Marcelle Matar: the most skillful dancer
The clock struck five in the evening... and there were throngs of children... flocking to the children's party.
It was a lovely thing of the Ahram Hotel in Beit Mery to think of the little ones in a year when Lebanon has been taken up with the grown-ups... its emigrants and its tourists.
And it was lovelier still that it did not hold the party for mere amusement and the election of a children's beauty queen, as is usual... but exerted efforts to discover the artistic leanings in the little ones... and to seek out the talents lying hidden in some of them, and encourage them.
Here is a little girl of only seven who dances every dance... the hard and the easy... the stirring and the soft... moving with the movements of one sure of herself... performing an official duty with no limpness in it... measured movements of the loveliest ever seen... upon a body of the loveliest ever seen... I could have wished that more of it were hidden than was hidden, in mercy to creation... this little one has a future in the world of art.
And here is another, ten years
old at most, dancing a magnificent Spanish dance... you close your eyes and fancy yourself in Andalusia... the red dress... the skill of whoever sewed it, as though the costume had been taken from the pictures of history or from one of the moving-picture films... the ornament of the head... the thing like mute castanets in her two palms, which she brandishes so that now it is above her head and now at the level of her body... even the exquisite dark coloring and the features of the face, all of them from the country we lost, in which our soul still dwells.
The Lebanese dabke was led by a marvelous little girl who found in the orchestra's playing a false note — or, more exactly, a drift toward the Western melody — and so went on strike from the dance until, once the playing was got right, she performed wonders... everything in these little ones, from the measured movements to the leader waving her kerchief and leaping into the air and then striking the ground with her feet... all of it composed an astonishing Lebanese folk tableau... where are the organizers of the emigrants' festivities, to search out
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