The Seventh Folk Dance Festival

On the great grass field of the American University of Beirut, as is its custom, this year's folk dance festival was held, on Friday and Saturday, May 24 and 25.

The dance troupes spread out across the grounds in their bright, variegated colors, forming an enchanting springtime tableau within a human frame teeming with thousands of spectators... The truth is that this festival has won popularity among all classes, foreigners and Lebanese alike, because the American University of Beirut, which supervises its organization, has taken care that all the cultural and artistic bodies of Lebanon should take part in it. Thus the spectators see every kind of folk dance in its own ornamented dress — Dutch, Scottish, Russian, and American... And more beautiful than all of this is the special concern for encouraging the Lebanese dabkeh and reviving scenes of the village: a bouquet of maidens at the spring, the watchman, the village wedding, and so on...

We spoke in a previous issue of the blessed renaissance of folk dancing which has begun to spread among the classes of polite Lebanese society, reviving — with no little mastery — the kinds of the Lebanese dabkeh: of the south, of the north, and of the Bekaa, most of which had all but died out and vanished under the sway of jazz dancing. The credit for this blessed renaissance goes to a band of our zealous compatriots, such as Mr. Sami Salibi, proprietor of the "Ras Beirut Institute of Music and Drawing," and the artist Mrs. Wadia Jarrar. Were it not for the beneficent enthusiasm with which the likes of these two, and others besides, press on, this artistic movement could never have revived and flourished..