Shamakhi dancers

Shamakhi Dancers

The tawaif style entertainment groups that existed in Shamakhi, Azerbaijan up to the late XIX century. However, unlike the tawaif, the Shamakhi Dancing schools had both female and male dancers to perform. The dancing style itself presumed to be similar to Persian Traditional Dance. The famous Shiraz Dancers wer the main and perhaps the only rivals for the Shamakhi Dancers. At the time the native tongue of the Shamakhi inhabitants was Tat language, which also very close to Persian. Sorrowfully the dance tecnique, once developed in Shamakhi vanished leaving a few records of that. One of the sources that concerns the Shamakhi Dancers is Alexsandr Pushkin's The Tale of the Golden Cockerel. Nowadays Azerbaijani Traditional Dance style is based on Persian (hand-finger) and Kaukasian (leg-foot) dance tecniques.