-in-each-bar, its treatment is more or less at variance with the idea of soothing. But the symbolism is likely to lack nothing of picturesqueness. The Handkerchief Dance is characteristic of the type.
Of the two handkerchiefs used in this dance one represents the girl herself, the other her soon-to-be-selected lover. She first takes a corner of each handkerchief into her teeth, warming them into life. She lays them parallel on the floor and indifferently dances around and between them, to state her power to cross the line and return free from entanglements of lover’s claims. Into the waistband of her trousers she tucks opposite corners of both handkerchiefs so that they hang as panniers: the hands pushed through show the panniers empty; she would receive gifts. To show, too, that she can give, a flourishing gesture releases a corner of each, to spill the imagined contents. Interest progresses until as a climax she kisses one of the fluttering cloths, slowly passes it downward over heart and body, and throws it in a wad to the elected one. The token is his passport to her; and its return at any later time is announcement that she no longer interests him.
One dance the Arabs have that is not associated with the idea of symbolism, but is rather a vehicle for the display of technical skill for skill’s own sake. It is the Flour Dance. On the floor a design is drawn in an even layer of flour—a favourite figure is the square imposed on a circle, familiar in Saracenic ornament. The dancer’s first journey over the figure establishes a series of footprints; a successful performance consists in planting the feet in the same tracks during subsequent rounds. Difficulties can be added by crossings of the feet, turns and other involutions, and multiplied by increasing speed. This dance was mentioned in connection with the ancient Greek Dance of the Spilled Meal, of which it may reasonably be supposed to be either a direct descendant or a surviving ancestor.
There are a number of little dances popular in light entertainment. In one, a woman in the act of eavesdropping is startled by a lizard dropping on her back. Her efforts to get rid of it attract her husband from his [imagined] conversation on the other side of the curtain. She must now explain why she was standing at the curtain, and above all she must appear calm. The comedy opportunity lies in her efforts not to squirm away from the [imagined] lizard.
Another of these one-character sketches tells of the lazy washerwoman. She enters steadying on her head an imaginary basket of linen. Arriving at the edge of the stream she puts down the basket, kneels, and indolently begins mauling and scrubbing the garments over the half-submerged rocks. (And she turns the movements into poetry!) But her attention wanders from uncongenial work. Whose hasn’t? one sympathetically asks oneself as one watches. She looks up the stream, and down; her eye sees beauties, and her mind finds subjects to wonder about. She falls a-dreaming, and then asleep—still kneeling.
When she wakens, the other women have finished their work and gone, and it is late. Not stopping to wring out the clothes that she hurriedly collects from the
