Ispahan Magazine, Volume 5 - Winter Edition 2013
Oriental hibernation! It is the beginning of a whole new year and you have probably been asked about your new year’s resolutions..! Do you have any..? Have you started making them come true? To be honest I never make those.. If I want to do something, instead of making a resolution to do so, I simply do it. That’s how this magazine came about too.. Thinking long and hard about it, doubting if it will work, how it will be received, only leads to a lot of ideas never even being tried at all. Trial and error.., that’s more my thing, so if I’ve tried it and it does not work, at least I gave it a shot.. Text & Photographs by Kashka
Those things you dream about, big or small, your fantasies about how it could be, which never actually ‘materialize’: they can become fairytales, seemingly too good to be true. Like starting a magazine without any knowledge or education about how that works. And perhaps also like starting to dance ‘Oriental’ style, for someone who has never danced before.. Often women who are attracted to this dance style have found themselves ‘lured in’ by Harem fantasies and Oriental mystique, made up by the West. Probably to discover (once being an Oriental dancer) that this is eh… quite difficult to find and even not at all appreciated these days by fellow dancers! The strongly romanticized ‘Harem ladies dancing for the Sultan’ is not ‘trendy’ at the moment, for it is an ignorant Western fantasy that has got little to do with Oriental dancing. The fun contradiction is that, at the same time, there are more and more new dance trends that combine Western dancing (or other forms of ‘movement’) with Oriental dance and that IS considered very trendy. Oriental burlesque (not too very different from the dancin’ Harem girls, in my opinion!) and very romantic ones, like ballet pieces are an intricate part of Oriental dance shows nowadays. So I am predicting the ‘rentrée’ (comeback) of the Oriental Fantasy style..: Harem trousers, veiled dancers and dramatic effects! Maybe it is wishful thinking on my part, because I am a sucker for fantasies & fairytales and because I dream of a large dance company (so, join us at the
Ispahan Oriental Dance Company!) to do massive choreographies, musical style. But I sense that in these grim days and harsh reality of financial crisis, recession and all of us needing to cut back our spending in order to pay the bills, there is a need for daydreaming and to be able, when you are dancing, to forget your troubles for a moment.., to live in another place where the music is sweet and the sun bright and we haven’t got a care in the world. So this issue is all about (Oriental) fantasies! If you too make your fantasies come true, you will find that there will be some setback.., most of the time precisely where you didn’t expect it. What this magazine is concerned, I expected to be overwhelmed by articles, written by you. I saw the numerous updates and short stories on social media and know that lost of people write newsletters and blogs, but alas, the input is rather minimal. Since I suspect that you will get bored reading only my input plus one or two interviews, this magazine might seize to exist if this does not change. Thanks to modern technology you, my readers are located all over the world, this platform is therefore huge, much greater than the people in your own circle, you can reach via social media or your own personal web site: so take this challenge and run with it! So join me and dive into the fantasy that is called ISPAHAN Magazine..! Enjoy!
With love, Kashka (editor) ISPAHAN 05