Siasamba

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Hebrew: סיאסמבה. Two-wall block dance by Sagi Azran and Doron Valenci, 2005.

The dance is unusual only for its bridge, in part of which the choreography calls for the dancers to execute two long figure eights along the line. In many sessions, this has been replaced by a free-form segment: the dancers move around at will, interacting with each other in pairs or larger groups, linking elbows and circling around each other.

The instrumental-only music is cut from a more complex piece called Siamsa, written in 1996 by Ronan Hardiman for Lord of the Dance, an Irish dance show created by and starring Michael Flatley. (The word "siamsa" is a short form of the Irish word "siamsaíocht", meaning "entertainment".) The choreography in the show calls for ten couples. Near the end of the piece they perform a flying hora, a staple of Israeli dance performance, but with twenty dancers instead of the more typical four to eight.

Links

Siasamba at MachoLA 2020, showing the bridge as commonly danced

Siamsa from Feet of Fire (a successor to Lord of the Dance), with the twenty-person flying hora at 4:07

Siasamba at israelidances.com

Video at Rokdim