Barbara Sellers-Young (Auth.) - Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity-Palgrave Macmillan Uk (2016)

belly dance,
pilgrimage
and
identity
barbara sellers-young
Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity
Barbara Sellers-Young
Belly Dance,
Pilgrimage and
Identity
Barbara Sellers-Young
Dance Department
York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ISBN 978-1-349-94953-3 ISBN 978-1-349-94954-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954976
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
With deep gratitude to
Linda, Scylla, Marti, Badawia, Lynette
and the dancers of the Gamal El Rooh
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people who have made this thirty-year research project
possible.
My thanks go to Scylla, my first dance teacher, whose clear joy in mov-
ing inspired me to continue studying dance. I am grateful to my second
dance teacher, Badawia, who gave me the courage to discover my identity
through performing.
I would also like to thank the first dance students I ever taught, Linda
Myers and Marti Cheshire, who with enormous patience and friendship
taught me to be a dance teacher.
Rebecca and Roy Conant provided friendship and great conversation in
the early phases of my research.
Janet Moelzer shared her years of folk-dance experience and insight
into the role of dance in society.
Robert Barton taught me the role of movement on the stage.
Phillip Young introduced me to the practice of ethnography.
Lynette Harris, Editor of The Gilded Serpent, provided opportunities
for me to put ideas into motion.
Anthony Shay opened my eyes to considering a further study of belly
dance and the role of men in the dance form, and has been a valuable
research collaborator.
Caitlin McDonald has been an insightful co-editor on joint projects.
Carol Altilia and Michael Longford provided enormous support during
the early phases of working on this book.
Ina Agastra read a version of the book and provided deeply astute
comments.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The global belly-dance community included me as a dancer and later

as an ethnographer and generously shared with me their thoughts on the
role of the dance in their lives. This includes the many scholar/dancers
whose research was pivotal and who are referenced throughout the book.
My daughters, Berri Leslie and Kimberly Sellers-Blais, have over the
years taught me what it means to be a member of a family and a commu-
nity, and therefore helped me to understand what community means to
members of the belly-dance community.
Jade Rosina McCutcheon is a depth of presence in my life for which I
am daily grateful
The support of the Davis Humanities Institute University of California/
Davis, the Center for Cultural Risk in Society, Charles Sturt University,
Australia and faculty research grants from University of California/Davis
and York University have made this project possible.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Belly Dance: Transmission

in Popular Culture 1
2 Egypt: Place of Pilgrimage, Place of Home 19
3 Dancing the Goddess in Popular Culture: Resistance,

Spirituality and Empowerment 41
4 San Francisco and American Tribal Style 65
5 Fusion, Dark Fusion and Raqs Gothique 91
6 Belly Dance, Gender and Identity 109
7 Belly Dance and the Stage: Nationality,

Ethnicity, Identity 129
Bibliography 149
Index 165
ix
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 2.1 A young Tahia Carioca 21

Fig. 2.2 Leila Farid performing at a wedding at the Marriott
Zamalek Hotel in Cairo, Egypt 33
Fig. 3.1 Maria Sangiorgi in an Egyptian Assuit costume 60
Fig. 4.1 Paulette Rees-Denis at 2014 TribalCon in Georgia 84
Fig. 5.1 Tempest and husband Nathaniel Johnstone at the 2015 Waking
Persephone Saturday Night Gala Show. Photo by Carrie Meyer 101
Fig. 6.1 Nineteenth-century Turkish male dancer 111
Fig. 7.1 Yasmina Ramzy in the Arabesque Dance Company
and Orchestra production NOOR, March 3–6, 2011,
Fleck Dance Theatre, Toronto, Canada, Nomad photographer 140
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Belly Dance: Transmission

in Popular Culture
A dancer stands on the stage of an urban cultural centre. The dancer is

dressed in what has become recognizable as a belly-dance costume with a
sequined top on the upper torso, bare belly, a hip-level skirt or pants and
a belt with long rows of sequins slung around the hips. As a community
of belly dancers “whoop” and “shout” in support, the dancer integrates
gestures of the torso and pelvis with a soft placement of their arms. The
dance is a staging of self and therefore a public representation of a per-
sonal conception of identity and its realization within the performative
environment of the belly-dance community. For in the creation of the
performance, the dancer has chosen the music, created the costume and
choreographed and/or improvised the movement.
While the dancer is performing on a stage in an urban centre in Tokyo,
Sydney, Chicago, London or New York, there is a woman or man, at
a wedding, betrothal or other celebration in North Africa, the Middle
East or related diaspora, who, dressed in the clothing of their community,
are incorporating gestures of their torso, hips and arms to perform their
improvised version of the dance in which they are dancing their physical
expression of their gender, ethnic identity and personality, which is also a
symbolic representation of their community.1
Belly dance in its countries of origin and in its global dissemination has
since the nineteenth century been situated at the confluence of celebra-
tions associated with rites of passage—births and weddings—and popular
culture as entertainment. Victor Turner in his conception of the perfor-
© The Author(s) 2016 1

B. Sellers-Young, Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_1
2 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
mative (1982) discusses the relationship between the liminal and its rela-

tionship with ritual transformations and the liminoid as a related, and yet
differentiated space of play associated with the stage and its representation
of social/cultural processes. This is a psychophysical space that is betwixt
and between one mode of being and another. Primarily associated with
rituals and the extraordinary performance spaces, such as the dance studio,
stage and cyberspace, this imaginary space of the liminal or liminoid pro-
vides an opportunity for a participant to transition between psychophysi-
cal modes of identity. Within liminal ritual celebrations such as weddings,
dance, according to Turner, serves an integrative function in that it unites,
via music and movement, people from separate kin groups in a similar
expressive aesthetic that signals for the individuals and the community a
new status for the individual performers within that community. When
dance becomes part of the public environment of the liminoid, there is
a convergence of a performer-audience experience in which the dancing
body is, as Ann Cooper Albright has pointed out, an object of represen-
tation and the subject of its own experience that engages in a “variety of
discourses: kinesthetic, visual, somatic, and aesthetic, as well as intellec-
tual” (1997: 5). In these liminoid spaces, which are often associated with
popular culture, dancers negotiate the intersections between self, society
and the perceptual awareness of the dancing body. The dancer’s body
is, therefore, an act of mediation between the expressive gestures of the
dance form and personal conceptions of identity.2
Andrew Ross (1989) in describing the history of jazz, blues and rock
points out the synergy that exists between forms as they evolve separate
musical traditions in interaction with each other and related twentieth-
century economic, political and social forces. Through the medium of
popular music, he articulates one of the fundamental components of
popular culture; its ability to constantly evolve within competing dis-
courses from the mainstream to the margins. In Between the Middle East
and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of the Diaspora (2013), Alsutany
and Shohat draw attention to the shifting nature of representation of the
Middle East’s popular culture. They note the impact of Brazilian tele-
novela O Clone (2001–2002), which focuses on a love story between a
Muslim Moroccan woman and a Catholic Brazilian man. The backdrop
for the narrative was “Orientalist exoticism rooted in a tropical imaginary
long marked by a fascination with a distant Moorish/Iberian past. The
telenovela’s imagery of harems, veils, nargilas, and belly dancing ignited a
Dança do Ventre craze and generated classes in belly dance across Brazil”
(Alsutany and Shohat 2013: 3). There were also popular culture derivatives
INTRODUCTION: BELLY DANCE: TRANSMISSION IN POPULAR CULTURE 3
from O Clone in the new music/dance fusion genre, the Belly/Samba; cos-
tumes for the 2002 Rio Carnival were based on the telenovela’s costumes,
and the show’s popularity caused it to be ultimately broadcast throughout
North and South America, Portugal and Spain. As Alsutany and Shohat
note, “there is a stubborn persistence of an Orientalist imaginary” (2013:
11) that exists in narratives such as O Clone, and which is also manifested
by Disney World’s Epcot Center’s exhibit of Arabic exotica, “Arabian
Nights” experiences at the Las Vegas Aladdin Hotel and Middle Eastern
cafes throughout the world that integrate Arabic pop music Arabic food
and belly dancing. The exotification of the Arab identity is also embedded
in the music industry through the performances of Columbian/Lebanese
singer Shakira and other music icons, such as Beyoncé and U2. The global
history of belly dance, as an ethnically based aesthetic form in popular cul-
ture, is a negotiation of these often competing political, economic, social/
cultural and aesthetic forces.
This complex discourse has been brought to public attention in the
media with headlines such as the article in Time magazine in 2006 enti-
tled “Body and Mind: Belly Dance Boom” which reported the increasing
popularity of belly dance (within this text references to dance consistently
refer to belly dance). Numerous James Bond films have used the dance to
set the scene in North Africa or the Middle East. Other media articles from
different parts of the world focus on the dance from a variety of angles
and contexts: for example, the position of the dance in popular television
programmes (“Belly Dance on Boogie Woogie,” Times of India),3 its role
in fitness (“Belly Dance, Fitness and Weight Loss,” LiveStrong.com),4 per-
sonal self-improvement (“Find a Little Wiggle Room,” Bangkok Post),5 the
role of male dancers in the Middle East (“Male Dancers Back in Vogue in
Turkey,” Reuters,6 and “Male Belly Dancers Make a Comeback in Egypt,
Defying Suppression,” Bloomberg),7 the dance’s relationship to Egyptian
politics (“Belly Dancers Worry About Possible Islamist Takeover,” Al
Monitor),8 the role of the dance among diverse diasporic communities
(“Arab Lesbians: A Place to Dance Freely,” New York Times)9 as well as
individual articles on male and female dancers from across the globe.
There have been in the last ten years several films whose narrative struc-
ture involves individuals whose lives are changed by their involvement in
the dance. They include: the Tunisian film Satin Rouge (2002); the Hong
Kong-based film My Mother is a Belly Dancer (2006); a French Canadian
Romantic drama, Whatever Lola Wants (2007); a film about two Chicago
women, one born in the US and one from North Africa, Just like a Woman
(2013); a documentary on the international touring company Belly Dance
4 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
Superstars entitled American Dancer (2003); an account of the dance

community in Cairo, The Bellydancers of Cairo (2006); a documentary
on the position of male dancers, Belly Dance Man: from Canada to Cairo
(2009); and Zenne Dancer (2012).
In general, media versions of belly dance subsume all dances of North
Africa and the Middle East under the general designation of belly dance.
However, within the history of dance in North Africa and Middle East,
there are distinct solo improvisational forms that integrate movements of
the head, arms, hands, torso and hips. They include— al-raqs al-baladi
or raqs sharqi (literally village or oriental dance in Arabic), raqs misri
(Egyptian dance), baladi (dance of the countryside), cifte telli (Greek
dance), majlesi (dance of the social gathering in Iran) and less well-known
terms such as cifte and karsi-karsija (variants of the Turkish cifte telli and
karslima) in Serbia and Macedonia. As Torkom Movsesiyan has noted, in
some parts of Lebanon the dance “is often called raqs alfarrah, literally
translated from Arabic into English as dance of happiness.”10 Traditionally,
the dance is a popular form of entertainment for weddings, saint’s days
and associated festivals as well as in restaurants and nightclubs in such
urban centres as Beirut, Istanbul and Cairo. There are some variations on
these settings, such as Sudanese weddings, at which the bride performs a
variant of this solo form for the groom and assembled guests.11
Since the Napoleonic era, the public performance of the dance has
been identified in travel accounts, paintings and photographs as primar-
ily an occupation of women (Said 1978; MacKenzie 1995; Brenstein and
Studlar 1997; Beaulieu and Roberts 2002). This is despite the existence
of a number of male performers, some of whom have imitated women
and others who have not, such as the Khwals of Egypt and the Köçek and
Zenne of Turkey.12 Beyond its position as popular entertainment, the gen-
eralized movement style was the vocabulary of public female performing
groups such as the Schikhatt in Morocco, the Ouled Nail in Algeria and
the Ghawâzı̑, in Egypt.13
The construction of the Orient and these solo dances as feminine and
by extension as sensual, exotic and mysterious encouraged a popular read-
ing of North Africa and the Middle East as a site of excessive display.
In due course, this image of the Orient, as documented by Edward Said
(1978) and others, became embedded in Western European visual and
performing arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dance scholar
Noha Roushdy (2009) has suggested that the image became so deeply
entrenched that the elite in countries such as Egypt disavowed the roots
of their expressive culture. This disavowal included a denial of the legiti-

macy of solo dance as an appropriate expressive form for men or women.
Karin Van Nieuwkerk elaborates on the tensions between Islam and per-
formance in her consideration of contemporary performance in Egypt
since 1970. In Performing Piety (2013), she describes the position of con-
servative Islam that all performance—singing, acting, dancing—emotion-
ally distracts from the worship of Allah. Specifically, public performance is
haram, or sinful, as such performance is considered to display the body
in a manner that threatens the social and emotional life of a community.
What Anthony Shay (1999) refers to as the “choreophobia” of Islam
discouraged performers of raqs sharqi and other solo forms from develop-
ing the legitimizing structures of a named movement vocabulary and the
direct transfer of a vocabulary from teacher to student, such as exists in bal-
let, bharat natyam, nihon buyo and other dance forms. Instead, the trans-
mission process for solo dance forms from North Africa and the Middle
East has historically been a matter of observation through community
participation. As the solo dance forms moved within the global media
flows of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the absence of legiti-
mizing authority converged with their orientalist imagery and allowed for
a variety of interpretations of the movement vocabulary and a generalized
naming of these as belly dance.14
MODES OF TRANSMISSION
Dancer Ibrahim Farrah described how he learned to dance at family cele-
brations. People would dance to the phrasing and rhythms of the music and
children would imitate them. Today the dance is still transmitted in these
family environments but it is also taught in dance studios as well as video
reproductions that are viewed individually in homes or in the community
of cyberspace via YouTube and online dance courses. As these modes of
transmission ultimately influence perceptual awareness, they are the foun-
dations of an enactment of the performative frameworks that Judith Butler
(1993) references in her conception of the social/cultural basis of identity
and gender formation as evolving from the material embodiment of social
scripts. It is a foundation evolved betwixt and between ritual family celebra-
tions and popular entertainment and across three modes of transmission.
The performance at a family or community event is a direct transmis-
sion from the body of the dancer to the body of the observer as a form
of mimesis. In this approach to dance, the dance is transmitted directly
6 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
through an imitation of the performer by the observer. The performer

and observer are participating in a wedding or other life-cycle ritual in
which the dancer is performing a set of movements to music for which
they have an entire cultural history that integrates the style and quality
of the movement with the music and the context of performance. With
each repetition of the performer’s movement, the observer increasingly
takes on the nuances of the performer’s body—the shifts of weight, the
adjustment of the spine and torso, the turn of the head, the placement of
the arms and hands—until their entire being embodies not only the move-
ment phrasing but the entire emotional ethos attached to the movement.
As these are events in which more than one family or community member
will be performing, the observer has an opportunity to mimic the move-
ment style and vocabulary of more than one person and improvise their
personal movement style.
This method of transmission requires the observer to integrate all
modes of attention (aural, visual, kinaesthetic) to imitate the movement of
another in an experience that performance theorist Phillip Zarrilli would
call “a total intensive engagement in the moment” (1995: 74). Philosopher
and educator Thomas Hanna refers to this method as “somatic educa-
tion”. Describing the ontological development of the body and its evolu-
tion from single to multiple cells, Hanna defines “self” as a soma, “a rich
and constantly flowing array of sensings and actions that are occurring
within the experience of each of us” (2004: 10). In phenomenological
terms, a dancer has transformed their experience of their “lived-body”
through an intensive engagement with the body of another, a transfor-
mation in which the body of the performer becomes, through imitation,
the object of the learner’s subjective identity. In this instance, the observ-
ing participant becomes an extension of the performer and any cultural
metaphors embedded in the movement vocabulary of the technique.
The dualistic subject–object field is united in the performer’s culturally
somatic consciousness via the total engagement of all sensory modes in a
transmission process of intersubjectivity that culminates in the body of the
observer becoming an image of the body of the performer. Ultimately, the
experience for the dancer is a unification of multiple senses within a single
action. The result is an integration of technique and cultural knowledge
in a single act and the dancer’s embodiment of a very specific cultural
consciousness.
Michael Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity (1992) cites Walter Benjamin
in noting that mimesis or the mimetic faculty, which is pivotal for our basic
survival, is also the skill we use to adapt to environments including interac-

tions with people we designate as other. According to Benjamin, technol-
ogy adopts our mimetic ability via an imitation of our senses. For example,
cameras create still and moving images in an imitation of humans’ visual
ability that ultimately develops an “optical consciousness”, a conscious-
ness that according to Benjamin, via Taussig, “creates a new sensorium
involving a new subject-object relation and therefore a new person” (24).
This optical consciousness has been a part of dance training since the
mirror, an early form of reflective technology, was introduced into the
dance studio at some time in the nineteenth century. Cynthia Jean Cohen
Bull notes that the mirror is an ever-present partner to dancers who “prac-
tice by executing repetitive movement patterns while being watched by
a teacher or choreographer and by watching their own reflected image”
(1997: 272). With the increased interest in studying belly dance in the
1970s, the studio became an important transmission site. In these classes,
a group of students study with one instructor. The instructor performs
movements in front of a mirror and the students standing behind the
instructor use both mirror and an observation of the instructor to imitate
the movements. The teacher will sometimes adjust the body of a dancer
in order to help them to understand the kinaesthetic meaning of a specific
arrangement of the body or suggest a metaphor for a particular integra-
tion of body parts. This interaction is, however, mitigated by the mirror
and students primarily rely on the subject–object relationship of optical
consciousness in the development of a consciously “gazing self” or self
as an abstract expression of line, shape and form for which they must
discover some internal emotional attachment. The dancers’ use of optical
consciousness and conscious experience of self is framed by the real or
mimesis through the dancer’s self-imposed observation of their body via
the mirror.
The mirror was an early reflective device. Since its invention, its reflective
ability has been incorporated into the still photographs of a camera and the
moving pictures of film, television and the internet, and these images have
been further distributed in analogue and digital formats through VHS,
DVD, computers, iPads, etc.15 Various moving image systems have been
used as an additional feedback method in some dance classes, but only
with the advent of the easily distributed VHS tape and later the DVD have
dancers attempted to learn dance from a two-dimensional image. With
over 300 websites and approximately 271,000 YouTube videos devoted to
belly dance, the internet has become a significant means of transmission.
8 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
Websites contain photographs of dancers, renditions of the dance’s history

and personal statements of belly dance’s influence on dancers’ lives. Many
websites also have pages of advertisements for instructional and perfor-
mance DVDs, online classes, costumes, CDs, books and jewellery. The
DVDs cover such topics as basic movements, makeup and costume, use
of zils or finger cymbals, advanced movement, choreography, and may
include performances by noted dancers. The websites also advertise belly-
dance tours to Morocco, Turkey, Egypt and Greece, where learners can
study the dance directly in its place of origin, or alternative courses, for
example one combining it with yoga in Costa Rica, a common site for
workshops in alternative physical disciplines.16 Male dancers are repre-
sented in DVDs that suggest you can Learn the Art of Male Belly Dancing
(Zamora and Gomes 2006) by imitating the images on the screen.
The recorded image is increasingly being engaged by the belly-dance
community as a teaching tool. Examples include fully online courses or
courses that are an extension of face-to-face interactions in a studio envi-
ronment. These courses utilize e-learning and multimedia technologies.
The dancer viewing a screen image uses their optical consciousness to pick
up visual information and kinaesthetically recreate it as dance phrases.
Relying on webcams, feedback on the dancer’s performance is given
online through subsequent written communication between student and
teacher following the teacher’s review of the student’s previously recorded
image. Although this form of transmission is similar to the dance studio
in its reliance on seeing as the primary mode of learning, VHS, DVD
and online formats participate in a form of embodied consciousness that
relies on the camera as the perceptual intermediary between teacher and
student. The student’s interaction and immersion in the dance form are
mediated by the ability of the camera to relay the movement phrasing of
the teacher and the student, as well as by the ability of each to respond
through asynchronous written communication to questions or sugges-
tions, for example questions from the student and critical responses from
the teacher.
Online, digital and analogue formats offer an opportunity for individu-
als to participate as dance students in the privacy of their homes, without
the inhibitions associated with size, age, race or gender that they might feel
in the public environment of a dance studio. In terms of VHS and DVD
programmes, the dancer also has a level of choice and freedom about the
quality and style of their interaction and immersion with the screen image.
A dancer can choose to learn some movements and not others or change
the movement in a way that suits the age, shape or prior experience of
their body. In informal VHS or DVD situations, the dancer is safe in the
knowledge that the media teacher is not observing their personal, idiosyn-
cratic imitation, which relies on previously learned physical vocabulary and
related arrangements of spine, torso, legs, feet, arms and head. As opposed
to the studio experience, a dancer will not be corrected for the form or
quality of their movement. Although there are potentially mitigating fac-
tors related to their life outside of the digital dance class, the student in the
mediated class is, by comparison to their counterparts in previous classes
described, a free agent who personally determines their embodiment of
the dance form. As such, these students partake of the opportunity that
digital formats provide for experimenting with a performed identity.
These different modes of transmittal develop what Thomas Csoradas
refers to as “somatic modes of attention,” which he defines as the “cultur-
ally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings
that include the embodied presence of others” (2002: 244). As media
scholars Ong (1999) and Hayles (2012) have pointed out, community
and personal viewing practices have evolved to match the increasingly self-
directed attributes of technology that have developed over the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. Media theorist Ron Brunett suggests that par-
ticipants are engaged in the virtual world through the use of their “imagi-
nations and energy to push the boundaries of their perceptions and to
make their bodies respond to what they are looking at” (2005: 131). A
student learns the form via the media and further extends this process
by using their imagination and prior media-based images of the form’s
culture and history, in a setting where there is no critical or corrective
discourse.
The three methods of dance instruction and environments I have
sketched here could be named according to their primary method of
transmission; culturally somatic, optical and mediated. Each method relies
on repetition of movement to promote a consciousness experience that
ultimately informs the belly dancer’s experience of self—as a container
of cultural symbols in terms of family and community interactions, as a
container of self/other images in the case of the studio and as a free agent
for the dancer involved with mediated formats. One of the distinctions
between the three is the different metaphoric embodiment of the subject–
object relationship. A culturally somatic dancer subsumes their identifica-
tion in the body of the performers in the community event and becomes
a repository of cultural symbols. A studio dancer, through their reflection
10 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
in a mirror, becomes their own object. The free-agent techno dancer surfs
identities in a corporeal experience that unites, within their imagination,
the training of the dance with the media context of the dance.
The individual and group negotiations that create the performance of
the form are increasingly mitigated through a movement vocabulary that
is a convergence of studio courses and an online global discourse that takes
place via blogs, YouTube and online courses. For example, a dancer in
Hong Kong who studies a version of cabaret belly dance in a studio can also
take an online course in the Salimpour technique with Suhaila Salimpour
of San Francisco. A dancer from Melbourne, Australia can take online
courses in American Tribal Style with Paulette Rees-Denis in Portland,
Oregon and in a Sufi-infused form with Dunya from New York. The
students’ kinaesthetic imagination and performance of self are therefore
framed within a convergence of the ‘live’ and the ‘virtual’. The connecting
frame consists of the Oriental images of North Africa and the Middle East
from the nineteenth through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and
the shifting references of those images in popular culture.
ROLE OF IMPROVISATION
For the majority of belly dancers, improvisations that take place as part of
studio classes becomes the point of integration of these modes of transmis-
sion and media images of the dance.17 The improvisations are free-flowing
opportunities for dancers to combine the movements they have learned with
musical accompaniment. Depending on the teacher, this music may have
originated in the rhythms and musical phrasings of North Africa and the
Middle East or it may be music that has some resonance with that instruc-
tor. In many cases, classical Egyptian recordings by Farid Al-Atrash may sit
alongside the music of the Ghawâzı̑ ensembles, cabaret-style music by Eddie
the Sheik Kochak, Sufi trance, contemporary new age music by Steven
Halpern and the electronic music of Arcane Dimension, Solace and others
in the musical repertoire a teacher uses. Improvising to an eclectic range
of music encourages dancers to evolve a personal expressive vocabulary. A
dancer who has become accomplished enough will be asked to dance at a
class performance for family and friends and potentially at a local restaurant
or at a belly-dance community event. As there is no established practice of
integrating designers or composers, the dancers, as individuals or as groups,
choose the costumes, music and movement vocabulary. This selection is a
reflection of their personal self-image, which includes how they view their
body image, gender and community of origin. The combination of differ-

ent modes of transmission and the inclusion of improvisation disrupts the
cultural habitus of the dancer and encourages new explorations of self.
The inclusion of improvisation encourages an attitude of exploration
and discovery that has led to a variety of styles of belly dance. In 1970s,
this included a focus on dance as a representation of the goddess and
on belly dance’s relationship to meditation, as well as the evolution of
what is referred to as the cabaret style of belly dance. Beginning in the
1990s, there was a further evolution to a much-codified genre referred to
as American Tribal Style. Practitioners of belly dance also begin to develop
styles referenced as Tribal Fusion, Dark Fusion, Gothic Belly Dance and
Bollywood Belly Dance. Today, these and other variations of belly dance
incorporate movement from hip hop, burlesque, gymnastics, modern
dance, Bollywood and martial arts, and training techniques from yoga and
other Asian physical disciplines. At the same time, there have been dancers
from around the world who have returned to North Africa and the Middle
East to seriously study the dance styles of Egypt and to a lesser extent of
Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.
GLOBAL CONVERGENCE OF IMAGES

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996) has argued that there are five
global flows of the social imaginary. These are ethnoscapes, mediascapes,
technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. These flows converge with
each other through the movement of individuals and ethnic communi-
ties across national boundaries, the organization of multinational enter-
tainment groups and the transmission of images and ideas through the
media from the virtual to the print. In reference to the media specifi-
cally, Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide (2008), articulates a vision of the mediascape as a “flow of content
across multiple media platforms and the cooperation between multiple
media industries” (2008: 2). This dispersal of images creates moments of
convergence evolved from the interactions with others which take place
in face-to-face and media interactions in which “each of us constructs our
own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted
from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we
make sense of our everyday lives” (Jenkins 2008: 3–4). The everyday lives
to which Jenkins refers live at the intersection of the popular media and
those sites of performance that require face-to-face interaction.
12 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
Integrating Appadurai’s global flows with Jenkin’s convergence the-

ory allows a consideration of gender and identity formation of male and
female dancers as a negotiation of their performance within a global flow
of images that engenders an enactment of a performative self, individually
and collectively. Professionals and amateur dancers explore aspects of per-
sonal identity related to cultivating kinaesthetic self-knowledge through
the exploration of a general movement vocabulary and the related music
of a dance form in distinctive urban, diasporic and national communities;
this exploration, Richard Schechner suggests, “offers to both, individuals
and groups, the chance to become what they never were but wish to have
been or wish to become” (1985: 38). This imaginary identity encompasses
the individual dancer’s conception of gender which, within the history of
belly dance, has in some cases embraced and at other moments resisted the
conception of the dance as feminine.
When applied to belly dance Arjun Appadurai’s theory suggests that its
current form is the result of integration between the body and its mediation
through global technology, an integration in which the imagination plays
a central role. He summarizes, “The world we live in today is characterized
by a new role for the imagination in social life. The image, the imagined,
the imaginary—these are all terms that direct us to something critical and
new in global processes: the imagination as a social practice” (Appadurai
1996: 31). Within this flow of the social imaginary, dancers who wish to
study directly with an internationally noted teacher can attend a festival in
Cairo, Istanbul, New York, London, Berlin, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo,
Melbourne, San Francisco or other cities throughout the globe, and par-
ticipate in a weekend of workshops where they may take classes in any style
of belly dance as well as learn a specific style of improvisation or choreog-
raphy by dancers from Egypt, England, Australia, United States, Russia
or China, and so on.18 They can also become certified in the movement
vocabulary of the form through programmes offered by noted teachers.19
If they feel their talent warrants it, they can participate in dance contests
that take place around the globe. For a more in-depth experience of cul-
ture, they can take a tour with a noted belly-dance instructor to Morocco,
Egypt, Turkey or elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East. This
diversity of venues provides an opportunity for dancers to explore their
“dancing self” from the standpoint of the local and the global, from the
informal exchanges of the hafla (dance party), to a focus on a particular
style of belly dance such as Egypt’s raqs sharqi.
Although there are some dancers who make their living via teaching
in a dance studio and at workshops at international festivals, as well as
performing in entertainment venues, the majority of dancers are what I
would refer to as serious amateurs who have studied the dance for years
and made a considerable personal investment in attending classes, festivals
and workshops, creating costumes and buying CDs and DVDs as well as
books on the dance. Within this community, there are those who study the
dance and perform primarily as soloists, and others who perform as mem-
bers of a group. Whether professional or amateur, the dance has become
a site of pilgrimage and personal identity shared with dancers who share
a similar set of experiences. This search for personal identity and a com-
munity home is not without its psychophysical complexity. As Chandra
Mohanty notes, “Home is not a comfortable, stable, inherited and familiar
space but instead […] an imaginative, politically charged space in which
the familiarity and sense of affection and commitment lay in shared collec-
tive analysis of social injustice, as well as a vision of radical transformation”
(2003: 128 ). Sally Ann Ness refers to this transnational imagination as
a migration of dance as gesture: “Migrations move within and through
colossal fields of power, fields that exert pressures and influences, and that
can create tensions, obstacles, diversions, and other resistant or facilitating
features of their own. The attainment of a new place in the world, a far
removed place—the main consequence of a migratory move—is always
in some sense a power play” (2008: 261). The complexity of the dance’s
position as a site of pilgrimage and identity is exemplified in its history of
tension between joyous celebration, interplay with Orientalism’s imagery,
and social disapproval of the form both inside and outside of its place of
origin in North Africa and the Middle East.
CONTEXT OF THIS MANUSCRIPT

This book is based on data collected during a combination of site visits I
made to belly-dance communities in the US, Canada, UK, Egypt, Turkey,
Greece and Australia, as well as a review of the extensive literature that
has been published on belly dance across the globe by dancers/schol-
ars (this includes my two co-edited volumes Belly Dance: Orientalism,
Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy, with Anthony Shay [2005] and
Belly Dance Around the World: New Communities, Performance and
Identity, with Caitlin McDonald [2013]) and the numerous websites,
blogs, DVDs, news reports and more that make up the presence of the
belly-dance community on the internet.
14 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
The underlying framework for this manuscript is Orientalism as the

concept was articulated by Edward Said, specifically latent Orientalism,
the unconscious assumption that the Orient is dark, feminine and mysteri-
ous (1978: 206–208) as it has evolved in popular culture. This vision has
been depicted in the media and on stage since the nineteenth century. The
discourse regarding the dance forms of North Africa and the Middle East
that this vision created was to travel through the social global imaginary.
The effects of this have included the convergence of new modes of trans-
mission both face-to-face and media and its inclusion into liminal venues
associated with rituals and the spiritual life of individuals and communities
as well as the liminoid environments of secular stages.
This manuscript examines the transmission of a dance form that has been
moved out of its cultural context, read through the lens of Orientalism and
appropriated to provide unique performed gender identities for women
and men. Facets of this transmission which I will examine include the fol-
lowing: its positioning and relation to politics as primarily a solo form in
Egypt, the historic cultural capital of the Arab world; the integration of
belly dance as a central component of the spiritual lives of female dancers;
the fusion of the form with primitive and Gothic art movements; and the
return of the male dancer in North Africa and the Middle East as well as
the masculine presence in the global dance community. Finally, there is the
discourse of the choreographic manifestations of the form, which range
from the work of the Reda Troupe in Egypt to the performance of North
Africa and the Middle East in such diasporic communities as Toronto.20 As
belly dance is primarily a solo form of dance, the text includes the histories
of individual dancers and their contributions to the evolution of the form.
The history of belly dance is the transformation of a beloved folk form
from North Africa and the Middle East. In the cosmopolitan context of
the global community from the Napoleonic era to the present, the dance
has evolved multiple functions that include as a rite of celebration in dia-
sporic communities, a healing modality for those who have been through
sexual abuse, an alternative identity formation for women challenging
gender norms that in some cases engage alternative religions, an exercise
for preparation for childbirth, a means of embodying different mascu-
line and feminine identities, an exotic entertainment on the stage and
screen, and a national identity formation for Egypt and those in diasporic
communities. Research on belly dance provides an opportunity to con-
sider the multifaceted purpose and meaning of this dance form in popular
culture.
NOTES
1. A discussion specifically focusing on women and the dance in Egypt can be
found in Noha Roushdy (2013) Femininity and Dance in Egypt:
Embodiment and Meaning in al-Raqs al-Baladi. Cairo: American University.
2. Turner’s theory of the liminal and liminoid have particular relevance for
members of the belly-dance community, whether they be from Egypt or
elsewhere in the world. Egyptian dancers may perform in the liminal/
liminoid contexts of a wedding ceremony, where they dance as a celebra-
tion of the bride and groom, and a Nile cruise ship, where they dance to
provide entertainment. Dancers from other parts of the world also engage
in a range of experience from the realm of the family and ritual celebrations
to those venues associated with entertainment. Both inside and outside of
Egypt, dancers have a set of strategies to emotionally and psychologically
cope with the pressures of this dichotomy. The performance career of
Delilah of Seattle is such an example. She identifies the dance with goddess
theology and Gaia consciousness and has created choreography that cele-
brates the earth. She has also had an extensive career performing in restau-
rants throughout the US. She unites these divergent performance spaces in
a philosophy of performance that makes no distinction between ritual and
popular venues; all her performances have ritual overtones.
3. “Belly Dance on Boogie-Woogie” (January 8, 2014) The Times of India.
Accessed July 12, 2015: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertain-
ment/hindi/tv/news-interviews/Rakshit-learns-Belly-dance-on-Boogie-
Woogie/articleshow/28562009.cms?referral=PM.
4. Felicie Green (October 21, 2013) “Belly Dance, Fitness and Weight Loss”,
Livestrong.com, accessed October 21, 2015: http://www.livestrong.com/
article/276450-belly-dancing-fitness-weight-loss/.
5. “Find a Little Wiggle Room,” Bangkok Post (May 5, 2012) Accessed July
12, 2015: http://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/family/292042/find-a-
little-wiggle-room.
6. Alexandra Hudson (July 31, 2007) “Male Dancers Back in Vogue in
Turkey,” Reuters, accessed July 31, 2015: http://uk.reuters.com/arti-
cle/2007/07/31/us-turkey-bellydance-male-idUKL3130074720070731
7. Daniel Williams (January 31, 2008) “Male Belly Dancers Make a Comeback
in Egypt, Defying Suppression,” Bloomberg, accessed January 4, 2015:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=atLloM
TgRlEg.
8. Kamel Saleh (May 23, 2012) “Belly Dancers Worry About Possible Islamist
Takeover,” Al Monitor, accessed July 12, 2015: http://dance-news.
blogspot.com/2012/07/belly-dancers-in-egypt-worry-about.html.
16 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
9. Micheal T. Lunogo (May 18, 2012) “Arab Lesbians: A Place to Dance
Freely”, New York Times, accessed July 12, 2015: http://www.nytimes.
com/2012/05/20/fashion/for-arab-lesbians-a-place-to-dance-freely.html.
10. Torkom Movsesiyan, (2008) “Raqs Sharqi in Cultural Diplomacy”, Master’s
Thesis (CUNY: New York), p. 77.
11. While I was conducting field research in the Sudan in 1981–1982 women
attempted to teach me this dance. The dancer’s chest is thrust forward,
head back and legs rooted to the earth. From this position, she completes
a series of complex circular movements of hips, torso and head that are in
constant opposition to each other. During a wedding celebration, the
groom stands next to the bride and catches her as she releases her upper
torso, thus, publicly indicating his willingness to protect her. Beyond the
performance by the bride at her wedding, the dance is performed by
women at private parties. When dancing among women at parties, the
dancer maintains vertical control of her body and does not incorporate the
torso release that is part of the marriage dance. Instead, women stand next
to the dancer snapping their fingers in encouragement and appreciation.
12. The best discussions of male dancers both historically and in the present
are Berger (1961, 1970: 4–43), Shay (2005) and Karayanni (2004).
13. There are also other folk dance forms in this area that feature a variety of
line dances performed by separate groups of men and women.
14. This concern with women performers is not limited to North Africa and
the Middle East. American and European women performers, as actors,
singers and dancers, have historically been categorized as a marginal class.
This tension has been particularly highlighted in the belly-dance commu-
nity, as Angela M. Moe points out: “Its performers have thus been sub-
jected to a host of stereotyping and prejudice, often being seen only as
objects of the unadulterated male gaze. It is indeed interesting, then, that
despite negative conceptions, belly dance has become wildly popular in
recent years as a form of leisure. This is particularly true among non-Mid-
dle Eastern women in such countries as Great Britain, Germany, Australia,
Japan, and the United States” (2012: 201).
15. Fatima Djemille (1890–1921) appeared at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
It is said but not confirmed that this Fatima was the subject of two early
films, Edison’s Coochee Coochee Dance (1896) and Fatima (1897). She
performed at Coney Island for many years.
16. Tours to Egypt are led by Yasmina of Cairo (http://www.yasminaofcairo.
com/), Astryd Farah de Michele (http://www.bellydancetours.com/)
and Leila (http://www.leilainegypt.com/doit.htm). Tours to Istanbul
and Turkey include those from Oriental Istanbul (http://www.orientalis-
tanbul.org/), Cappadocia (http://www.goreme.com/belly-dancing-
classes.php) and Anatolia’s Parties (http://www.anatoliaparties.com/
Istanbul_Bellydance_inst.php). There is also a Mediterranean festival and

tour (http://www.Bellydancefestival.net/info/eng/); tours to the Holy
Land (http://www.bellydanceholyland.com/) and Israel (http://tour-
dance.com/bellydance-tour/). Other tours include the Moroccan Magical
Mystery Tour (http://hadia.com/1403/fun-and-more/moroccan-magi-
cal-mystery) and the Costa Rica Yoga retreat (http://yogabellydancing.
com/blog/retreats).
17. Anthony Shay, in a 1998 essay for Visual Anthropology, makes an argument
for the relationship between calligraphy as an art form and the movement
and improvisational style of dances in Iran and potentially elsewhere in the
Middle East. “In Search of Traces: Linkages of Dance and Visual and
Performative Expression in the Iranian World”, Visual Anthropology 10,
335–360.
18. The festivals held in urban centres are very expensive for the amateur
dancer. The combination of air fare, hotel accommodation, and workshops
can amount to as much as $5000 or more.
19. Certification in a specific technical vocabulary is relatively new and offered
primarily by teachers who have developed an international reputation. The
courses are two years long and are sometimes identified as level 1, level 2,
etc. Many dancers identify themselves in terms of the style and level; for
example, American Tribal Style Belly Dance certified at level 3. Some danc-
ers seek a certification from different teachers and may be certified, for
example, in Salimpour technique level 3 and ATS level 2.
20. Prior to the 1990s, research publications on belly dance, or what is referred
to in most of the Arab world as raqs sharqi, was scarce, both in the dance’s
areas of origin, North Africa and the Middle East, and in the countries that
would later adopt it as part of popular culture. Scholarly work from this
period includes two seminal articles, one an issue of Dance Perspectives by
Monroe Berger and La Meri (1959) and another in Dance Research
Journal by Leona Wood and Anthony Shay (1976). In the last twenty
years, there has been an increase in the number of dancer/scholars from
around the world. Their publications and my personal research are the
basis for the essays in this book. Works by these more recent scholars
include Karin van Nieuwkerk’s A Trade Like Any Other (Van Nieuwkerk
1995), Ő ykű Potuoğlu-Cook’s Night Shifts: Moral, Economic, and
Cultural Politics of Turkish Belly Dance Across the Fins-de-Siècle (Potuoğlu-
Cook 2011) and Stavros Stavrou Karayanni’s Dancing Fear and Desire
(Karayanni 2004).
CHAPTER 2
Egypt: Place of Pilgrimage, Place of Home
CAIRO, EGYPT
It is 12:00 a.m. in Cairo, Egypt on a hot steamy night. The nightclubs
of Cairo are just beginning to fill up. At one such club, a twenty-piece
orchestra of Western and Middle Eastern instruments starts playing a clas-
sical piece of music. As if called by the music, a dancer in a two-piece
costume decorated with sequins and a hip belt whirls onto the stage. The
audience of tourists and Egyptian families out celebrating a holiday stop
conversing and focus on the stage. In total harmony with the orchestra,
the dancer gracefully manoeuvres her body through a series of rhythmic
and melodic changes, all the while maintaining a joyful smile on her face as
if to invite the audience to participate in her visual rendition of the music.
She leaves the stage as the orchestra brings the dance number to a close
and immediately begins another musical number that many recognize; the
audience begin clapping along to the music. One of the small children,
to the delight of her family, gets up out of her seat and begins to dance
next to the family table. She is joined by her sister. The attention of the
onlookers is diverted from the stage to the family celebration. Suddenly,
the music changes to a rhythm that ushers the dancer back onto the stage.
This time the dancer is wearing a long sequined dress and carrying a cane,
a reference to the village life of Egypt. The audience begins to clap to the
beat of the underlying rhythm and some of its members call out to the
dancer in joyous appreciation. One or two of them come up to the stage
and shower the dancer with money as a demonstration of their gratitude.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_2
20 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
The dancer reaches out to the audience inviting them to come to the stage
and dance with her. The majority of the spectators remain in their seats,
but a few of the foreign tourists join the dancer on stage. The dance ends
with a final salute by the dancer to the onstage dancers and the audience
as she leaves the stage.1
On one such evening one of the members of the audience was the four-
teen-year-old Edward Said.
EDWARD SAID, EGYPT AND ORIENTALISM

Edward Said’s (1935–2003) initial book Orientalism (1978) stimulated
scholars to examine the image of the East conveyed in Western literary,
visual and performing arts as well as popular culture. As he phrased it, “To
the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or
Oriental movements of thought and culture, these were perceived either
as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist, brought into reality
by them, or as a kind of cultural and international proletariat useful for the
Orientalist’s grander interpretive activity” (Said 1978: 208). His ideas led
to a number of studies that examine the role arts played in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century politics. These include the portrayal of women of North
Africa and the Middle East in Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (1986), a discus-
sion of Orientalist images on stage and in film in MacKenzie’s Orientalism:
History, Theory and the Arts (1995), Brenstein and Studlar’s discussion of
Hollywood Visions of the East (1997), Beaulieu and Roberts’ Orientalisms’s
Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture and Photography (2002) and Ziter’s The
Orient on the Victorian Stage (2003). There has also been an examination of
the role of the West’s version of the orient as part of consumer culture in the
early part of the twentieth century, in Edwards’ Noble Dreams and Wicked
Pleasures: Orientalism in America 1870–1930 (2000) and Jarmakani’s
Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and
Belly Dancers in the US (2008). These are just a few of the publications that,
within the framework of post-colonial studies, sought to understand the
role of the arts in the west’s political positioning of those it dominates, and
the subsequent resistance on the part of those cultures. Following Edward
Said’s death in 2003, five universities (Columbia University, University
of Warwick, Princeton University, University of Adelaide and American
University in Cairo) as well the London Review of Books established annual
lectures inspired by his work that have included discussions of the ramifica-
tions of his ideas by such theorists as Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler and
artists such as Ahdaf Soueif (The Map of Love, 1999).
EGYPT: PLACE OF PILGRIMAGE, PLACE OF HOME 21
Towards the end of his life Said used his position as a noted public
intellectual to highlight the political issues of the place where he was born,
Palestine. He also published his autobiography Out of Place (1999b),
which described his early life in Palestine and Egypt, and his formative sec-
ondary and post-secondary years and professional career in the USA. His
intensely personal narrative includes a reference to Egyptian dancer and
public icon Tahia Carioca (1915–1999), an artist he would also reference
in 2000 in a set of essays titled Reflections on Exile (Fig. 2.1).
At the age of fourteen, Edward Said attended a performance by
Egyptian actress/dancer Tahia Carioca. At the time, Said was living with
his family in Cairo as an exile from Palestine following the formation of the
Israeli state in 1948. The evening outing to Casino Badia was arranged by
Samir Yousef, Said’s schoolmate from Victoria College, a private British-
run academy for ruling-class Arabs. Tahia Carioca’s performance of the
popular culture form raqs sharqi left a deep impression on the fourteen-
year-old. Said described the experience in Out of Place: “Tahia Carioca,
the greatest dancer of the day, was performing with a seated male singer,
Abdel Aziz Mahmoud, around whom she swirled, undulated, gyrated,
with perfect, controlled poise, her hips, legs, breasts more eloquent and
sensually paradisiacal than anything I had dreamed of or imagined in my
crude auto-erotic prose” (1999b: 193).
Fig. 2.1 A young Tahia Carioca

22 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
Throughout his life in interviews and writing (1990, 1999b, 2000),

Said would refer to this performance as well as his observations of Tahia
Carioca in Egyptian films. In a tribute to her, Said wrote of the pilgrimage
he had made to Cairo in 1989 to interview her “about her extraordinary
career as a dancer and cultural symbol not just in Egypt, but throughout
the Arab world” (1999). For Said, the great dancers of the Western stage
such as ballet performer Suzanne Farrell were no match for the perfor-
mances of Tahia, or as he phrased it, “They all fail after her” (2000: 232).
I propose that Said’s reflections on Tahia Carioca are a continuation
of his ongoing challenge to the West’s version of Egypt and elsewhere in
North Africa and the Middle East. In his writing on Tahia he challenges
the historic positioning of the arts in Egypt through the cultural framing of
Tahia’s performance of al-raqs al-baladi or raqs sharqi, most often referred
to globally as belly dance. He argues that she, as an object of representa-
tion and the subject of her own experience, was engaged in a combina-
tion of Egyptian-based cultural, kinaesthetic and aesthetic discourses. With
Tahia as a symbol of an Egyptian aesthetic, he challenges Western versions
of belly dance and by extension Western aesthetics. As such, his discussion
within the framework of the discourse on dance and performance within
Egypt reveals the ongoing complexities of the performing arts in Egypt
and their global reception. This chapter considers this challenge within the
framework of Tahia Carioca’s life and the changing history of the arts in
Egypt throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
EGYPT: DANCE, COUNTRY AND TARAB

Despite Islam’s discomfort with dance, which has been well documented
by Al-Farqui (1987), van Nieuwkerk (1995) and Shay (1999), the gen-
eral urban population of Cairo and elsewhere in the Middle East, belly
dance (or as it is referred to in Egypt, al-raqs al-baladi or raqs sharki) is a
form of cultural play associated with community celebrations. Najwa Adra
in her essay “Belly Dance: an Urban Folk Genre” notes that belly dance,
when performed at ritualized events such as weddings, provides an oppor-
tunity for individual physical self-expression, but one that operates within
the confines of gender roles and expectations that celebrate the unification
of family and community (2005: 41). In Egypt before the 1960s, women
and men at ritual events such as weddings would dance in separate environ-
ments, often as a series of short solos that allowed them the freedom to
express the joy of their corporeal bodies within the framework of a family
celebration. Festivals associated with the celebration of a specific saint days
(mawâlid) have also often featured performances by dancers. As van

Nieuwkerk points out in her 1995 study, a celebration without singing and
dancing is not considered a real celebration. Yet, professional female and
male entertainers who historically appeared in public, known respectively as
Ghawâzȋ and Khawals, were “regarded with ambivalence” (van Nieuwkerk
1995: 2). They were at the same time necessary as brought “out people’s
happiness” (van Nieuwkerk 1995: 7). As part of the tourist industry from
the late nineteenth century to the present, the dancers and associated musi-
cians have been an important aspect of the Egyptian economy and in that
capacity have faced a variety of regulations beginning with Muhammad Ali
of Egypt’s outlawing of female performers from Cairo in 1834 and con-
tinuing with various restrictions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
on the style and costume of their performance, as well as the introduction
of new procedures for attaining a licence that designates them as artistes.
These amateur and professional performances are engaged, as Sherifa
Zuhur points out, in the aesthetic quality of tarab or enchantment. It
is a “quality that causes enjoyment, reciprocation of emotion and com-
munication between performers and their audiences” (Zuhur 2001: 1)
and which is learned through participation in community celebrations.
Ethnomusicologist A.J. Racy expands on this concept of enchantment and
describes tarab as a transformational experience of ecstasy:
The nuances and connotations of the word tarab as commonly used today
are consistent with the concept of ecstasy as explained in standard English
sources. Accordingly, ecstasy, like tarab, implies experiences of emotional
excitement, pain or other similarly intense emotions, exaltation, a sense of
yearning or absorption, feeling of timelessness, elation or rapturous delight.
Moreover, the term ecstasy tends to fit the various conditions associated
with tarab as a transformative state, for example those connected with
intoxication, empowerment, inspiration, and creativity. (Racy 2003: 6)
The depth of the emotional state related to tarab is brought about by the
music’s aural representation of a deep cultural matrix of interconnected
relationships between religious, social and cultural forces, and the memory
the music invokes of those relationships.
Dance scholar Candace Bordelon explains in an essay on the aesthetic
dimensions of performance that the dance in its revelation of tarab is a
“merger between the music and emotional transformation” (2013: 33)
or, phrased another way, the dancer sings the music. An amateur or pro-
fessional dancer performing raqs sharqi at a community celebration or as
part of a staged performance engages a depth of kinaesthetic listening and
24 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
related musical understanding to portray a series of emotional portraits that

are a revelation of the music and its association with the audience’s cultural
framework. This could be a rendition of a popular song, a village baladi tune
or one of the compositions created for the most popular singer in Egyptian
history, Umm Kulthūm (1898–1975). Bordelon suggests that professional
dancers pick classical compositions by composers such as Farid al Atrash as
the music’s complex interweaving of different rhythms and musical phras-
ing brings forth “images, ideas and feelings associated” with a specific emo-
tional context for the audience “that are transcendent because they are not
limited to a specific time and place.” Bordelon proposes that a dancer’s
inclusion of the music of Umm Kulthūm is that the songs “refer back to a
time of strong Egyptian nationalism and pan-Arabism—perhaps now, in this
era of new revolution, these old memories of pan-Arabism associated with
Umm Kulthūm reinforce the politics of the present” (2013: 42).
As noted by Racy, Zuhur and Bordelon, an important portion of the
dance, whether among amateur or professional performers, is conveyed
through improvisation, which is deeply engaged with the music and which
in its immediacy connects performers and audience in mutual enjoyment.
This deep connection between musicians, dancer and audience is a form of
deep community engagement that within ritual settings would be referred
to by Victor Turner as communitas, or in reference to secular settings,
existential or spontaneous communitas (1982). The distinction between
the two forms of communitas is that rituals associated with rites of pas-
sage have embedded a transformation of an individual’s place in the com-
munity while secular settings engage general community members in a
temporary relationship with each other.
In an increasingly globalized world, these intimate points of contact
between music and performer share their imaginative space with pub-
lic venues in which tarab may or may not be an important aesthetic
component of a performance, as native and non-native performers and
choreographers create dances that include Western aesthetics in an attempt
to appeal to an Egyptian middle and upper class that has been influenced
by Western values (Shay 2002: 126–162). As Egypt has historically been
the focal point of the entertainment industry in North Africa and the
Middle East the styles, forms and aesthetics developed there are broadcast
throughout these regions and changes in performance styles in Egypt have
a significant impact.
Egypt became the film and entertainment centre of the Middle East
shortly after motion pictures were invented in the late 1890s. “The first
cinema theatre opened in 1900, and by 1911 there were eight theatres in
Cairo and three in Alexandria, all showing American and European films”
(Fraken 1998: 266). Egypt in the 1920s became the Middle East’s cultural
and entertainment hub. New cabaret clubs and restaurants were opened
to entertain the growing tourist industry. One of the most successful of
these new nightclubs, the Casino Opera House, was opened in 1926 by
Lebanese-Syrian actress-dancer Bedia Masabni (Dougherty 2000). A per-
former familiar with Western films, she created cabaret revues, a primary
component of which were dance performances that would appeal to tour-
ists and those of the Egyptian upper class whose tastes were influenced
by America and Europe. These shows included a daily programme just
for women. Thus, the dance of wedding and saint’s day celebrations was
transformed from a primarily stationary solo improvisational form to a
staged performance that borrowed from the all-female image of raqs
sharqi produced by American films. Because of their lack of popularity, the
professional male dancers gradually disappeared from public life only to
return in the twenty-first century.
Beyond identifying the dance as a primarily female form, Masabni’s
cabaret staging influenced both the costume and movement vocabulary
of the dance. The layers of pantaloons, vests, head coverings, scarves,
belts and coin necklaces were replaced with revealing two-piece cos-
tumes, adapted from Hollywood films of the period, which accentu-
ated the belly and hips. Many dancers, such as Samia Gamal, adjusted
their body’s alignment to project out from the stage to the audience;
this change was enhanced by dancers who instead of going barefoot now
wore shoes with heels. Movements from ballet, such as the arabesque,
were combined with a hip lift to allow the dancer to gracefully fill the
space of a nightclub stage. Dancers decreased or limited their use of fin-
ger cymbals for accompaniment. The veil, a piece of gossamer fabric that
was a staple of the Hollywood version of the dance, became a standard
component. And, instead of improvised performances, the dancers were
choreographed to use their arms to frame and otherwise display the torso
of the body. Finally, the stars of the cabaret did not always perform solo,
but were often backed by a chorus of dancers. These early twentieth-
century developments have continued to influence the dance’s evolution
in Egypt and throughout North Africa and the Middle East. However, as
it is primarily a solo form, each Egyptian dancer integrates current trends
with their personal performance history to create a dance style that is
uniquely their own.
26 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
TAHIA CARIOCA: DAUGHTER OF THE LAND, DANCER

OF THE GOLDEN AGE2
When Edward Said saw Tahia Carioca perform, she was an established
thirty-five-year-old stage and film performer. She had been born Tahia
Mohammed Kraiem in 1915. Like all young Egyptians, she participated
in family gatherings in which she imitated the dancing performance of
relatives. Later she studied ballet formally at the Ivanova School of Dance.
From here, she was drafted by Bedia Masabni to become a performer at
the Casino Opera House (Dougherty 2000). To appeal to an international
audience, she renamed herself after the carioca, a dance popularized by
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in their 1933 film Flying Down to Rio.
Tahia rapidly became a popular entertainer and Middle Eastern icon, who,
as well as appearing in 190 films, danced at events for the Egyptian upper
class including the wedding of King Farouk.
Tahia’s career evolved in what is referred to as the dance’s ‘golden age’
in pre-Nasser Egypt, a time in which the voice of Umm Kulthūm and
the music and films of Farid al-Atrash dominated Egypt’s popular culture
(Zuhur 1998). Tahia’s appeal to Egyptians was based on her performance
of the bint al-balad character, or woman of a working-class background, a
character that, as dance scholar Noha Roushdy notes, separates Egyptian
dance from Western influences:
Throughout the 20th century, the designation awalad al-balad and its
baladi derivative has acquired a socio-economic, cultural and subjective sig-
nification that distinguishes between who and what is perceived as essen-
tially Egyptian and what has been affected, shaped or introduced through
foreign, mainly Western, cultural influences. The multiple connotations to
the word baladi as used by different people in different contexts leaves little
space to determine with accuracy whether the designation implies a positive
or a negative quality. In one sense, the concept of baladi denotes that which
is not modernized, developed or refined. In another sense, it implies that
which is authentic, pure and unadulterated. (2013: 22)
On the stage and in films, Tahia Carioca performed a movement vocabu-

lary that harkened back to the older baladi or village-style dance, which
was a concentrated study of the mobility of the pelvis to articulate a variety
of lifts, flips and shimmies within various rhythmic and melodic structures.
This was a movement vocabulary that was the basis of community and
family celebrations. Her movement style was the opposite of that of her
dance contemporary Samia Gamal (1924–1994), whose Western dance

training was evident in her picturesque arm and leg extensions. Carioca
and Gamal were both invited to Hollywood; Gamal performed in the 1954
movie Valley of the Kings, but Carioca was disenchanted with Hollywood’s
request that she expand her movement vocabulary, and returned to Egypt.
Besides her film and stage career, Tahia was an activist who was involved
in the changes that took place in Egypt from the Nasser to the Mubarak
eras (1956–2011). These changes included the evolution of the perform-
ing arts community, with its increased focus on political satire, as well as
the development of performing folk dance companies such as the Reda
Troupe that, like their Soviet and European counterparts, came to symbol-
ize the nation through the performance of Egyptian folk music and dance.
Tahia’s political activism caused her to be sentenced to prison terms on
several occasions by both Gamal Abdel-Nasser and his successor Anwar
Al-Sadat (in power from 1970 to 1981). While in prison in 1953, she
went on a hunger strike to protest the potential of physical abuse of pris-
oners. In 1987, she participated in another strike to protest against a new
set of laws that would have impacted actors’ livelihood. In the following
year, 1988, she travelled to Athens with a group of Egyptian and Arab
artists and intellectuals to support the Palestinian cause via a ship on a
reverse-exodus to the Holy Land. The trip was ultimately prevented when
the boat was blown up before the guests had boarded. Towards the end of
her life she joined with many other artists in an Islamic revival and made
the trip to Mecca; she took up wearing the veil and ultimately gave up her
stage career and political activism. The popular entertainer and activist
died on September 20, 1999. A cultural icon, she was mourned publicly
in the press and at a funeral that was attended by prominent members of
the Egyptian government.
EDWARD SAID, REFLECTIONS FROM EXILE

Feminist theorist Valerie Kennedy (2000) has critiqued Said’s statements
and writings on Tahia Carioca as a form of objectification of women that
(re)inscribes the very Orientalist attitudes towards the Orient, and spe-
cifically women, that Said critiqued in the writings of Flaubert and other
Western writers. She argues that Said’s noting of how Tahia had physi-
cally transformed over the years as she aged and the fact that there was no
archive of her work in the Cairo library was an indication that “Said showed
no awareness of how the unequal power relations between colonial and
28 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
postcolonial powers impinge on scholarly writing and research” (2000:

129). And, it is possible to read Said’s references to Tahia from this per-
spective. However, in his writings about Tahia’s life and performance
published in the London Review of Books (1990), Reflections on Exile and
Other Essays (2000) and her obituary for the Al-Ahram Weekly (1999a),
Said can, as I noted earlier, be interpreted as creating an argument for an
Egyptian dance form and in the process challenging a Western aesthetic.
Said described Tahia’s allure not in Western performance terms of time
and space but in terms of the control and restraint of her gestures, traits
associated with raqs sharqi and the concept of tarab:
The beauty of her dance was its connectedness: the feeling she communi-
cated of a spectacularly lithe and well-shaped body undulating through a
complex but decorative series of encumbrances made up of gauzes, veils,
necklaces, strings of gold and silver chains, which her movements animated
deliberately and at times almost theoretically. … I especially recall that once
she started dancing, and continuing through the rest of her performance,
she had what appeared to be a small self-absorbed smile on her face, her
mouth open more than is usual in a smile, as if she was privately contemplat-
ing her body, enjoying her movements. (Said 2000: 349)
Although clearly a fan of her performance, Said is still caught in the

dilemma that Kennedy observes of writing about her from his personal
location at a Western academic institution and its established image of
belly dance as it is presented on the Western stage and in Hollywood
films as a form evolved to capture the male gaze. Thus, Said ultimately
admits her performance can be interpreted within the Western realm of
“tawdry theatricality” but he argues that this image is purified by the style
of her performance, which incorporates an inner focus or as he phrases
it “by the virtue of the concentration bestowed on her innermost and
most self-abstracted thoughts” (2000: 349). This restraint, according to
Said, can be compared to bullfighting: “As in bullfighting, the essence
of the classic Arab belly-dancer’s art is not how much but how little the
artist moves … The point is to make an effect mainly (but by no means
exclusively) through suggestiveness, and—in the kind of full-scale compo-
sition Tahia offered that night—to do so over a series of episodes knitted
together in alternating moods, recurring motifs” (2000: 348).
Said’s description moves to separate Tahia Carioca’s performances from
the global belly-dance community whose initial introduction to the USA
took place during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and which, due to its
lack of specific lineage system and associated vocabulary, had become an

open space for the imagination; thus it reappeared as part of the Salome
craze in the early part of the twentieth century, again with the evolution
of urban ethnic clubs following World War II, again as an off-shoot of
the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and
has increasingly featured as part of global popular culture from 1980 to
the present. Writing about Tahia Carioca in the twenty-first century, Said
argued that Tahia’s performance was the opposite of non-Arab versions of
the dance that can be found both inside and outside of Egypt and which
he described as “the deplorable Greek and American imitators, who go in
for the appalling wiggling and jumping around that passes for ‘sexiness’
and harem hootchy-kootch” (2000: 347–348).
Said argues that performances by dancers in the global belly-dance
community, at ethnic restaurants, on stages or in films, are devoid of kin-
aesthetic listening, the inward concentration and integration with the
music that he notes in Tahia’s performance. According to Said, the sensu-
ality of the Western staged body is overt and obvious as opposed to that
of Tahia Carioca who in her public display was, as Said observed, both
“immediately sensual and yet remote, unapproachable, and unobtainable”
(2000: 349). Tahia’s performances, rooted in the context of the bint-
al-balad, were graceful and elegant renditions of the historic raqs sharqi
and in Said’s interpretation “classical and even monumental” (349). Said
theorized that Carioca’s sensuality was “a public event, brilliantly planned
and executed, yet totally unconsummated and unrealizable” (2000: 349).
Said’s description of Tahia corresponds with Racy’s, Zuhur’s and
Bordelon’s descriptions of raqs sharqi as an embodied expression of reserve
and expansive joy in which the sensuality of the moving body is focused
inward through kinaesthetic listening and the movement of the music
through the body of the dancer. This deeply embodied correspondence
between the music and the body increases the intensity of the integration
of the dancer’s emotional experience of the music and thus initiates in
performer and audience an experience of enchantment or ecstasy, or put
more simply, tarab. A dancer with an overtly external focus is failing to
embody this level of corporeal commitment and is therefore not embrac-
ing the true nature of the form. Instead the dancer performs on top of the
music, not within the music, and they do so in a relationship to space and
time that is read as a Western form of expression, which is outside of the
Egypt’s aesthetic structure. More significantly to the cultural performance
of the dance and related audience reception, the dancer’s failure to inte-
30 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
grate a deep embodiment of the music does not engage the audience in
an experience of tarab.
Besides separating Tahia’s performances from those of Western dancers,
Said discusses her as a woman who positioned herself as a progressive and
consequently charted her own political and artistic path, but was always
linked through her dancing to the metaphoric heart of Egypt. Referencing
The Lady’s Ploy, a film Tahia made in 1946, Said referred to her as an
almeh, a role she played in the film and a term used to describe a class of
women in nineteenth-century Egypt who could “sing and recite classical
poetry as well as discourse wittily” (2000: 350). Also referred to as awȃlim
(plural), this term references a learned woman who played a significant
role within the separate woman’s quarters in the homes of upper-class
Egyptians. These women were highly sought-after performers because of
their wit, intelligence and charm. Karen van Nieuwkerk in A Trade Like
Any Other: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt describes their main activi-
ties as “writing poetry, composing music, improvising, and singing” (1995:
26). They were valued for their ability to improvise. Van Nieuwkerk quotes
French traveller Savary’s 1777 description of them as follows:
They are called savants. A more painstaking education than other women
has earned them this name. They form a celebrated community within the
country. In order to join, one must have a beautiful voice, a good posses-
sion of the language, a knowledge of the rules of poetry and an ability to
spontaneously compose and sing couplets adapted to the circumstances …
There is no fete without them, no festival where they do not provide the
ornamentation. (van Nieuwkerk 1995: 26)
As a result of the social and political upheavals of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, this group as a distinctive community gradually disappeared.
Said maintained that Tahia Carioca retained the equivalent status of a
contemporary almeh through the enormity of her talent and personality,
and despite attempts by the film industry to cast her as the dangerous
other woman and a counter to the virtuous wife. According to Said, Tahia,
as a contemporary almeh, was “too learned, smart, and sexually advanced,
for any man in contemporary Egypt” (2000: 351). As she demonstrates
in her films, Tahia is “the finest dancer, the most formidable intellect, and
the most desirable sexual object around” (Said 2000: 351).
In Out of Place (1999b), Said examined his personal history through
his memories of life in Cairo, which included the performances of Tahia
Carioca. In other essays, he continued to separate her performances from
those of Western imitators. In part, he makes his argument by locating Tahia

as part of an Egyptian cultural renaissance initiated in the independence
movement of 1919 and which featured “writers Naguib Mahfouz, Tawfil
al-Hakim, Taha Hussein, singers like Umm Kulthūm and Abdel Wahan
and actors Soleiman Naguib and Rihani” (Said 2000: 353). In placing her
in this movement, he divided her historically from what he considered to
be the vulgar Western imitations by twentieth- and twenty-first-century
performers, non-Egyptians and Egyptians, whose evolution of the form
often relied on written and visual Orientalist images from nineteenth-
century texts and twentieth-century stage and film productions.
EGYPT RE(VISITED), A PLACE OF PILGRIMAGE

Said’s descriptions of Tahia Carioca were distinctly different from Flaubert’s
descriptions of the nineteenth-century Egyptian Ghawâzȋ, Kuchuk
Hanem, a difference which Said discusses in Orientalism (1978). As Said
states, Flaubert was entranced by Kuchuk Hanem’s “self-sufficiency, by
her emotional carelessness, and also by what, lying next to him, she allows
him to think” (Said 1978: 187). Said argued that Western artists created
a vision of the orient to generate an imagined feminine prototype that
became the characters Salammbô and Salome. Thus, Flaubert’s writing
on Kuchuk Hanem, through its depiction of an overly sensual woman,
latently supported the Orientalist stance, which stressed the necessity for
Western political regulation of an overly sensualist Arab world. The latter
discourse created the vision of Arab womanhood that Amira Jarmakani
documents in Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of
Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the US (2008). Jarmakani creates a link
between the tradition of the female nude in European art, as seen in the
paintings of Gérôme, Delacroix, Ingres and other European painters, and
the fascination with Egypt and its environments that were an extension
of the political positioning of the USA as a new twentieth-century power,
but with connections to a classical past. According to Jarmakani the danc-
ers in the Egyptian exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair provided an
initial site for the combination of fascination and aversion that were in part
representative of a new global positioning for the USA. As she phrases it:
The power and the draw of the belly dancing displays had to do with the way in
which they reflected the conflicting feelings of attraction and repulsion back on
the audience members themselves. The dancers were the embodiment of the
32 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
tension between the shock of familiarity and the thrill of the absolute and exotic
difference. This tension, which was mapped onto the bodies of the belly danc-
ers, was not about the exotic sexuality of the performers, rather, it reflected the
needs of the turn-of-the century US audience to gain an assurance of self-def-
inition in relation to the display of titillating otherness. (Jarmakani 2008: 67)
This conflict between attraction and aversion ultimately became part of

the twentieth-century global discourse through the convergence of media
images in film, television and internet. Despite the consistency of the
image broadcast globally via the media, that of a woman in a variation of
the “I Dream of Jeannie” costume, there are also distinct local interpreta-
tions of this image in such global cities as San Francisco, Tokyo, Sydney,
Singapore, London and Moscow, which engage an specific discursive posi-
tioning of the dance and at the same time continue to situate their inter-
pretation in dialogue with the dance community in Egypt.
Since Said first observed Tahia Carioca in 1949, Cairo’s arts commu-
nity has undergone changes influenced by a combination of internal politi-
cal forces including political Islam and the forces of globalization. Fahmy
(2011), Hammond (2007), Wynn (2007), de Koning (2009) and van
Nieuwkerk (2013) point out in their respective manuscripts how these
forces have impacted the cultural life of Egypt. One of the forces of global-
ization has been tourism. Before the politics of its 2011 internal revolution
came into play, one of the economic drivers for Egypt was its 13 million or
more tourists each year. Tourists from North and South America, Europe
and Asia came to see the Pyramids and Great Sphinx at Giza outside of
Cairo, the Karnak Temple Complex and Valley of the Kings in Luxor and
the Abu Simbel temples south of Aswan. Since the late 1970s one of the
major components of the tourist industry has been the contribution of belly
dancers from around the globe. Visitors would come to see the monuments
of Ancient Egypt and contemporary Egypt represented in a raqs sharqi
show at one of the five-star hotel nightclubs or as part of a dinner cruise up
the Nile, and would take classes taught by these dancers.3 There were also
numerous Arab tourists from Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Yemen and elsewhere
who, as Wynn (2007) points out, came for a different set of reasons. “The
Arab tourist was aware of Egyptian pyramids, but in the Arab world the
more immediate picture that Egypt brings to mind is an exotic accent that
everyone has heard in songs, movies, and television series since childhood”
(2007: 7). Instead, an Arab tourist would come to Egypt to be in the centre
of the regional entertainment industry, the birthplace of Umm Kulthūm;
they might also visit for the chance to see “pop culture heart throbs” (7)
such as Amrou Diyab and the opportunity to visit casinos, nightclubs
and discotheques that often put on dance performances and where they
could dance to popular Arab tunes. All of which was not readily available
on the Arabian Peninsula. Ultimately, it is the belly-dance performances in
nightclubs or on Nile river cruises that provide a point of mingling images
between the non-Arab and Arab tourists. Both of these groups were influ-
enced in its viewing practices by the print and virtual images of Egypt seen
in their specific cultural context. Non-Arabs saw Egypt as the juncture of the
classical pyramid and the sensual belly dancer. Arabs were visiting the centre
of an entertainment industry whose dancers and film stars attracted ongoing
speculation about their exotic lives and lifestyles (Fig. 2.2).
Egyptian dancers who developed their careers in the last two decades of
the twentieth century were doing so alongside a global belly-dance com-
munity for which Egypt was increasingly a site of pilgrimage and place
of employment. Dancers with such adopted names as Leila, Luna, Sore
and Safinaz from the USA, the UK, Russia, Argentina, Brazil and else-
where have navigated the complex licensing structure and performance
community to perform on the stages of Cairo. As American dancer in
Egypt Leila Farid points out, “The idea of dancers being admired and
despised at the same time is woven into Arab culture and difficult for
Westerners to understand. It may create disappointment and resentment
Fig. 2.2 Leila Farid performing at a wedding at the Marriott Zamalek Hotel in
Cairo, Egypt. Photo courtesy of Leila Farid.
34 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
as a foreign performer discovers this.” 4 For these dancers, the legal and
cultural complexity is professionally worth it as the dancer’s performance
in Egypt enhances their legitimacy as a performer both in their country of
origin and on the international teaching circuit. The dancers who come
to Egypt on a pilgrimage to festivals such as the annual Ahan Wa Sahlan
or to perform in nightclubs help to support the tourist economy as they
in turn encourage others dancers from around the globe to visit Egyptian
dance festivals, take lessons from Egyptian dancers and provide buyers for
the Egyptian belly-dance costume industry.5 However, these non-Egyptian
dancers begin their training not as children taking part in Egyptian family
celebrations but in the studios of New York, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires,
Moscow, London and other cities in which the images of orient promoted
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is embedded in the kinaes-
thetic structure of the dance. The musical modes, rhythms and sense of
cultural celebratory play that are part of the dance’s history in Egypt are
not integrated within the fabric of their somatic experience. Regardless, in
2015 Cairo, the dancers performing in the major venues included eight
dancers from Egypt, two dancers from the USA and one each from Brazil,
Hungary, Russia and Argentina.
This influx of global dancers, both tourists and performers, has taken
place concurrently wotj the 1990s Islamic revival in ethical self-improvement.
This movement aims to create performances for public and ritual celebra-
tions which engage in appropriate staged discourse that models appropriate
social relationships and religious attitudes within the bodies of the perform-
ers. Referred to as purposeful art, such a performance is “a source of noble
values that supports the didactic role of the family, enhances people’s
morality, inculcates good values in youth and society at large and recti-
fies the image of Islam” (van Nieuwkerk 2013: 195). To achieve the goal
of the movement, renowned preachers such as Amr Khalid have encour-
aged performing artists in general and dancers specifically to repent their
performing careers and leave them to join the purposeful art movement.
By the 1990s, there were male and female performing artists who repented
and quit. For those involved in the expansion of Islamic values these
ex-performers have promoted Islam within Egypt.6 As van Nieuwkerk
notes, “Female artists who veiled and left art for the home were perfect
tools for reaching the masses with a message of veiling and domesticity”
(2008: 201).
The purposeful art movement has not been without its critics. Film
director Daoud Abd El-Sayed has pointed out that art has always had
a purposeful mission and that one such example was the realist art under
the Nasser regime. There are also the cynics who feel the movement has
been under too much influence from Saudi individuals or corporations.
They tell the following joke: “Who are the second-best-paid women in
Egypt? Belly dancers of course, because Saudi tourists throw banknotes of
hundred dollars at their feet while they are dancing. Who are the best-paid
women in Egypt? The converted belly dancers of course, because Saudi
sheikhs transfer banknotes of thousand dollars to their accounts if they
stop dancing” (quoted in van Nieuwkerk 2008: 196 from Brooks 1998:
242). As indicated by the current developments in Egyptian politics, the
replacement of Mohammed Morsi and the crackdown on the Muslim
Brotherhood, there is no agreement regarding the direction of Islam in
twenty-first century Egypt.7
For those dancers, Egyptian and non-Egyptian, who have continued to
perform, there are fewer opportunities, as with the continuing unrest since
the 2011 revolution the tourist trade has lessened and as a result restau-
rants and nightclubs in Cairo and in the tourist areas of the Red Sea have
closed or reduced the number of dancers they are hiring. However, when
an Egyptian dancer decides to “take the veil” there will be non-Egyptian
dancers, particularly Russians and Brazilians, who do not share the same
image of women and domesticity and who are ready to replace her. Thus,
there is in the process of evolution a global dance community that may still
see Egypt as the country of origin and of pilgrimage but which does not
necessarily create its performance aesthetic from Egyptian conceptions of
the role of the dance in the community or perform within the framework
of the aesthetic of tarab.
The recent history of dance in Egypt serves as the context of the com-
ments on Tahia Carioca’s life and performance that Said made in the last
year of the twentieth century (the year of Carioca’s death) and the first
decade of the twenty-first century. In the language Said uses to describe
Carioca’s performance “connectedness,” “series of scenarios,” and
“inward focus,” he is creating an aesthetic vocabulary that is the historical
revelation of tarab, the intersection of music, movement and memory.
In doing so he integrates Tahia’s performance, a symbol of the country,
with her political stance and the history of Egypt to designate her as a
contemporary almeh. By identifying Carioca in this way, Said is suggesting
that the culmination of her life as a performer and political activist who
was deeply engaged in the artistic community is aligned to a historically
distinctive group of the nineteenth century.
36 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
As part of his (re)positioning of Tahia Carioca, and by extension the

arts in Egypt, he uses the contemporary term “belly-dance” (which he
writes with a hyphen) rather than the Egyptian terms al-raqs al-baladi or
raqs sharqi in order not to limit his view of the form to Egypt, but to take
into account the aesthetic consideration of the form in global culture, in
particular if the dancer were dancing within the aesthetic framework of
tarab. Indirectly, he also provided more agency for Egyptian dancers,
allowing those who might use Tahia Carioca as a model to manoeuvre
their own positioning within a social structure increasingly influenced by
the global belly-dance community.
In creating this argument, it seems that Said was both reflecting on his
personal experience as a fourteen-year-old entranced with the physicality
of Tahia Carioca’s performance and using that fascination to theoretically
consider belly dance within a postcolonial framework. At the same time,
he was attempting to find the answer to his complex ‘betwixt and between’
existence as a Christian Palestinian, exiled to Egypt, with American citi-
zenship via his father and whose secondary and post-secondary educa-
tion as well as professional career had been in the USA. He stated in a
1998 article that he always had the feeling he was “standing in the wrong
corner, in a place that seemed to be slipping away from me just as I tried
to define or describe it. Why, I remember asking myself, could I not have
had a simple background, been all Egyptian, or all something else, and
not have had to face the daily rigors of questions that led back to words
that seemed to lack a stable origin” (1998: 5) In his positioning of Tahia
Carioca, Said, as an expatriate of first Palestine and then Egypt, is creat-
ing an aesthetic place of home that in its nostalgia for Tahia’s style of
performance resists the changes that have taken place in the transnational
dialogue between Egypt and the global community. His writings on Tahia
are representative of diasporic or expatriate longings attempting to negoti-
ate the shifting landscapes of their communities (in the case of Said, the
global academic community). Homi Bhabha (1994) suggests classical and
traditional art forms can, as a nostalgic site of memory, serve as power-
ful metaphors for the past. Bhabha, in his discussion of identity, indicates
that this is one of the primary impacts of traditional practices and makes
a distinction between art acting as nostalgia and art as a potential for new
modes of being or newness. Nostalgia, according to Bhabha, operates as
a denial of the present and presence in its attempt to replicate the past.
He argues for artists to create intervening spaces which deconstruct past
and present to mirror the complexity of contemporary political and social
realities. He states, “Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause
or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, prefiguring it as a contingent
‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the
present” (1994: 7).
A consideration of Edward Said’s encounters with and writing about
Tahia Carioca within the framework of twentieth and twenty-first-century
Egypt reveals his nostalgic resistance in his positioning of Tahia and by
extension Egypt. His resistance takes the form of an aesthetic frame-
work that suggests that the global belly-dance culture, and its presenta-
tion within a Western aesthetic that concentrates on the body in time and
space rather than in deep connection to the music, lacks the power of
the form as Tahia danced it within the aesthetic framework of tarab. Said
points out in Culture and Imperialism that art “is a sort of theatre where
various political and ideological causes engage one another” (1993: xiii).
That is, a theatre of a convergence of images from history, contemporary
theorists, media stereotypes, local and international performers linked on
a liminoid stage in a complex interaction with the potential for dramatic
tension. Initially, the stage setting is a dance, raqs sharqi, that is included
as part of family celebrations in Egypt but was also interpreted by eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century artists in erotic representations of the
Middle East. Against this historical backdrop there is the history of the
dance in the latter half of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, during
which dancers from cities as diverse as Los Angeles, Tokyo, Rome, Berlin,
London, Singapore, Sydney and Buenos Aires have created their rendition
of the dance within the reflection of Orientalism’s frame. Regardless of
style of performance, Said uses his international position as the author of
Orientalism to (re)position Tahia Carioca’s performance in an attempt to
(re)define and (re)articulate the historical and cultural meaning of belly
dance for dancers inside and outside of Egypt. When done Tahia-style, the
dance is, according to Said, classical and thus represents the village, the
aesthetic of tarab and the cultural roots of Egyptian society. In his theo-
retical positioning, Said provided a potential agency for Egyptian dance
in its version of raqs sharqi, in its capacity as a traditional form of expres-
sion responding to the globalization of the form. Following the logic of
Said’s (re)definition from a historical perspective, the dancers of the 1893
Chicago World’s Fair are not belly dancers as nineteenth-century entre-
preneur Sol Bloom designated them, but ancestors of the classic dance of
Tahia Carioca. In his argument he has pointed a new direction for defining
Egyptian dance through the aesthetic of tarab and thus pushed boundaries
38 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
of the theory of Orientalism beyond a critique of the colonialist agenda to

a revision of the image of the dance created by Flaubert and others. In the
process, he is also challenging a Western dance aesthetic that within the
frame of the proscenium arch and related conceptions of time and space
projects its performance upon the audience instead of a mutual sharing
with an audience.
In the final analysis, Said in his discussion and descriptions of Tahia
Carioca used his position as an exile and the theoretical stance of
Orientalism to articulate his personal experience of Egypt as his aesthetic
home in a continuing act as a cultural critic. Ultimately, his writing about
Tahia places a dynamic tension within a form that has become part of
global popular culture: a tension between expectations of the foreign
dancers who reside in Egypt and the Egyptian dancers who reside in Egypt
and in other parts of the globe. For, within his arguments, Tahia Carioca
becomes the cultural icon and, as Aldo Grasso suggests, icons are myths
that are “a fragment of eternity inserted in the feverish tale of our uncer-
tain condition” (1999: 8). On a personal level, Said, in his homage to
Tahia, linked his theoretical self with his formative years growing up in
Cairo and thus provided for himself an aesthetic home.
NOTES
1. This description of a Cairo belly dancer is a composite of my experiences
viewing dancers in 1979 and 1999.
2. Douglas Martin, “Tahia Carioca, 79, Dies; A Renowned Belly Dancer,”
New York Times, accessed September 22, 1999: http://www.nytimes.
com/1999/09/22/arts/tahia-carioca-79-dies-a-renowned-belly-dancer.
html.
3. According to Rodanthi Tzanelli (2013), there are at least sixteen websites
that advertise week-long belly-dance vacations: these take place in Greece,
Turkey, Cyprus and Morocco as well as Egypt.
4. Leila Farid (2014) “Crossing the Chasm: Cultural Sensitivity and
Bellydance,” Gilded Serpent, accessed August 15, 2015: http://www.gild-
edserpent.com/cms/2014/07/16/leila-farid-cultural-sensitivity/#axzz3h
scbzZiM.
5. Organized by Egyptian dancer producer, Raqia Hassan, the yearly festival
held in Cairo, Egypt brings together master teachers from around the globe
and Egyptian teachers who specialize in raqs sharki and folkloric forms.
6. An example of the increasing impact of Islam on public performance is the
refusal by the father of soccer star Yasser Hosni to permit the noted Egyptian
Dancer Dina to perform at his son’s wedding as reported on October 12,

2012 on the Albawaba Entertainment website. Accessed August 3, 2015:
http://www.albawaba.com/entertainment/dina-444955.
7. The author of the The Yacoubian Building, Alaa Al Aswany in 2014 wrote
an op ed piece for the New York Times in which he noted the conflicting
position of belly dance in Egyptian culture from the eighteenth through the
twenty-first centuries. Accessed October 10, 2015: http://www.nytimes.
com/2014/05/14/opinion/aswany-dirty-dancing-in-egypt.html.
CHAPTER 3
Dancing the Goddess in Popular Culture:

Resistance, Spirituality and Empowerment
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her pivotal book The Second Sex:
…women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which
can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no his-
tory, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work
and interest as that of the proletariat. … They live dispersed among males,
attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social
standing to certain men-fathers or husbands—more firmly than they are to
other women. (1952: xxv)
Simone de Beauvoir’s words were a challenge to women to expand their

position beyond that of being women who vote to women who are active
in all aspects of society. American actor, dancer and poet Daniela Gioseffi,
along with other members of the second wave of the feminist movement,
took up this challenge in the 1960s and 1970s. In an act of resistance
to the social/cultural position of women in a patriarchal society, Gioseffi
developed a one-woman show entitled “The Birth Dance of Earth: A
Celebration of Women and the Earth in Poetry, Music and Dance.” This
piece, in which she plays an Etruscan priestess, begins as she enters the
performance space covered by a veil that floats around her and subtly
reveals her face, torso and pelvis as she moves to the beat of the drum.
Ultimately, she reveals her “body to the community of women and men.
They watched, enthralled by her flowing motions, her spectacular gar-
ments, the mesmerizing stare of her eyes above her veiled face, the even

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_3
42 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
contained rhythms of her walk” (1980: 22). In Gioseffi’s rendition of the

dance and the mythology she evolved for it, the men look on in awe and
the women with reverence as they see in the movement an image of the
primordial mother goddess as she drops to the floor and, with a series of
belly rolls and stomach flutters, mimes giving birth. She raises herself from
the floor and the audience communes with her in an appreciation of the
sensuality and strength of a woman’s body.
In this mythic depiction’s focus on woman as life-giver, Daniela’s per-
formance celebrated the potential of a woman’s body to discover and
express the joy of the relationship between the internal kinaesthesia of the
spirals and circles of the pelvis and spine that move from inward experi-
ence to outward projection, from individual self-discovery and revelation
to a political statement via the performance of her body’s sensuality. In
its embrace of the sensuality of a woman’s body through the image of
an ancient goddess (in this case an Etruscan priestess), this performance
is a celebration of the sensuality of a woman’s body, the innate ability
of women to give birth and of the meditative qualities of movement.
Gioseffi’s performance was in dialogue with writers of the same period—
Susan Griffin in Woman and Nature (1978), Robin Morgan in Anatomy
of Freedom (1984) and the feminist ideals expressed by Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique (1976), and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch
(1970).
In order to find support for the integration of the sacred goddess into
a new definition of the feminine, Gioseffi and other women in North
America, Europe and Australia looked to the writing of archaeologist
Marija Gimbutas and her research into the myths and related artistry of
old Europe published in such volumes as The Living Goddesses (1999).
Gimbutas’ conception of the religions of old Europe was incorporated
into the second wave of feminist thought; this wave was associated with
the goddess movement, according to which the earth or Gaia is consid-
ered a complex ecological system in which a change in one aspect of the
earth’s environment influences the total system (Matter 1997). For many
women, the belly, in belly dance, came to symbolize the centrality of being
a woman wrapped in the image of a goddess who through this image was
a positive force for resistance of the male gaze. However, this search for
a new gender identity took place against the backdrop of interest in the
orient and related Orientalist images which had begun in the nineteenth
century and was to continue through to the twenty-first.
DANCING THE GODDESS IN POPULAR CULTURE: RESISTANCE, SPIRITUALITY... 43
THE ORIENT, HOLLYWOOD AND THE IMMIGRANT

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been referred to
by popular cultural theorist Rosalind Williams as the dream world of mass
consumption (1991). In this period, the imperialist power of the West’s
colonialism was lauded and paraded in global exhibitions, beginning with
the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 and continuing through the twen-
tieth century. These exhibits created a romantic dream world of erotic
intrigue; a dream of the orient that became the theme of department
stores such as A.A. Vantine in New York City. Catalogues and in-store
displays created a Victorian pastiche of the orient in which Japanese prints
and Chinese vases were placed next to Persian carpets. Women caught up
in the movement of aesthetic domesticity consumed this oriental vision,
which brought the exotic within the realm of the familiar. As Grabar
suggests, Americans’ fascination with the orient was “a fascination with
something alien which manages to enhance the pleasure of the senses, the
comfort of daily life, or the image one projects of one’s self “ (2000: 6).
These popular exhibits and cultural performances were the integra-
tion of several streams of oriental and classical imagery. They included
the imitative movements of the dancers of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair
that had become incorporated into carnivals and vaudeville shows; the
advertising industry’s use of images of the orient to appeal to the public’s
desire for the exotic; paintings and photographs by Eugene Delacroix,
Jean-Leon Gerome and others; as well as the biblical story line of Salome,
made popular by Oscar Wilde’s play (1891) Richard Strauss’ opera
(1905) and the performances of Maud Allan, Ida Rubinstein and Colette
(Cherniavsky 1991; Koritz 1994; MacKenzie 1995; McCullough 1957).
Gertrude Hoffmann, Eva Tanguay and Aida Overton Walker performed
their interpretations of Salome at women’s salons held in the homes of
wealthy (Koritz 1995). Performances by Allan, Rubinstein and Colette
were made even more sensational by the ambiguity of their sexual identi-
ties (Bentley 2002). Within the same period universities and community
groups such as the National Women’s Suffrage Association staged their
vision of the ancient world in pageants that1 celebrated women’s bodies
within the framework of the classical world. Women learned to find the
balance of their bodies through exercises in breathing and kinaesthetic
awareness combined with assuming the stillness and muscular organiza-
tion of the poses of Greek and Roman statues.
44 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
These performances joined the exotic, and sometimes erotic, with the
spiritual mysticism of the ancient world to evolve the legitimacy for new
modes of performativity in what Mircea Eliade (1998) refers to as models
of behaviour. Women engaged in these performances, either on the stage or
as members of an audience, were challenging the Victorian idea of woman-
hood displayed in the attitude of the Lady Managers of the 1893 Chicago
World’s Fair, who condemned the foreign dancers on the Midway Plaisance.
In their concern about the public display of women’s bodies, the Lady
Managers were in general agreement with accepted beliefs considering the
public role of women. A woman performing in public was acting outside
of appropriate gender behaviour for those who ascribed to either conserva-
tive Christianity or Islam. Yet, women in North Africa and the Middle East
were allowed at events within the confines of the home to express the joy of
their body and sing the body through melody and the rhythm of the music.
Women within a Christian-dominated Victorian framework had no expres-
sive outlet, thus, they adapted the orient to, as Mary Simonson phrases it,
“thematize social and cultural standards, hopes, and fears” (2013: 45) and
create a “forum to question and challenge existing hierarchies of gender”
(2013: 46). The connection of the dance to an ancient past provided an
avenue of legitimacy that allowed these women to sidestep issues of appro-
priation and authenticity, as the dancers were in direct communion with a
goddess and not with contemporary versions of the dance that could be
found in North Africa, the Middle East or at the local carnival.
There ultimately evolved two American interpretations of the solo
dancing of North Africa and the Middle East. One was associated with
elite social circles; such were the oriental dances of Ruth St. Denis (Bentley
2002). She combined exotic costuming with a movement style that
ignored the obvious sexuality of the pelvis and focused on movements of
the upper body. In a 1916 portrait with Ted Shawn her husband and artis-
tic collaborator, she projects the image of a slim young woman dressed
in a torso-revealing skirt and halter-top, with her weight resting on one
hip. Her arms are lifted over her head and her gaze is projected upward in
ecstatic meditation.2 On the other hand, there were the popular images of
exotic belly dancing created for middle- and working-class consumption
in locales such as the Coney Island midways. These less refined dancers,
often named “Little Egypt,” kept the rhythmical movements of the hips
and torso, but adapted a similar style of costume, which revealed the belly
and accentuated the bust and pelvis. Variations of this performance style
were later incorporated into burlesque in stages across America.
As film scholar Gaylyn Studlar points out in her essay “‘Out-Salomeing

Salome’”: Dance, the New Woman and Fan Magazine Orientalism”
(1995), the film industry served as a place of convergence for a number
of phenomena: the performative of a staged Salome, the expressive free-
dom of François Delsarte, female choreographers such as St. Denis, the
increased social flexibility of the 1920s, the positioning of the Ballet Russe
and the consumerist urges of the period to construct an alternative view of
femininity.3 In dance, the film industry found an expressive form from the
silent film era that could be adapted to the talkies. A founder of American
modern dance, Ruth St. Denis, and the Denishawn company contributed
to the film industry as choreographers and dancers for such productions as
D.W. Griffith’s silent epic Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages
(1916). The dances provided the scenic “glue” for the complex inter-
weaving of this narrative’s four historical periods—Babylonian (539 BC),
Judaean (AD 27), French (1572) and contemporary (1914). Prominent
actresses took lessons at Denishawn and dancers from the company were
hired by the Hollywood studios. Fan magazines highlighted the lives of
Denishawn graduates in what Studlar refers to as “highly stylized dance-
derived poses” (1995: 114) that often featured an oriental-style costume.
Studlar argues that the culmination of these film and printed represen-
tations was the ‘vamp’. A concept that emerged in the 1910s, the vamp
combined high art images of operatic icons such as Salome and Cleopatra
and used the Orientalist framing of the East as a site of moral disorder
that perverted “the proper gender-alignment of power and sexual pas-
sion” (1995: 116). Framers of this image included film stars Theda Bara
and Nita Naldi, whose characters in such films as A Fool There Was (1915)
and Blood and Sand (1922) used their sexuality to hold power over the
male hero. During the late 1920s, Hollywood tried through magazine
stories to dismiss the eroticism of the vamp character. However, the fan
magazines and related films had already entrenched the vamp in the popu-
lar imagination and as a highly charged character that “temporarily broke
down the binary roles through which not only femininity but ethnicity
and race were conceived” (1995: 123). Studlar concludes that:
If the women of the 1910s and 1920s were unsure of their equality, the
retreat to Orientalism as a site of intensified sensual experience and sym-
bolic Otherness might have permitted them the temporary assumption of
an exotic, performance identity within a textual economy of libidinal excess.
The mysterious East identified with the release of sexuality and experiential
46 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
(orgiastic) intensity seemed to have had a particular appeal to women both

for its aesthetic and emotional intensity as well as for its comfortable dis-
tance from everyday reality. (1995: 125)
This physical, psychological and emotional embrace of the orient of the

early twentieth century would be played out by women in the latter half
of that century, but with a slightly different context due to the impact of a
changing global order.
Following World War II, there was an increased influx of immigrants
to the USA from the Middle East, and many Middle Eastern-themed res-
taurants and clubs developed in major cities across the country. These
venues were, according to ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen, “an out-
growth of the community music events of Arab Americans” (Rasmussen
1992: 345) and an extension of the commercial aspirations of this com-
munity with the goal of presenting a “captivating portrait of the self to the
other” (1992: 355). While a Middle Eastern-American community event
would not include Orientalist decor reminiscent of a Hollywood film set,
many restaurant and nightclub venues did embrace the prevailing melting-
pot philosophy and adopted a fantasy version of the orient to appeal to a
diverse clientele. As Rasmussen suggests:
Encouraged by the precedents set in such media as Orientalist literature

and Hollywood films, American-born musicians of Middle Eastern heri-
tage and post-World War II immigrants adapted the constructed fantasy
of their homeland for their own musical purposes. Stereotypes of the so-
called Oriental world served, in this case, to break down some of the barri-
ers between immigrant groups and between these groups and mainstream
America. (1992: 82)
Restaurant and club owners enticed customers with promises of a Middle

East that integrated references to mysterious harems, sensuous and pro-
vocative dances and ancient rituals. This image was augmented by the
music produced by the musicians in the clubs, which often featured enter-
tainers from the Middle East. For example, the back cover of an album
titled Port Said by popular Egyptian immigrant performer Muhammad
al-Bakkar referred to “dancing girls who will perform their ancient ritual
for a few modest coins and for a little more will take you into their tent or
hut for more enjoyable entertainment” (1992: 350). This version of the
orient was alluring to urbanites of the middle and upper classes who were
in a constant search for new forms of entertainment (Erenberg 1984).
With the popularization of Oriental-themed restaurants and dancers,
there was an increased demand for entertainers. American dancers who
had watched the movements of dancers from Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon
on restaurant stages found work through copying of their movements.
Many of the dancers—American and Middle Eastern—also played tam-
bourine or finger cymbals as part of the orchestra and thus added a musical
element to their nightly performances. Over time, musicians and dancers
integrated the folk rhythms from throughout North Africa and the Middle
East into a musical belly-dance canon. Dancers became familiar with the
4/4 and 4/8 rhythms of Egypt, the 9/8 rhythms of Turkey and the 6/8
rhythms of North Africa. As Rasmussen describes them, these liminoid
venues were “adventurous, creative, polyethnic, electronic, and commer-
cial. The music reflected interaction both with other immigrant groups
and with American society and music culture as a whole” (1998: 147).
The musical styles and instruments of Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon,
Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East mingled with the saxophone, elec-
tric guitar and drum set.
As Rasmussen also points out, these sites held some emotional ambiva-
lence for the musicians: “Although the trademarks of Orientalism helped
these musicians to achieve success, the racist bias of this European belief
system served to enhance the foreignness of these Arab and other Middle
Eastern immigrants and their families, placing them in an imaginary world
that was exotic—even to themselves” (1992: 365). The Middle Eastern
immigrant patrons of these restaurants from Greece, Turkey, Egypt,
Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere were forced to individually nego-
tiate and enact an identity through the integration of music and dance
styles that did not reflect the specificity of their personal backgrounds, but
rather a popular media conception of North Africa and the Middle East.
In the end, as the most public representatives of the Middle East, these
restaurants and nightclubs increasingly became the site of a complex nego-
tiation of the popular Hollywood image of the region and the Middle
Eastern community’s desire to meet and celebrate multiple versions of
their diverse heritage. This was particularly true for second- and third-
generation Middle Eastern Americans, who found in these venues a site
that represented a blend of their family of origin and popular culture’s
interpretation of those origins (Sellers-Young 1986). In the audience were
women such as Daniela Gioseffi who were revising their conception of self
48 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
as part of the second wave of feminism. The integration of an erotic and

sensuous orient, developed through the convergence of oriental imagery
with music and movement in the Middle Eastern nightclubs, provided a
liminoid space for dancers’ personal experimentations with new modes of
expression and related identity. The music of these restaurants and clubs,
provided by Muhammad al-Bakkar, Eddie the Sheik Kochak, George
Abdo, Gus Vali, John Bilezikjian and others became the music used in
belly-dance classes throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and, thus the musical
home for American cabaret belly dancers. Dancers who, as Sunaina Maira
notes, had appropriated the dance to transform their self-image “through
a liberating Orientalism” (Maira 2008: 333) that allowed “middle-class
women, both white and nonwhite, to counter a waifish model of (white)
femininity while simultaneously participating in a commoditized subcul-
ture that helps to create social networks, largely for middle-class women.
The cultural and body politics of belly dancing thus allows women to
secure their class status by rejecting selected aspects of American feminin-
ity, without jeopardizing their class positioning or challenging fundamen-
tal gender norms, let alone the racial order” (2008: 333).
SERENA WILSON: STAGING THE FEMININE (1933–2007)

Serena Wilson was one of these early American cabaret belly dancers. A
former student of the early modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis, Serena
Blake was born in the Bronx on August 8, 1933 to a vaudeville fam-
ily of performers whose stage name was Blake and Blake. Her mother
sang and her father played the banjo. Her childhood and adolescent years
intersected with the 1930s vaudeville stage. This was, however, an era
when that stage was in decline, as the population flocked first to the silent
films and then the talkies. In the end, Serena’s parents quit vaudeville and
settled in New York where they organized soirees in their Upper West Side
apartment that integrated a vaudeville format of dance, singing and comic
routines.
Serena began lessons with Ruth St. Denis during a period of transition
in the latter’s life. The company St. Denis and Ted Shawn had formed,
Denishawn, had been dissolved and St. Denis had started the School of
Natya with La Meri (Russell M. Hughes). Ruth St. Denis’ contribution
to the school’s curriculum was her interpretative style of Oriental dance,
while La Meri taught the actual dances of India and Spain. Although
Serena would have been exposed to the dual dance environment of the
studio, there is no indication that she took lessons with La Meri. Her
memories of the lessons with Ruth St. Denis, however, were still vivid
when I interviewed her in 1999. As she described it:
Ruth St. Denis was seated on a couch that was draped with a silk fabric bril-
liantly patterned with flowers. She sat throughout the entire lesson, and only
dealt with movement of the arms. After I had taken a few classes with her,
Miss St. Denis presented my mother with a copy of her book, An Unfinished
Life. In it she had inscribed, “To my youngest student at this time, Serena
Blake, whose future I watch with great affection”.4
The sixty-two year old St. Denis left a lifelong impression on Serena. For
the young girl, St. Denis was the embodiment of femininity in perfor-
mance, an image of poise and sophistication with a movement vocabulary
in which each simple gesture expressed emotional volumes. These were
images Serena would later attempt to convey to her students.
In 1952 at the age of nineteen, Serena married Alan Wilson, a per-
cussionist and Dixieland band leader of the Jane Street Boys. Their joint
performance career began in the 1950s when Alan’s band was hired to
perform at a celebration that required a belly dancer. The band adapted
their Dixieland repertoire to include well-known musical renditions of the
Middle East such as “Miserlou” and “The Sheik of Araby”. Serena utilized
her diverse dance training, including the lessons with Ruth St. Denis, to
improvise her version of oriental dance with a water jug as a prop.
With the support of Armenian oud player Chick Ganimian, Serena
got a job at the Egyptian Gardens in New York’s Greektown. Reflecting
on her experience she later described the restaurant thus: “Phony palm
trees adorned the dimlylit walls, while murals of dancing girls covered
the halls.”5 And yet, the dancers—in particular the Turkish and Egyptian
dancers in the Greektown restaurants—symbolized for Americans, espe-
cially women who flocked to see them, a sensuality the latter desired to
inhabit; a desire that would cause the women to note the American dancer
sitting next to the Turkish dancer and inquire of the American how they
could also learn to dance.
In 1972, the same year that Ms. Magazine first appeared on the stands,
Serena made one of the first attempts to systematize the movement vocab-
ulary of American cabaret belly dance in The Serena Technique of Belly
Dancing. The introduction to the book clearly defines Serena’s position,
“I have chosen dance as my way to self-expression because it represents
50 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
the qualities of poise, grace, stamina, femininity, and an enormous chal-

lenge to free creativity. When I say free creativity, I mean that the move-
ments are natural to a woman rather than distorted and artificial as they
are in ballet” (1973: 3–4).
With the publication of her technique, Serena approached questions
regarding a woman’s role in society and related sexual expression that had
become part of the national discourse. In this discussion there were a range
of opinions, expressed most succinctly by two East Coast women, Helen
Gurley Brown and Betty Friedan. Helen Gurley Brown’s 1963 publication
Sex and the Single Girl provided advice on the art of being a woman and
how women could fill their lives with romance and delectable men. Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1976) approached women’s politics
from a completely different angle. Friedan, who would found the National
Organization of Woman in 1966, shared in her manuscript the result of
a questionnaire she had distributed to her 1942 Smith College gradu-
ating class. The women’s responses indicated that they were dissatisfied
with a position in society in which their primary identity and meaning was
through their role as wife and mother. In combination, these two books
brought to public attention a series of questions, including: What was the
private and public role of an intelligent, competent, capable woman? How
did she negotiate an identity that allowed her to express her sensual side?
Or to engage in sexual activity? How did a potential new image of herself
as a woman integrate with a public conception of the wife and mother?
Serena Wilson, with the publication of The Serena Technique of Belly
Dancing, was fashioning a performative space which attempted a dialogue
between the separate articulations of the feminine offered by Brown and
Friedan. A woman could express her sensuality, but still embody a very tra-
ditional notion of the feminine. Essentially, she used the Orientalist trope
of the dance as a representation of a potential other in order to evolve a
technique that physically embodied her concept of femininity, of which
the three major attributes were poise, grace and stamina.
Serena did not negate the popular conception of the dance as sexually
stimulating to men. In fact, she advocated in the introduction of the book
that the dance is not intended as an arousal for men, but is alternatively
an individual experience of a woman’s sexuality through her demeanour
of femininity, which is in turn attractive to men. Or as she states it, “A
woman who is capable of arousing herself is also attractive and arousing
to men as an entire being rather than just as a sexual toy” (1973: 23).
Feminine beauty is holistically defined according to Serena by a woman’s
“control and grace” (1973: 24); a state which is not limited by age because
“an active, interested, enthusiastic, flexible woman is young” (1973: 24).
This embrace of the body’s femininity through the dance contributes to
the participant’s overall physical and emotional well-being and positively
influences important aspects of her life associated with childbirth and mar-
riage. Consequently, Serena argues for the dance’s position within the life
of a woman to create an identity that can maintain personal health and
familial relationships, while still providing opportunities for creative and
sensual expressiveness.
Through repetition in the dance studio, Serena taught her conception
of the “postures of the feminine.” These postures acknowledge the sen-
suality of the female body through the interplay of hips and torso, which
are gracefully integrated with movements of the head, arms and hands.
Much like those of her mentor Ruth St. Denis, Serena’s “postures of the
feminine” did not include movements that obviously highlighted the pel-
vis or breasts or brought the dancer’s crotch into the visual range of the
audience, as with the leg lifted over the head one finds in Western stage
dance forms. In this regard, Serena was teaching through the “postures of
the feminine” a form of gender display which Judith Butler in Bodies that
Matter (1993) locates in her theory of performativity; in particular the
aspect of learning a dance form which requires constant repetition or what
Butler refers to as iterability. For Butler performativity and repetition, or
iterability, are intertwined as it is repetition of an act which ultimately
defines subjectivity. As she phrases it, “this repetition is not performed by
a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the tem-
poral condition for the subject. This iterability implies that ‘performance’
is not a singular ‘act’ or event, but a ritualized production” (1993: 95).
Students came to the studio with one set of gender displays, which they
had learned as children in a socialization process that Pierre Bourdieu
would refer to as habitus (1977). Serena’s technique challenged and reori-
ented their conception of the feminine and provided opportunities to per-
form their new postures of the feminine in the safety the studio with its
community of women, and in the more public environment of restaurants
and New York stages.
Serena’s approach saw women as joyful, soft and feminine. They were
responsible for and in control of their sensuality and by extension their
sexuality. The dancers were not encouraged to challenge men by their
physical presence, but neither was their physical presence and personal
52 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
desire controlled by men. The control remained with the dancer and in
her dancing revelation of desire.6
SELF-FASHIONING: GODDESS AND COMMUNITY

From its inception, the belly-dance community was influenced by a con-
vergence of images from popular entertainment from the Midway of the
1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Hollywood films and the negotiation of iden-
tity implicit in the performance of the Arab American community. These
divergent visual, kinetic and musical markers became part of the commu-
nity in the 1970s as individual dancers defined themselves either as cabaret
dancers who made their living performing in Middle Eastern-themed res-
taurants, found alternative venues of performance on the stages of new-age
and alternative communities or developed a performing life that spanned
both. Thus, the dance of community’s ritual celebrations connected with
immigrant communities was placed within the social imaginary of the limi-
noid stage and Western images of North Africa and the Middle East.
This exotic and erotic overlay, in which dancers are seen as either appro-
priating a dance form or performing the salacious, has caused the dance
community in the USA to evolve a set of strategies in an attempt to reposi-
tion the form. As Rachel Kraus points out, “Belly dancers use a combination
of resistance, secrecy, semantic manipulation, management of their personal
fronts, and education to negate perceptions they are erotic dancers” (2010b:
435). The image of the goddess continues to be a strategy belly dancers
have used to resolve the psychological and emotional tension related to their
search for new identities and performance venues for belly dance.
An expanded image of the goddess has since the 1970s become allied
with neo-pagan beliefs related to feminist spirituality (Eller 1993). Dancer
and Classics professor at the University of North Carolina/Wilmington
Andrea Deagon does not articulate a historical link between the dance
and goddesses of the past; instead, she focuses on a psychic link to the
goddess. Her article “Inanna’s Descent: an Archetype of Feminine Self-
Discovery and Transformation,” (1995) unites Inanna’s journey to the
mythic underworld with a dancer’s journey into the performative aspects
of self. Her process includes a ritual preparation of a bath, theatrical make-
up and costume. As she states it:
I am mentally, physically and spiritually prepared to enter and create the

magical space of the dance. I have become more myself, and left some-
thing of myself behind. This is one of the functions of ritual … In ancient

Mesopotamia, the goddess Inanna goes through a similar process, giving
divine and narrative form to the archetype of feminine transformation-into-
power. (1995: 17)
Performance studies scholar Donnalee Dox suggests that Deagon’s inter-

pretation of the myth allows her, as a dancer, to escape the standard cul-
tural definitions of appropriate feminine behaviour and to attend to her
artistic self and thus the myth of Inanna becomes for her a metaphor for
self-representation and self-knowledge. “The Inanna myth is a way of
explaining or interpreting belly dancing as spiritual practice, and of defin-
ing spirituality as self-knowledge in service to artistic purity” (Dox 2005:
314).
Members of the belly-dance community have many means of expand-
ing their experience and knowledge of the classical world referenced by
Deagon and Dox. They can actually go on a pilgrimage to the histori-
cal sites associated with ancient Mediterranean religions, with the per-
former Ghanima on the “Trail of the Great Goddess.” Among the global
belly-dance publications there are articles that include references to the
goddess. For example, Laurel Gray (1995) writes of “The Goddess Dances:
Women’s Dances of Georgia,” and Robyn Friend describes “Jamileh: the
Goddess of Iranian Dance” (1997). Regardless of the quality of the evi-
dence of a historical link between the goddess and the dance, an entire
belief system and related iconography has been constructed within the
belly-dance community. It includes images of goddesses from ancient
Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia including Aphrodite, Athena and Isis.
In references to these goddesses, some belly-dance companies take names
such as Sisters of the Moon. The dance of the mother goddess created by
Jamila Salimpour of San Francisco has become an emblem of this belief
system. The dance features a woman in some stage of pregnancy, belly
exposed, performing a series of rolls and undulations, while her arms are
stretched out in supplication. Developed by Salimpour to celebrate and
honour woman’s procreative abilities, this rendition of the dance has been
borrowed and adapted by many individuals and groups.7
This inclusion of a spiritual dimension is not limited to an engagement
of goddess images. In her 2010 study, Rachel Kraus (2010a) interviewed
27 Catholic and Protestant dancers regarding how they negotiated gender
expectations, with particular reference to public sensuality, the dance and
their religious experience. What she discovered was that the majority of
54 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
interviewees did not feel a conflict between their religious tradition and
the dance. The ability to discover the different ways their body could move
creatively helped them to feel empowered. Kraus also notes “Results show
that along with maintaining dual roles, selectively defining religion, and
separating roles, belly dancers use a new strategy that I call ‘setting inten-
tion’ to integrate Christianity and belly dancing” (2010a: 457).
Janice Crosby (2000), Donnalee Dox (2005, 2007), Rachel Kraus
(2009, 2010b), Jeana Jorgensen (2012) and Angela Moe (2012) further
elaborate on the role of spirituality and the dance in the lives of danc-
ers and their personal experiences of empowerment. Janice Crosby states
that one third of the belly dancers in the USA practice this dance form
as an aspect of their spirituality (2000). Dox’s seminal essay on spiritual
belly dance positions it as “a method to come to self-awareness”, with the
implicit assumption that there is a reality beyond that accessible to the five
senses (2005: 301). Throughout her essay, Dox uses the term somatic as a
reference to the totality of the mind/body experience. In referencing the
self as soma, she integrates her discussion of the spiritual aspects of belly
dance with the increased emphasis on the unification of body and mind
that characterizes discourse in dance studies.
“Somatics,” a term first coined by the philosopher Thomas Hanna in
1976, is derived from the Greek word for the living body, soma. Somatic,
or embodied practices investigate movement as a mode in which cognition
is not separate from moving. Jill Green in “Engendering Bodies: Somatic
Stories in Dance Education” describes their application to dance studies.
“Somatic practices emphasize the unity of mind and body as experienced
from within, and complement disciplines of inquiry that primarily study
knowledge about the human body and mind.”8 Within the belly-dance
community there are a growing number of dancers and teachers who draw
on somatic practices to explore creative processes that encourage cultiva-
tion of a deep state of consciousness that combines concentration with
internal awareness. Whether these forms are specifically related to dance,
such as Authentic Movement, or to body therapies which derive their
conceptual framework from Asian physical disciplines, such as yoga, the
theory behind each one is that an attention to inner states can transform
prior psychophysical images that are the result of past experience and as a
consequence open the body to new modes of being.
Within those dancers who incorporate belly dance into their lives as spir-
itual practice, this integrated state of somatic or mind/body is, according
to Dox, the point of initiation which enables the practitioner to do the fol-
lowing: engage the image of the goddess as a process in order to transcend

the learned behaviours of a patriarchal society; to employ the physical/
emotional means to practice a natural childbirth; and/or to deepen the
conscious experience of the flow of the proprioceptive and kinaesthetic
systems and an increased sense of oneness. Ultimately, Dox suggests that
“The female body is constituted as an icon of a natural world that has been
eroded by Western industrial culture; it is the medium through which
spirituality is expressed, and it is the agent that transforms a sense of ‘earth
spirit’ or ‘goddess spirit’ or simply spirit to material form” (2007: 33).
Jeana Jorgensen references the prior research of Crosby and Dox as
well as of performance, feminist and dance theorists (Grosz 1994; Bordo
1993; Bock and Borland 2011) to document what she refers to as the
numinous, a transcendent state achieved by a dancer through the embodi-
ment of belly dance’s movement vocabulary. She notes that, historically,
Western society has made a clear distinction between mind and body; a
distinction which, she advocates, is a consequence of the gendered nature
of patriarchy. As a form that combines an awareness of isolated movements
of the head, shoulders, hands, torso and hips in conjunction with a move-
ment vocabulary that dynamically integrates these gestures in relationship
to each other, she states that the dance develops a kinaesthetic coordina-
tion and proprioceptive awareness which moves from part to whole in
a fluid expression of being. (Dox would have used the term somatic to
describe this unity of experience.) Jorgensen refers to this part/whole
integration and related awareness as the foundation of the numinous.
Jorgensen describes several elements of the dance that, she contends,
support the embodiment of the numinous through what she also refers
to as the affecting presence, a term coined by Robert Plant Armstrong.
She is in agreement with Dox and Deagon that the selection of and put-
ting on of the costume transforms the dancer’s material representation
from the ordinary to evoke the imaginary. Significantly, in the major-
ity of cases, these are not costumes designed for the dancer, but ones
she has designed and in many cases she has actually done the labour
of crafting. A second attribute is the music and its rhythmic underpin-
nings to which the dancer’s body responds in a series of gestures that in
their fluidity expand the dancer’s kinaesthetic awareness. To deepen an
experience of trance or sense of possession of archetypal forces, danc-
ers will, according to Jorgensen, incorporate repetition. This could be
done by always dancing in the same space, repeating a piece of music or
deepening an experience through breath techniques derived from Asian
56 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
physical disciplines. Each dancer will create her unique combination of

these elements of the numinous, which will culminate in a kinaesthetic
flow of energy.
This is a mode of being that is enhanced through performance in which
dancers from various belief systems—Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim,
Pagan and atheist—engage a representation of aspects of themselves
through the representation of a character and/or the embodiment of a
fluid psychophysical state. As Jorgensen phrases it, “In practicing a dance
form that allows them to touch the numinous either as representation (as
when portraying a deity or someone worshipping a deity) or implicitly (as
when accessing trance or flow states) my collaborators subverted expres-
sions of mind/body dualism in favor of synthesis and transcendence”
(2012: 23). This transcendent experience of embodiment that empow-
ers the dancer takes many different forms. Some dancers, such as Scylla,
actually practice the dance as a meditation at the beginning of each day.9
Donna Carlton says the dance functions in her life as a dharma, a path of
spiritual awakening (Carlton 1994: 84).
The dance as a means of spiritual self-empowerment is a global move-
ment. Marion Cowper and Carolyn Michelle in their project “Dancing
with Inspiration in New Zealand and Australian Dance Communities”
discovered that dancers had “significant spiritual and inspirational experi-
ences” (2013: 104) as part of their dance practice. Smeeta Mishra quotes
dancers in India as feeling liberated by their belly-dance classes (2013:
194). Nevertheless, the improvisational framework of the dance and its
performance before a group of supportive women encourages each dancer
and each teacher to evolve a personally unique approach to the form that is
related to them as individuals and the community in which the live. Some
teachers from this second generation of belly dancers have developed spe-
cific pedagogical approaches which incorporate the following: elements of
mythology; relationships with nature; forms of community-building; and
body/mind therapies. Two such teachers are Delilah from Seattle, who
focuses on nature, and Maria Sangiorgi from Melbourne and Italy, who
integrates a combination of somatic disciplines.
DANCE AND NATURE: DELILAH

Gathered in a circle, thirty women create anticlockwise circles with their
hips as the drum keeps up a steady rhythm. Shaking their shoulders they
gather into the centre of the circle and back out again, returning once
more to the movements of the hips. Within the room there is a deep
concentration and quiet dignity in the bodies of the dancers as Delilah’s
movement phrasing for the “Birthing and Reclaiming Dance” is repeated
again and again. This group of dancers has come to the large island of
Hawaii and to the quiet of the 120-acre Kalani retreat to be guided by
Delilah in a communion with each other and with nature. For Delilah,
the dance retreat is a commitment she made in 1992 to bring women to
an environment away from the distractions of their daily lives that allows
them to investigate their relationship to their personal natures through an
environment set in nature; this ultimately helps them to develop an inner
awareness of the ecology of their being. A level of individual awareness in
relationship to nature or eco-feminism, Delilah believes, will challenge the
social/cultural binaries associated with self/other, culture/nature, man/
woman and humans/animals.
During the Hawaii retreat, Delilah brings together the Cretan myth
of King Minos and the Minotaur and the elaborate design of the laby-
rinth to help dancers achieve a contemplative state of transcendence. In
an actual labyrinth, walking among the turnings, one loses track of the
outside world, and this increases a contemplative internal focus. This is the
state towards which Delilah, through the labyrinth exploration from the
centre of the body, guides the dancer. Yet, it is also her goal for the dancer
to experience a revelatory awareness of the labyrinth as a representation of
the complex interweaving of the moving body, which is a corporeal ver-
sion of the labyrinth and a metaphor for earth’s complexity.
Delilah expands the dancer’s internal mapping of consciousness by
borrowing from nineteenth-century French movement theorist François
Delsarte’s system. A musician and teacher, Delsarte evolved a performance
style that endeavoured to connect the inner emotional experience of the
performer with a structured set of gestures. As noted by dance historian
Nancy Lee Ruyter (2005), Delsarte’s work had an impact on such early
modern dancers as Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in
connecting the inner emotional experience of the dancer with the vari-
ous parts of the body. The goal in Delilah’s incorporation of Delsarte’s
approach is “to give voice to the body.” Within the Delsarte system, the
body is divided into sections. The head is the origins of the intellectual,
spiritual and mystical. The torso is centre of the emotive and personal and
the legs represent the vital relationship to the earth. This tripartite divi-
sion is further extended as the torso is divided into the intellectual upper
torso, emotive middle torso and vital lower torso. These designations are
58 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
reversed for the legs and feet, as the upper leg is the vital, the calf and knee
the emotive and the feet reflect an intelligent relationship to the earth.
The arm is in a similar correspondence to that of the legs, with the vital
connection in the upper arm and its attachment to the torso, the emotive
in the forearm and the intelligence represented by the hands and fingers.
The head is also divided into three areas with the forehead and the eyes
as the place of intelligence, the cheeks of emotion and the chin and neck,
with their connection to the torso, the vital.
Delilah teaches dancers to engage these different areas by guiding them
through an ongoing improvisation that begins with the hips and pelvis
and moves up and out through the head, arms and hands. As the danc-
ers improvise, she encourages them to explore the various kinaesthetic
pathways of their bodies. She reminds them to appreciate the support and
balance provided by the legs and how the placement of the feet impacts
the alignment of the pelvis, hips and torso. She asks them to explore the
possibility that emotions are coming from their central torso, supported
by the upper arm and acknowledged by the forearm before the hands
add the final communicative touch. She also points to a phrase repeated
in Bharatnatyam: “where the eyes go the body follows.” She expands on
this advice by noting that the direction and gaze of the eyes communicate
a relationship between a dancer and their body and the dancer and the
audience. As she guides her students through a deeper relationship to self,
she never critiques their personal method of exploration. Delilah’s goal
for the dancer is to bring them to a realization of a deep kinaesthetic con-
sciousness that she believes empowers them and allows them to creatively
express their unique individuality in dance and by extension in life.
Within the dance and nature retreats she organizes in Hawaii, Costa
Rica, and the Pacific Northwest, this connection with self is extended to
one with nature in sunrise rituals as well as dances in the sea, gardens and
forests. The dancers are in each instance taking the deep, internal, kinaes-
thetic experience of nature imagery provided in the studio—the hips as
earth revolving around the body’s sun core or the positioning of the arms
as hugging a redwood tree—to an interaction with nature. Their quest is
to allow a personal correspondence between the movements of their body
and that of the tides and waves of the ocean or in relationship to the grass,
trees and other plant life. In the process of dancing in nature, they dis-
cover, as Delilah phrases it, the “sacred-interconnectedness” between self
and the environment. She believes this realization can lead to a transfor-
mation of consciousness that empowers the life of the dancer as it increases
their appreciation for their place within the earth’s scheme. At the same
time this expanded sense of self enlarges their sense of empathetic response
to the earth and its fragility.
EMBODIED BELLY DANCE: MARIA SANGIORGI

Australian/Italian Maria Sangiorgi is a long-time member of the Melbourne
and Italian dance communities and has trained since 1989 in several dif-
ferent styles of belly dance with dancers from the USA and Europe. In
1995, she and other members of the Melbourne community formed a
research group that for seven years met on a weekly basis and studied con-
temporary dance forms such as modern and contact improvisation as well
as a variety of somatic therapies including Alexander, Feldenkrais, Body
Mind Centering, Laban and Bartenieff.10 More recently, she has added
Continuum training. This breadth of experience has evolved an approach
to belly dance which she refers to as “Embodied BellyDance,” which inte-
grates theories from the somatic therapies, her training in dance therapy
and her years of experience as a teacher and performer. A student in her
courses does not only learn the movement vocabulary of belly dance but
the structure of the body that supports the movement.
Maria Sangiorgi begins her classes from the bones, which are according
to her the physical dimension of the body that provides the connection
to Mother Earth. The image of the bones’ relationship to Mother Earth
creates a space within the individual body that allows the dancer to experi-
ence the bones as distinct from and yet related to each other. For example,
they contemplate the different sizes and functions of different bones in
the body from those of the feet to the legs, hips, spine, rib cage and shoul-
der girdle and cranium. This focus on the bony structure helps a dancer
understand that a movement of the hip is not limited to the pelvis but is an
integration of the axial or central skeleton and the appendicular skeleton,
or those bones of the legs and feet that support the pelvis, and the arms
and hands which frame the movement of the hip (Fig. 3.1).
Maria does not separate the emotion of the feeling of a change in the
use of the muscle from the kinaesthetic awareness of the movement. For
her, the term feeling implies both what one feels kinaesthetically and how
one feels emotionally when performing the movement. The integration of
kinaesthetic and emotional states provides an opportunity for the dancer
to begin to become aware of the subtle levels of the work of the nervous
60 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
Fig. 3.1 Maria

Sangiorgi in an Egyptian
Assuit costume.
Photograph courtesy of
Maria Sangiorgi.
Source: Photo provided
by Maria Sangiorgi.
system as it activates the muscles, and consequently of how the use of

these muscles frames their perception of the world.
Maria expands the dancers’ awareness through improvisations that take
into consideration the aesthetic of Islam as revealed in the patterns and
shapes of its calligraphy and architecture, and through explorations associ-
ated with the Hindu chakra system. The abstract nature of these images
from Islamic art encourages the dancer to experience themselves from the
viewpoint of a completely different cognitive framework that indirectly
transforms past habit patterns and provides new sets of experiences to the
bones and muscles, in the end impacting on their experience of self in
the world. The exploration of the chakra system with a focus on areas of
connecting nerves throughout the spinal column provides an avenue for
an increased awareness of tensions and potential release of those tensions
within the spinal vertebral system.
Maria Sangiorgi’s method of “Embodied BellyDance” provides a sys-
tem that takes the dancer through the movement vocabulary of the form
but from awareness in general through attention to first bones and their
relationship to each other, followed by attention to muscle system and
a joint kinaesthetic and emotional awareness. Using this somatic knowl-
edge as a basis the dancer expands their self-knowledge through abstract
improvisations that are not in themselves culturally loaded. This is made
clear in the teacher certification for “Embodied BellyDance” as outlined
in the handbook for the course, which begins with Body and Breath
Awareness and Anatomy, covering the basics of visualization, breath,
bones, muscles and organs as well as principles of body awareness and
modes of learning. This segment of the certification is followed by sec-
tions 2, 3 and 4 which focus on Embodying Technique, or putting the
first section to practice with understanding the distinctive organization
of the body in explorations of inhabiting one’s individual body and how
that body can engage styles of movement from those associated with
Egyptian style dance to cultural gendered notions of masculine and femi-
nine movement and the implication of musical rhythms and phrasing for
movement.
Maria Sangiorgi’s approach is an application of the recent research
in neuroscience by prominent exponents of the relationship between
neural structures, cognition and experience including Anthony Damasio
(2000, 2005, 2010), Joseph LeDoux (1998, 2003), Shaun Gallagher
(2005) and Michael Gazzaniga (2008). Their research suggests that the
development of the neural structures of the brain, and thus cognition,
is the result of input from the body’s sensory systems; and, in fact, that
the interactions of the entire body/mind with the environment struc-
ture our thought processes, a process referred to as embodied cogni-
tion. Esther Thelen and her collaborator Linda Smith (1996) advocate
that the relationship between individual cognition and the environment
is a dynamic system in which a variety of the body’s forces interact to
integrate information. This is an ongoing process in which new bodily
activity in relation to the environment integrates past information with
experience to evolve new forms of embodied cognition, which results
in new behaviours. These dynamic cognitive processes are also lifelong.
These consciously engaged patterns often become what Damasio in
Self Comes to Mind (2010) refers to as unconscious behaviour as they
become embedded into the neural structure of experience. Thus, Maria
Sangiorgi’s approach to belly dance provides an opportunity for a dancer
to reach a level of awareness where they can revise their contextualized
62 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
habitus and in the process come to new experiences of self-image and

self-understanding.
MY MOTHER IS A BELLY DANCER

Since belly dance’s introduction to the West in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the moving images associated with it have pro-
vided a site of exploration of an exotic identity for women, as seen during
the ‘Salome’ movement; it has also been a site of erotic identity coupled
with a site of resistance for women during the early phases of the second
wave of the feminist movement; and it has increasingly become a site of
leisure which women find is emotionally, psychologically and physically
healing, as it has brought them to an accepting community of women who
are a variety of ages and body types, and a spirituality that may connect the
dancer to a specific religion or to a mythic cosmos (Alves-Masters 1979;
Downing 2012; Moe 2012). The impact on women’s lives has not been
limited to Western countries.
My Mother is a Belly Dancer is a 2006 Chinese film directed by Lee
Kung-Lok that tracks the lives of three housewives and a single mother
who live in a working-class high-rise in Hong Kong. They seek distrac-
tion from the emotional complexity of their lives by going to a traditional
Chinese dance class. However, the class turns out not to be taught by a
classical Chinese dancer but by Pasha, a specialist in cabaret-style belly
dance. When the women are hesitant Pasha claims a 5000-year history for
the dance. Ultimately, despite the disapproval of the conservative mem-
bers of the community, the women find great joy and a new sense of
identity through participation in the form. This is an experience that is not
limited to Hong Kong. As dance researcher Yu-Chi Chang notes, “Belly
dancing has also become better known in several East Asian countries,
such as Taiwan, China, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, where
the dance is usually promoted as a body-slimming exercise and is helpful
for enhancing women’s self-confidence” (2012: 4).
Dancers across the globe describe the act of learning and performing
belly dance in the studio, online, rehearsal and on stage as giving them an
opportunity to play with and resolve, through performance, internalized
images of their feminine identity. Research on this aspect of the dance
for the lives of female dancers was initiated by Judy Alves-Masters’ 1979
study Changing Self-Esteem of Women through Middle Eastern Dance. Her
research demonstrated that women who took belly-dance courses had
increased levels of self-esteem related to being in a community where

body image was not dominated by advertising images. Her conclu-
sions were validated in the 2010 study by Downey, Reel, SooHoo and
Zerbind, “Body Image in Belly Dance: Integrating Alternative Norms
into Collective Identity” (2010). This research among 103 dancers in
Utah concluded that, “belly dance challenges narrow body image norms
and promotes healthier body image among participants—including sup-
port for broadened norms, lack of pressures for conformity to any par-
ticular ideal, and high levels of body satisfaction” (2010: 390). They also
suggest that the spiritual component of the dance and the portrayal of
ancient archetypes such as ‘Earth Mother” and “priestess” provide an
imagistic portal with which women can revise their experience. This abil-
ity to take part in new versions of self also includes people of different
sexual orientations.
It is difficult to imagine the Lady Managers from the 1893 Chicago
World’s Faire at an informal evening gathering of women belly dancers
sharing their performances with and for each other. It is easier to imagine
a woman from Cairo transplanted into such an event, as she might not
recognize the music or the general aesthetic, but would recognize the
community of women sharing and appreciating the individual approaches
to the real joy of the moving body. Yet, as Lynette Harper (2013) points
out, there is an ongoing tension between those members of the diasporic
community attempting to maintain a performance aesthetic such as tarab
and those outside the diasporic community that engage the movement
vocabulary but have a limited knowledge of its aesthetic context. This
tension is played out in belly-dance blogs and the popular press. Egyptian
Randa Jarrar wrote an article for Salon entitled “Why I Can’t Stand White
Belly Dancers.” This review of white dancers saw them as performing a
form of Arab drag that in its appropriation is devoid of the integration of
music and movement that is the core aesthetic of the dance.11 The global
response by the belly-dance community to this critique has been special
workshops by Egyptian dancers in urban centres, as well as dancers from
across the globe making pilgrimages to Cairo to attend workshops spe-
cifically created for the global dance community and which feature the
dance stars of Egypt. Thus despite the synergising impact popular cul-
ture’s Orientalism has had on belly dance as it has manifested around the
globe, Egypt and its image of the dancing body has maintained its position
as the dance form’s legitimizing cultural centre.
64 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
NOTES
1. Eliade discusses myth in relationship to behaviour in the 1998 text Myth
and Reality (Eliade 1998).
2. Critic Walter Terry wrote of Ruth St. Denis’ performance: “In their self-
embarrassment, the reporters tried to review her on the basis of compari-
sons with other performers while admitting the novelty of her offerings.
On the one had, they compared her to the Persian dancers of the Midway
and found her to be more exotic, and, on the other hand, they reported
that none of her dances are open to vulgarity.” Terry (1956, p. 52).
Quoted in Helen Thomas (1995, p. 73).
3. A discussion of the relationship between American consumer culture and
Orientalist themes can be found in Amira Jarmakani’s 2008 publication,
Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and
Belly Dancers in the US (Jarmakani 2008).
4. Personal communication, 1999.
5. Personal communication, 1999.
6. A comparison of fitness books on belly dance in the 1970s can be found in
Virginia Keft-Kennedy’s “1970s Belly Dance and the ‘How-to’
Phenomenon: Feminism, Fitness, and Orientalism,” in McDonald and
Sellers-Young 2013.
7. The belief in the mother goddess religions still animates much of belly-
dance discourse. For example, two books, by Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi (1999)
and by Tina Hobin (2003) both advocate a relationship between earth
rituals and the dance.
8. From Dancing in the Now: Somatic Approaches in Higher Education
Conference, 2006, Liverpool John Moores University, http://www.pala-
tine.ac.uk/events/viewreport/307/. Accessed January 5, 2010.
9. Personal communication 1995.
10. She has the following qualifications: an Advanced Diploma in Dance
Movement Therapy with the International Dance Movement Therapy
Institute of Australia (IDTIA); Certificate IV in Training and Assessment;
Coaching Certificate with the Australian Sports Commission; Certificate in
Holistic Massage; Certificate in Esoteric Healing.
11. Randa Jarrar (March 4, 2014) “Why I Can’t Stand White Belly Dancers,”
Salon.com, accessed June 4, 2015: http://www.salon.com/2014/03/04/
why_i_cant_stand_white_belly_dancers/.
CHAPTER 4
San Francisco and American Tribal Style
WINTERS, CALIFORNIA
A group of women dressed in short cropped vests, long flowing skirts and
hip sashes, with signs tattooed on their faces and swords in their hands,
wait in the early evening twilight next to a portable outdoor stage. They
are members of the Aneesh Belly Dance Company who have been hired
to perform at Winters, California’s Earthquake Festival.1 As the women
enter the stage a large group of people that have been visiting the food
and craft booths set up along one block of this small (population 6125)
community’s main street gather around it. Recorded music blares out of
the speakers as the dancers balance the swords on their heads. The audi-
ence readjust their viewing positions in order to better see the unison
undulating movement of the dancers’ bodies. There is a quiet attentive-
ness in the audience that matches the inward focus of the dancers as both
groups concentrate on a dancer’s ability to maintain the sword’s balance.
The audience mood shifts as the dancer completes the sword dance with a
final pose and quickly moves to another dance in unison; this one features
a combination of rapid movements that combine the upper lift of the arms
with quick, determined movements of the hips on the horizontal and ver-
tical, which are interspersed with rapid turns that end with a horizontal
gesture of the hip. The thirty-minute performance of the group continues
to move rapidly from one dance to another, with the dancers seemingly
aware of the short attention span of audiences in outdoor environments.
The music changes to a song by the popular entertainer Shakira, “Hips

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_4
66 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
Don’t Lie.” The dancers come out to members of the audience and
encourage them to get up and dance. Many members of the audience
are reluctant but some women audience members familiar with the dance
vocabulary and a group of girls aged five to twelve cautiously come up to
the stage. Some in this group immediately began dancing to the music.
Others gather around one of the company members who demonstrates
the movements for them to imitate. The performance ends with dancers
and audience members on the stage with generous applause coming from
the stage as well as those still watching.
This performance by Aneesh Belly Dance Company is an example of
American Tribal Style Belly Dance, a form that owes its initial development
to the cultural and artistic context of San Francisco. This chapter provides a
historical overview of this initial period of American Tribal’s history and its
further evolution through the lives of four dancers: Jamila Salimpour, who
provided the impetus for its development; John Compton, who added a
masculine persona; Carolena Nericcio-Bohlman, who created the vocabu-
lary for it; and Paulette Rees-Denis, who engages with the tribal as a form
of consciousness. The individual narrative of each dancer provides insight
into the transmission process of belly dance as a collage of images of North
Africa and the Middle East blended together against the unique physical
and cultural landscape of the San Francisco.2 The individual accounts also
note how each dancer personalizes the concept of tribal and integrates it
with a transformational belief system in which the movement vocabulary
of belly dance is the impetus.
SAN FRANCISCO AND THE 1960S

San Francisco native Naomi Wolf describes her home town in the follow-
ing way:
The fact that a revolution of the senses would take place in our town had
something to do with the interaction between the physical place and the
people who gave themselves to it. For our town made it hard to have ulti-
mate faith in any belief system that made claims beyond the pleasures of the
senses. San Francisco is a city built for sensual mysticism. Under its white
sky and the fog that sometimes lets you see no farther than a block in each
direction, it is easy to feel drawn toward ecstatic experience, there is nothing
to choose but God, oblivion, or the body. (Wolf 1997: 7)
SAN FRANCISCO AND AMERICAN TRIBAL STYLE 67
In her description she acknowledges the sensual diversity of San Francisco’s

landscapes—the erotic shapes, colours and smells and their sensory impact
on daily life. Thousands of visitors are drawn every year to the natural
beauty of San Francisco’s harbour and the hills that surround it. Since
the Gold Rush in 1848, the city’s mild climate has lured thousands from
around the world to establish homes and businesses. This diversity of
population created a cosmopolitan atmosphere that grew and developed
throughout the twentieth century.
Beyond an increasingly diverse population, the post-World War II his-
tory of San Francisco includes the establishment of an artistic community
that in the poetics of the Beat generation and the improvisational perfor-
mances of the 1960s challenged the artistic boundaries of modernism.
Within this challenge, the body as the site of pleasure was often the sub-
ject of these artistic innovations, which ranged from poet Alan Ginsberg’s
“Howl” to dancer Anna Halprin’s naked community rituals. In the 1960s,
politics and the body were unified in a playful discourse in which “love”
became synonymous with self-exploration of a new kinaesthetic awareness
through drugs, communal living and a release into the trance-like music of
groups such as The Grateful Dead. This era was celebrated as the “Age of
Aquarius” in the lyrics of “Let the Sunshine In” from Hair: The American
Tribal Love-Rock Musical (1967)3 and the later film of the same title.
Within the dances for the film choreographed by Twyla Tharp, the danc-
ers, dressed in colourful garb, move with joy and abandon and seemingly
outside the bounds of a ballet or modern aesthetic. San Francisco embod-
ied the ethos of this film, especially throughout what became known as
the Haight-Ashbury district, so named for its location at the intersection
of Haight and Ashbury. As noted by Naomi Wolf this was an ethos of con-
stant and sometimes confusing experimentation with drugs and identity in
“a city so alluring that our personalities took shape around the supremacy
of the idea of pleasure” (1997: 7). The highlight of this era was the 1967
“Summer of Love” when as many as 100,000 people converged on the
neighbourhood in support of a cultural and political rebellion. The inhab-
itants of the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood supported this alternative
lifestyle event in which people gathered in groups referred to as tribes to
share communal resources and support such earth-friendly businesses as
food co-ops, used clothing stores and political action performance groups
such as the New Mime Circus. These communally based and often eroti-
cally charged modes of personal inquiry were in opposition to the images
of the war in South East Asia and Vietnam.
68 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
Hilary Radner in Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s

(1999) notes that identity and sexuality were (re)defined in the 1960s.
Hugh Hefner’s Playboy and Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan encour-
aged a lifestyle in which sex was de-linked from marriage. Radner suggests
that prior definitions of sexuality and its dependency on heterosexual cou-
plings were replaced in the popular imagination with a celebration of the
single status of men and women. Sex was no longer associated with pro-
creation and by extension the family unit. Sex and an individual’s experi-
ence of it were (re)defined as an expression of the mutual pleasure between
two independent economic units. Individuals—women and men—sought
to develop the potential of their newly discovered sexual awareness by
seeking out sites historically associated with sensual pleasure and by using
drugs to enhance the experience. These alternative sites and related hal-
lucinogenic experiences often encouraged the exploration of the body as a
site of pleasure and discovery.
This movement towards sexual freedom and liberation coincided with
the development of the bar and cabaret scene in San Francisco’s North
Beach, a neighbourhood bounded by the former Barbary Coast, now
Jackson Square, and the Financial District south of Broadway, Chinatown
to the south-west of Columbus below Green, and then Russian Hill to the
west, Telegraph Hill to the east and Fisherman’s Wharf at Bay Street to the
north. In the late 1960s, Broadway and North Beach were lively centres of
entertainment featuring Middle Eastern restaurants such as the Baghdad
and the Casbah, the drag shows at Finocchio’s, and the topless dances of
Carol Doda. The Hungry I and the Purple Onion were the starting place
for such talents as Lenny Bruce, Barbara Streisand, the Smothers Brothers
and Cruz Luna. These clubs integrated the music of noted Middle Eastern
musicians such as oud player Fadil Shahin from Jordan with the perfor-
mances of dancers imported from Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey as well
as those who were born in the USA.4 None of the dancers were formally
trained; instead, they had learned the movement from attending family
and community celebrations or from repeatedly watching Egyptian films.
They were often appreciated as much for their personality as their techni-
cal virtuosity. Aziza, a University of California/Berkeley student in 1966,
describes the personal impact of one such dancer named Tahia. “Tahia
was a wild thing, supposedly a crazy Bedouin girl. She wore a purple skirt
and a gold coin bra and belt, with a large dagger thrust through her belt!
She danced energetically, and then seemed to have an argument in Arabic
with the musicians. She sat down on the stage, pouted, picked her toenails
and tossed her head, and eventually flounced off the stage.”5 As they also
would in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Detroit, women who
witnessed performances in the cabaret were fascinated and wanted to take
classes in the form. Regardless of stage or context, the San Francisco belly
dancers of the 1960s and 1970s believed they were engaged in a personal
act of discovery and exploration. It is a power reminiscent of poet Audre
Lorde’s (1934–1992) specific application of the myth of Eros.
Lorde drew her definition of the erotic from this myth and the Greek
word eros, “the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos,
and personifying creative power and harmony” (1982: 55). With this defi-
nition, Lorde removed the word from the typical contexts of romance
novels and adult movie theatres. Her conception of eros and the erotic
was a deep matrix of thought and action of the body/mind that “binds
together the scattered parts of the self and links a whole range of intense,
creative experiences” (1982: 55). The erotic is released through the self as
the individual discovers the inner layers of their being and sends this newly
acquired energy throughout the body. This deeply felt connection colours
the life of a person “with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and
strengthens” them (1982: 55). An experience of the erotic is not limited
to belly dancing. It is a recognized mind/body connection that is part
of many deeply felt experiences. The San Francisco of the 1960s was the
embodiment of Lorde’s definition of eros.
JAMILA SALIMPOUR: CREATING THE IMAGE OF THE TRIBE

Long-time San Francisco belly dancer Jamila Salimpour often quotes
Armen Ohanian, an early twentieth-century dancer from Central Asia:
Thus in Cairo one evening I saw, with sick incredulous eyes, one of our most
sacred dances degraded into bestiality horrible and revolting. It was our
poem of the mystery and pain of motherhood, which all true Asiatic men
watch with reverence and humility, in the far-away corners of Asia where the
destructive breath of the Occident has not penetrated. In this olden Asia,
which has kept the dance in its primitive purity, it represents maternity, the
mysterious conception of life, the suffering and the joy with which a new
soul is brought into the world. Could any man born of woman contem-
plate this most holy subject, expressed in an art so pure and so ritualistic as
our eastern dance, with less than profound reverence? Had this been told
me, I could not have believed it. Such is our Asiatic veneration of mother-
hood, that there are countries and tribes whose most binding oath is sworn
70 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
upon the stomach; because it is from this sacred cup that humanity issues.
(Ohanian 1923: 261–262)
An Armenian born in Shamakha in present-day Azerbaijan, Armen

Ohanian became a dancer by default following the death of her father
during an anti-Armenian pogrom and abandonment by her Iranian hus-
band. She initially performed in Turkey and Egypt but by 1911 she started
to appear in Europe where she performed in a variety of venues. As Anne
Decoret-Ahiha (2004) points out, her talent was in the creation of dances
based on the literature, mythology and daily life of the countries in which
she had lived and travelled. In Europe, she was compared with Isadora
Duncan for her ability to express deeply felt emotions with a unique ges-
tural vocabulary. Throughout her career, she sought to challenge what she
considered to be an imaginary view of the orient and its related clichés.
As such, her writing acts as a counter to nineteenth-century writers such
as scholar-adventurer Edward William Lane, who published in 1836 An
Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians based on his
time spent living in Egypt from 1825 to 1828 and again in 1833–1835.
Jamila Salimpour, a woman of Italian ancestry, identifies with Armen’s
depiction of the dance as sacred. Her personal exposure to dances from
North Africa and the Middle East was attributable to her Sicilian father
and Arab American friends. As she states it: “My basic Oriental dance
training came first from my father who was in the Sicilian Navy, stationed
in the Middle East in 1910. His favorite pastime when in Egypt was
watching the Ghawâzı̑, dance. When I was young, he used to imitate them
for us.”6 Beyond imitating her father’s imitation of the Ghawâzı̑, Jamila
regularly listened to half-hour radio programmes that featured music
from Armenia and the Middle East7 and went to the La Tosca Theater
on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles each month to watch famous dancers
Tahia Carioca and Samia Gamal on film. As she remembers:
My first lesson in Middle Eastern Dance happened when I controlled my

awe of Tahia Carioca, after watching several dance sequences and objectively
concentrated on watching her footwork, instead of her projection and facial
expressions. I became aware that what she was doing was accomplished by
training and not just an “ethnic emotional experience.” Film after film I
would wait for the scene in the movie that gave her the opportunity to
dance and I was almost never disappointed. … Tahia Carioca’s movements
were fluid with pelvic combinations that defied analysis. Her delivery was
so natural it made the dance look easy. I began to recognize repetition and
patterns. When the music was fast she executed certain steps embellished
with her own body’s ability, and when the music was slow her interpretation
evolved within another pattern.8
Through imitating the dancers of the films, Jamila evolved enough dance
vocabulary to be hired to dance at events such as a Turkish New Year
party and for the Armenian Great Benevolent Union with the Hanna
Brothers orchestra. Later she was hired by Middle Eastern restaurants
in Los Angeles and in San Francisco which combined local talent with
professional dancers from the Middle East. Dancing in these restaurants,
Jamila begin to develop a particular style of dance while still learning new
movements from the imported Middle Eastern dancers:
It was only after I went to dance in San Francisco, where dancers were hired
from different countries of the Middle East, that I saw a variety of styles.
Turkish Ayŗa wowed the audience with her full-body vibrations. During her
show I would run to the dressing room to analyze her pivots. Soraya from
Morocco danced almost always in Beledi dress, balancing a pot on her head.
Fatima Akef danced on water glasses with “Laura” her parrot, perched on
her shoulder.9
The year 1965 was a pivotal one for Jamila. Pregnant with her daugh-
ter Suhalia, she followed her husband Ardeshir Salimpour’s wishes and
gave up her performing career in order to start teaching classes. Teaching
required her to put into words a movement vocabulary that she had
acquired from observing dancers on film and in person and integrated
into a personal movement style during her improvisational performances
in Middle Eastern restaurants. With no formal training in the form, she
did not have a system of study. Her classes were therefore a variation of
the process by which she had learned the dance. “Since I had never been
taught the dance, I didn’t know a method to teach the dance. There were
no teachers, schools or methods that existed.”10
Teaching several classes a week, Jamila eventually evolved a system of
teaching and related movement vocabulary that codified the sum of her
exposure to the variety of Middle Eastern dance forms both on and off
the screen. This included creating an exotic environment for the student.
As an early student, Aziza, describes it, “Jamila was teaching in her flat on
Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and from the moment I walked in, I was
72 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
caught by the magic. There was incense burning by the front door, there
were prints of Bakst's exotic designs and photographs of Jamila in costume
on the walls, an Indian throw on the couch, and that music filling the living
room.”11 Jamila’s teaching style is demonstrated on an instructional DVD
set, divided into sections covering basic movements, hip work, shimmies
and folkloric style, all taught using a 1980 taping of her daughter Suhaila,
then in her mid-twenties. Suhaila began dancing with her mother from the
age of two, started to teach at fourteen and has continued to refine her
mother’s technique.
The combination of Jamila and Suhaila’s approach is the West Coast
codification of the form that Jamila evolved from watching Egyptian films
and dancers in Middle Eastern restaurants. It is a movement vocabulary
with a technical language such as “hip lock” for a specific lift of the hip
to the side or “three-quarter shimmy” for a movement which combines a
hip lock and a vibration. Within the explanations, the body is referred to
in terms of its discrete units, the hips, feet and arms, and is taught in the
same manner. For example, a three-quarter flamenco-style shimmy begins
with learning the patterns for the feet followed by the articulations of the
hip.12 Jamila has also written a set of books setting out her account of
belly dance’s history as well as providing instruction for the dance. They
include, An Illustrated Manual of Finger Cymbal Instruction: History,
Evolution, and Related instruments (1977), The Danse Orientale (1978)
and Belly Dancing from Cave to Cult (1979).
RENAISSANCE PLEASURE FAIRE, TRIBE AND BAL ANAT

Meanwhile, Jamila’s students searched for venues that would allow them
to explore their newly acquired cabaret belly-dance skills and related exotic
personae. One such location was the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. The
Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire was a rendition of aspects of
San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury- and Berkeley, California-based Society for
Creative Anachronism; a group dedicated to the study and (re)creation of
the European Middle Ages, its crafts, sciences, arts, traditions and literature
prior to AD1600. The original idea for the Society for Creative Anachronism
was kindled in 1966, at a theme party, by a group of science-fiction and
fantasy fans. Some members of the group who attended the party formed
a medieval (re)creation and (re)enactment community modelled on those
which (re)enact the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. Currently, the organiza-
tion has over 30,000 members in North America, Europe and Australia.13
The Renaissance Pleasure Faire, sometimes referred to as Ren Faire

or just plain Faire, is part-craft fair and part-historical (re)enactment.
It is however primarily a popular entertainment site for all participants.
American studies scholar, Rachel Lee Rubin describes the Renaissance
Faire as “a place to experiment with the new—new sexual arrangements,
new ways of understanding and enacting gender roles, legal and illegal
drugs (with LSD included in the legal category at this point), communal
living, and ideals of art taken directly to the people” (2012: 5). The faire
is outside the environment of contemporary roles and dress codes. In fact,
the organizers point out that there are no dress codes; but individuals
are encouraged to create personal visual statements using natural fibres
and colours. In this ‘extra-ordinary’ apparel, they meander with hundreds
of other visitors through the sensory spectacle of craft and food booths,
participate in informal music and dancing, banter with vendors and watch
jugglers, musicians, magicians, dancers and other entertainers.
The faire’s sensory environment stimulates the totality of the body’s
senses and provides an imaginary space of the past within the present.
This is a space of play that Richard Schechner reminds us is related to
Turner’s (1982) and Bateson’s (2000) play frame, a transitional space of
the subjunctive. “The field is precarious because it is subjunctive, liminal,
and transitional; it rests not on how things are but on how things are not;
its existence depends on agreements kept among all participants, includ-
ing the audience. The field is the embodiment of potential, of the virtual,
the imaginative, the fictive, the negative, the non-not” (Schechner 1985:
113).
During a visit to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1967, Jamila dis-
covered that her students, dressed in Hollywood harem costumes, were
blocking the faire’s pathways: “every five feet a crowd was gathered
around a wiggling novice, completely abandoned in her interpretation of
the dance” (Salimpour 1999: 16). The faire’s entertainment coordinator
was less than pleased with Jamila’s students. “Listen” she said to Jamila,
“You’ve got to do something about this. I mean, it’s not that I don’t like
belly dancing or anything like that. But there are just too many of them.
They’re all over the Faire, stopping traffic, in the road, on the stages,
crawling out from under the rocks, falling out of the trees ….They’re
everywhere” (1999: 16). Jamila agreed to help.
The following year, 1968, Jamila created a half-hour variety show that
was her image of an “Arabian festival, or souk in the Middle East” (1999:
17), an interpretation of the dance that would displace Hollywood’s
74 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
harem representation; an image that would correspond with the fair’s

natural outdoor environment and Renaissance flavour. Never having been
to North Africa or the Middle East, she created a concept that she readily
admits was half-real, based on dances she had learned from Middle Eastern
women friends, and part-hokum. The hokum was inspired by interpreta-
tions of photographs, paintings and films of the Middle East or set in the
Middle East. These included pictures of tribal groups from the National
Geographic, paintings by Gerome, films such as Justine (set in North
Africa) and a photo from a Moroccan cookbook. These sources provided
her with the costumes and physical postures that became the inspiration
for these dances, which would be performed by women and men.
Accompanying the dancers’ performances were musicians who were
also involved in the vibrant cabaret and Middle Eastern restaurants in San
Francisco’s North Beach. As the Renaissance Pleasure Faire did not allow
any recorded music or amplification, Jamila Salimpour had to find musi-
cians who could play types of instruments that could be heard over the
animated environment of the faire. This meant the instruments of vil-
lage North Africa and the Middle East were incorporated into the per-
formance. For example, drums, such as the large tabla baladi or smaller
darbuka provided the underlying rhythm while wind instruments such as
the mizmar (double-reed instrument) or nye (flute), with their piercing
resonance, provided the melody. The integration of musicians affiliated
with California restaurant and cabaret venues with village instruments
evolved a new musical style and led to the evolution of musical ensembles
such as Light Rain, Socorro, Tufan and Mirage, who would become the
second generation of belly-dance musicians. These musicians increasingly
composed music that moved away from the complex rhythmic and modal
framework of classical Egyptian and Turkish music and more towards the
sound and phrasing of contemporary popular culture.
Using Schechner’s definition of subjunctive experience, the perfor-
mances of Jamila’s company, Bal Anat, can be interpreted as existing
within the fictive field of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, with a dancing
body evolved from orientalized conceptions of the exotic Middle East.
The earthy and sensuous contours of nineteenth-century representations
were the imaginative backdrop for the male and female dancers of the
troupe. These dancers became a separate tribe in which masculinity and
femininity were not bound by Western normative structures. They existed
in a fictive Orient. Backed by the constant pulse of the tabla baladi, this
dancing tribe united their performance with prehistory through a solo
masked dance dedicated to Anat, the mother goddess. The secular space
of the fair became a spiritual/liminal space. The tribal group—men and
women—dressed in a colourful pastiche of tunics, skirts, pants, coin gir-
dles, draped fabrics, head coverings and tattoos, performed their inter-
pretation of the Orient in dances that incorporated the swinging hips and
undulating torsos of its dance style with the use of props such as swords,
trays, pots, and water glasses. In this way they conveyed a collective image
of the professional dancers of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey and
Egypt in the (re)created environment of the San Francisco Bay Area’s
Renaissance Pleasure Faire.
Submerged in a collective oriental fantasy, the dancers of Bal Anat
explored modes of sexual expression and related identity in a way that
was not permissible in daily life. Male performers such as John Compton
beguiled the audience while balancing a tray filled with candles. Women
manipulated an emblem of maleness, the sword. Men and women pro-
vocatively manoeuvred arms and veils in conjunction with pelvic circles,
thrusts and undulations to reveal and conceal the physical indication of
their gender and the desires of their bodies. Dancing their individual
bodies, they danced new gender identities in a process that reflected the
contemporary interest in new sexualities and at the same time challenged
prior constructions. These new gender identities were danced within an
imagined Oriental space created from a mix of the “lived” body of Middle
Eastern dancers and a media representation of the Middle East. Thus,
they validated the commonly accepted impressions of this location docu-
mented by National Geographic and highlighted by Hollywood film; an
imaginary, exotic world where women and men lived a life of heightened
sensuality. Since the initial Renaissance Pleasure Faire performances of
the 1960s, other dancers have retained elements of Jamila Salimpour’s
movement vocabulary and Bal Anat’s format while continuing to develop
new and distinct presentational modes of feminine and masculine identity
under the general designation of American Tribal Style Belly Dance.
JOHN COMPTON: CONTEMPORARY KHAWAL (1948–2012)

John Compton, a student of Jamila Salimpour, was one of the San Francisco
Bay Area’s early male pioneers of tribal belly dance. He would later be
joined by Jim Boz, Steven Eggers and other male dancers who found in the
concept of tribal dance an opportunity for masculine self-expression not
found in cabaret belly dance. In the 1970s, he joined Salimpour’s company
76 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
Bal Anat but left in 1991 to found Hahbi’Ru. John did not consistently
use “tribal” as a designation; instead, he situated his performance as a male
dancer within the vernacular of the Middle East and referred to himself as
a contemporary Khawal, a reference to the male dancers of nineteenth cen-
tury Egypt.14 Tracing his movement style to his experience of working with
a specialist in Turkish dances, Patti Farber, as well as with Jamila Salimpour,
John made an ambivalent distinction between the movement style of his
group and that of his teachers. As he stated it on his website, “We base our
dances upon tradition, but interpret that tradition with a bit of creative
license, change them, and make them stage worthy. We do sneak some
modern movements but try to integrate them in an old-style way.”15
Personally, John Compton was most noted for his version of the Tray
Dance.16 Backed by a group of male and female musicians playing the miz-
mar and a variety of percussion instruments, John emerged from the com-
pany dressed in a pair of loose hip-hugging trousers, a shift-style shirt made
of assyut (a cotton or linen mesh fabric embedded with strips of metal),
short black vest and an Arabic-style headscarf. In a short series of lightly
articulated gestures of the hip and feet, which combined the fluid twist-
ing motion of Jamila’s pivot step with rapid turns and hip-thrusts, John
established his presence on the stage: a presence that was at first difficult to
read as definitively masculine or feminine, but easy to read as exotic other.
A website dedicated to John Compton quoted the following San Francisco
Examiner description of him, “Dressed in the manner of the ancient caliph,
he swirls his way into dreams, it is as if Valentino has come back to life.”17
The rest of John Compton’s performance concentrated on his ability
to complete a set of acrobatic poses—e.g. backbends, splits—and dance
movements, while balancing a tray with six lighted candles and/or coffee
cups on it on his head. His demeanour throughout was friendly but with
an air of playful challenge that questioned the audience’s ability to success-
fully realize the same level of balance, flexibility and physical dexterity—a
relationship to the audience mastered over years of performances in res-
taurants and nightclubs including Finocchio’s in the North Beach and
the Sahara in Las Vegas. For example, from standing position, he low-
ered himself into a backbend while smiling at the audience. Without any
adjustment to the tray balanced on his head, he rolled over and balanced
on one arm and leg while he completed a series of torso undulations. Still
maintaining the tray’s balance, he rolled on to his stomach and began
a series of full-body push-ups, most often referred to as male push-ups.
Curling his body, he came to his knees and to standing; with the tray bal-
anced on his head, he began a series of rapid hip movements that end in
an isolated shimmy of the pelvis. Finally, he handed the tray to a musician
and began a rapid turn which ended with a leap into the air followed by
a landing on his back with his feet tucked under his torso in a movement
commonly called a Turkish drop.
Assured in his physical ability to manoeuvre the relationship between
body and tray, John sensually danced a definition of masculinity that was
as fluid as his hips and as malleable as his spine: an enactment of the body
that until recently would have been equated with the feminine. His per-
formance therefore generated a set of physical metaphors that fit within
the framework of the exotic, sensual oriental other. Yet, it was a white male
enacting this stereotype.
John Compton’s performances and those of other male American
tribal style dancers act to contest the stereotype of the orient as innately
feminine; and yet these performances continue the stereotype of the orient
as the site of the erotically exotic. By placing themselves within the physi-
cal centre of this apparent contradiction, these dancers offer an alternative
vision of masculinity. It is a vision that has no obvious referent within clas-
sical or modern dance traditions in the USA, and in fact in its movement
style of the hips and pelvis is closer to popular social dance forms as they
have evolved over the twentieth century.
CAROLENA NERICCIO-BOHLMAN: AMERICAN TRIBAL STYLE

BELLY DANCE® (ATS)18 AND FATCHANCEBELLYDANCE®
(FCBD)
American Tribal Style Belly Dance ® (ATS) is representative of dance
groups and performances that are held all over the USA and beyond.
San Francisco dancer Carolena Nericcio-Bohlman is the founder of ATS
and FatChanceBellyDance® (also known as FCBD) which, through vid-
eotapes, workshops and the internet, have disseminated the style glob-
ally. While borrowing from the movement vocabulary and costume styles
of the Middle East, the dance is a complex blend that draws its inspira-
tion from the ethos of the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1960s and early
1970s and its unique combination of counterculture, modern primitive
and contemporary movements in feminist spirituality. The opening page
of the website for FCBD features the phrase, “Imagine this: there was a
time in history, a long time ago, when the bounce and sway of a woman’s
78 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
hips was considered so beautiful that they set it to music and made a dance
out of it.”19 As a company, FCBD is, in its social organization and perfor-
mance style, a visual symbol of a feminist spiritual imagination in practice.
Dressed alike in natural-fibre fabrics with elaborate headdresses, the
dancers of Carolena’s FCBD, a company created in 1987, have a distinctive
physical appearance. Carolena describes their style of dress as an “American
fusion of elements from many countries along the Romany Trail and heav-
ily influenced by simply what works for the dancers and an audience of
Americans” (Djoumanhna 2003: 21). The costume, derived from photos
taken in North Africa, Central Asia and India, is a postmodern pastiche of
various materials, design elements and colours. It integrates images from
North Africa in a male Berber-style turban and from Northern India and
Central Asia in the full skirts of the Kathak dancer, mirrored vests and
layers of Afghan jewellery with facial tattoos from across the Middle East,
and body tattoos and piercing associated with contemporary primitivism
à la San Francisco. The body within this costume combines the uplifted
torso, hands, and arms of a flamenco dancer with the grounded hips, legs
and feet of solo dances from North Africa and the Middle East. Thus, the
form fuses the visual, aural and kinaesthetic aspects of various tribal and
ethnic groups into an evocative onstage image.
This “singular” vision of woman is the aspect that distinguishes FCBD
from the many companies around the world who have evolved a version
of tribal belly dance. There are no men in FCBD, although there are
men in the audience. As one might assume, the name of the company is
Carolena’s challenge to the male voyeur. She phrases it, “Fat Chance he
will get a private show! Fat Chance, he’ll get a date with one of the danc-
ers” (Zussman 1995: 2). The goal of the performance is to present women
as a team, similar to what one would find in women’s sports, which pro-
vides an alternative image of women to that which exists in the majority
of television commercials and magazine advertisements or in the cabaret
versions of belly dance. Regardless, there is a confrontational overtone
that some imitators, such as the Chicago-based company, Read My Hips,
have also adopted which seems a belly-dance version of Clint Eastwood’s
well-known Dirty Harry quote, “Make my day.” Nevertheless, a restricted
reading of “fat chance” as an ironic comment does not acknowledge the
personal and historical factors of Carolena’s life that are pivotal to the
dance form’s development.
Carolena was a restless teenager who did not find a place within her
peer group until high school when she became part of the San Francisco
Bay area’s Wilderness School and started taking belly-dance classes from
Masha Archer. The Wilderness School was a student-run farm that inte-
grated public service with working on independent projects and hiking in
the mountains. Carolena credits this school with developing her apprecia-
tion of her body and her body’s relationship with nature; and also with
providing a model of an “intentional community” she would later incor-
porate into the organization of a dance company. The other pivotal event
of her teen years was the belly-dance class she started attending in 1974,
taught by a former student of Jamila Salimpour, Masha Archer.
A visual artist, Masha had a strong impact on the quiet, shy fourteen-
year-old. Masha had a physical power and charismatic presence that
Carolena sought to model. She taught Carolena the movement vocabu-
lary she had learned from Jamila combined with costume elements that
Carolena describes as generating a unified vision of a woman’s body in
motion. Masha’s ability to unify costume and body had an enduring
impact on Carolena as a dancer/choreographer.
Carolena describes FCBD as a “community based on mutual respect;
a group willing to acknowledge a leader, a leader willing to acknowl-
edge the integrity of a group. Governing itself with common sense and
a desire to succeed” (Zussman 1995: 2). Although the public primarily
sees the onstage version of this community, there is a significant backstage
contingent that includes dancers, costume designers, internet specialists
and videographers who are responsible for producing the many products
associated with the group. These include a website, quarterly newslet-
ter, instructional and performance videos, costumes, jewellry, books and
herbal products. These products are marketed globally through the inter-
national belly dance community.
Carolena’s goal for ATS and its affiliate studios and companies is to
provide a unique and evolving image of women as a powerful extension of
nature. She believes the research of archeologist Marija Gambutas estab-
lishes the existence of a period in history when women’s ways of knowing
were respected. Carolena asks:
But what happened to that culture? How did we go from honoring the
natural shape and substance of a woman’s body to seeing it as something
imperfect? Nature created us perfectly, an incredible system of nerves, mus-
cle, bone and blood, all interwoven in such a way that an impulse from the
brain can make the hip or an eyelash flutter. The modern culture in which
we live has no interest in the original perfection of the body. Everybody is
80 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
encouraged to squeeze, shrink, stretch themselves into a mold that wasn’t

made for them. We seem to have lost our respect for Nature and her infinite
wisdom of balance. (Zussman 1997: 2)
A member of the American Tribal Belly Dance® group, Karen Gehrman

believes the form “teaches women to love their bodies and to recognize
their own grace.”20 This includes bodies of various shapes and sizes rang-
ing from what some would identify as the full-figured woman to those
bodies that more closely resemble a fashion magazine model.
In the quest for the natural body of women, Carolena expresses a simi-
lar concern to that of women in the 1960s and 1970s who considered
American Cabaret belly dancing, a form distinct from ATS or raqs sharqi,
as an extension of personal empowerment affiliated with the second wave
of the feminist movement. This view associated it with a bodily accep-
tance, a stance also articulated by dancer-author Daniela Gioseffi. In her
book Earth Dancing (1980), Daniella argued that belly dance was an
extension of Isadora Duncan’s vision of the female body in motion. She
quotes Isadora’s famous statement, “The dancer of the future will be one
whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natu-
ral language of that soul will have become the movement of the body”
(Gioseffi 1980: 91). Although sharing a common outlook concerning
the freeing of a woman’s body, Daniela Gioseffi and Carolena Nericcio-
Bohlman have evolved divergent responses which reflect different adapta-
tions to the issue of the public presentation of a woman’s body at different
moments in feminist history. As an adult in the 1960s who believed the
adage “the personal is political,” Gioseffi took an active stance for the
subjective voice of the individual dancer. The solo dancers, commonly
referred to as cabaret belly dancers, who created such a commotion dur-
ing the early Renaissance Pleasure Faire, were from Gioseffi’s perspective
improvising the joy of the spirals and circles of the pelvis and the undula-
tions of the torso. These cabaret belly dancers believed they were reflect-
ing dance history and the physical power/pleasure of the expressive female
body that in a way recalled the goddess religions of the ancient world.
Politically affiliated more with the 1990s than the 1960s–1970s,
Carolena, is a personal physical trainer and out lesbian as well as a belly
dancer who shares Daniela’s interest in the women’s ownership of their
bodies. Even so, she defines physical ownership differently from Daniela.
Carolena correlates physical with psychological strength, and relates both
to dance. ATS is for her an expression of the innate strength of a powerful
and confident female body that is developed in the gym, physically refined
in the dance studio and aesthetically focused on the stage.
Classes at her San Francisco studio or in the DVDs she has produced
exemplify this philosophy. Would-be dancers stand in long lines behind
Carolena and carefully imitate her upright body posture and carefully
orchestrated movement vocabulary of hip and arm gestures. The unity of
form among the students is created through the consistent repetition of
the same movements in unison with other dancers. This format of con-
stant repetition acts to negate the optical consciousness of the mirror as
the constant repetition creates a kinaesthetic engagement with the other
students in the course, and this becomes more important than the reflec-
tive nature of the mirror. Ultimately, the students have the precision of a
drill team, created at the intersections of studio-based culturally somatic
and mediated modes of experience. Individual expressiveness is subsumed
within the physical form and aesthetic style of Carolena’s version of ATS;
heads are held high, backs arch, arms stay lifted, hips swivel to convey the
strength of the body in motion.
This strength does not exist in isolation. The individual’s subjective
identity is strengthened when expressed in conjunction with a commu-
nity. FCBD performs in a variety of venues—weekly performances in a
San Francisco restaurant, art shows, concert stages, belly dance festivals,
and parties. They never perform in these venues as soloists as do American
cabaret dancers but as groups of two or more. Carolena considers solo
dancing as antithetical to the point of being a tribe, a group sharing a
common image of woman. As she explains on the website, “I insist on two
or more dancers always. I really want the tribal part to come through and
the camaraderie of the women to come through.”21
Carolena’s version of ATS is a carefully constructed hybrid form with
the goal of providing a sense of community while conveying the power
of a unified female presence. This is achieved to a degree through a com-
mon movement vocabulary and costume, but also important is the form’s
improvisational choreography.
The improvisational performances rely on a set of visual and aural cues
from a designated leader. Physical cues are subtle gestures to suggest a
change in movement. An example of such a cue might be a rise on the toes
to indicate a level change or a lift of a wrist to signal a turn. There could
be a change in the music that points to a change in the movement, or
the lead dancer could use her finger cymbals to indicate a break between
movement phrases. There is, however, at all times a designated, rotating
82 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
leader. In fact, one of the primary tenets is that every woman is both leader
and follower in a process of ongoing reliance on each other.
The company’s staging is influenced by the need, imposed by this
method of improvised choreography, for all dancers to be able to see the
leader. Thus, stage use is restricted to combinations of half-circles, tri-
angles, or staggered and diagonal lines.22 Within these stage configura-
tions, the dancer, under her layers of costume and make-up, wears a smile
that engages, yet distances her from the audience. Her attention is not on
the audience’s reaction to her performance, but on the interplay of cues
that signify the ongoing interdependence of the tribe; or as Carolena sug-
gests “In tribal style, the dancers are surrendering to their fellow dancers.
Everyone has to cooperate or the show falls apart.”23 Unlike a cabaret
belly dancer, an American Tribal Style dancer is not negotiating a set of
internalized Hollywood images whilst attempting to come to a state of
transcendence in correspondence with an audience. Instead, she has (re)
defined the feminine image and is presenting it in conjunction with her
tribal sisters. This sense of tribe extends beyond the stage to create a com-
munity in which dancers come to identify each other as an extended family
that provides the support system typically associated with blood relatives.
The tribal or extended-family component of American Tribal seems to
be the enduring centre to the global popularity and spread of this version
of belly dance. Variations of Carolena’s ATS have developed in the San
Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere around the globe.24 These companies
imitate ATS’s form and costume style, while at the same time creating
an identity that reflects a local version of the concept of tribal.25 As such,
they reproduce a variation of Jamila Salimpour’s use of images from the
Natural Geographic and other media as well as contemporary images from
films about Gypsy life, Latcho Drom and Gacjo Dilo, as a source of inspira-
tion; and, the belief that the tribe impacts their personal identity.
TRIBAL CONSCIOUSNESS/PAULETTE REES-DENIS

In her book Tribal Vision: A Celebration of Life through Tribal Belly Dance
(2008), Paulette Rees-Denis describes growing up in Columbus, Ohio
and her studio classes at the Marjorie Jones School of Dance in ballet,
jazz, tap and acrobatics. Whilst attending the school she participated in
Ohio-based dance competitions and as a teenager applied to a dance high
school in Illinois. She was not admitted but this did not prevent her from
pursuing her dream to be a professional dancer and she continued studio
classes. Graduating from high school a year early, she started in the dance
programme at the University of Utah but left as she felt limited by the
narrowly defined ballet and modern programme. A product of the cultur-
ally restless 1960s and 1970s, Paulette travelled to New York and worked
in the fashion industry and then to San Francisco to pursue a Bachelor’s
degree (1983) in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. It
was in San Francisco that she discovered Carolena’s American Tribal Style
classes. These classes returned her to dance but more profoundly than
previous dance study as the movement vocabulary of the form was a deep
experience of an internalized embodiment. As she phrases it “The new
dance that Carolena would introduce to me called to me, in a feminine
way that none of these other activities did. This dance would change my
life, but this change affected something so deep within me, my soul, my
heart, that it was to say with me forever” (Rees-Denis 2008: 27).
One of the primary life changes was a move to Portland, Oregon with
her musician husband, Jeff Rees, and beginning to teach American Tribal.
Her classes were popular and in 1991 she established a company named
Gypsy Caravan Dance Company. Unlike Bal Anat and FCBD, this com-
pany was a blend of musicians and dancers who quickly gained a reputation
in the Pacific Northwest. The combination of music and dance provided
an opportunity to integrate the movement vocabulary of tribal belly dance
with musical phrasing to create a new sound that was a stylized blend of the
music and related instruments “of North Africa, Spain, India, the Middle
and Near East, with a contemporary American sensibility.”26 Recording
under the Gypsy Caravan and Minza labels, the group is representative of
a musical movement that was initiated by groups of non-Middle Eastern
musicians who had begun to evolve a contemporary belly dance sound.
These included the previously mentioned groups Light Rain and Sirocco
and more recent ensembles such as Beats Antique and Galactic Caravan.
Paulette uses the music of Gypsy Caravan musicians and other groups
to provide a backdrop in which the dance and dancing becomes a celebra-
tion of individual expressiveness. As she writes, “What is it about music
that touches our heart or soul or body? For each of us, it can be different
reason. The sound of the voice—whether male or female, or the melody
line, be it melancholy or snappy—can penetrate deep into our soul. The
rhythm might be played in a slow, rolling pattern that takes us walking
with a clipped step. Or it may be bold and heavy, making us want to
jump and shake” (Rees-Denis 2008: 65). This commitment to sharing
her personal experience of the deeply felt joy of the dance is conveyed in
84 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
Fig. 4.1 Paulette Rees-Denis at 2014 TribalCon in Georgia. Photograph cour-

tesy of Paulette Rees-Denis.
the courses she teaches and her weekly online communications, “Tribal
Travels” (Fig. 4.1).
At the centre of Rees-Denis’ transmission of the dance to the students
is a sense of empowerment. In a recent online course called “Dance and
Desire” she encouraged students to explore what desire and empowerment

meant to them by asking, “What does the word empowerment mean to
you? What does desire mean to you? How does either word differ from
the word power? Where do you feel empowered in your body? And when
do you feel empowered?”27 These personal questions are asked within the
context of an environment of emotional and psychophysical safety for the
student. Paulette’s primary goal is to encourage students to get in touch
with the depth of their own experience or what she refers to as their intuitive
self. Thus, each class begins with a group circle of acknowledgement of self
and each other and proceeds through a focus on breath, guided meditation,
a warm-up that combines yoga with the circles and spirals of belly dance,
followed by an introduction of a new dance movement and an opportunity
to integrate the new vocabulary into an evolving individual style of move-
ment through improvisation, before ending with a final group circle. There
are also opportunities within the course’s structure for dancers to participate
in improvisational explorations in which they mirror or respond to each
other’s movement in pairs and in larger groups. As she suggests:
This signature Tribal styling is an eclectic, invigorating, and elegant fusion

based on urban, folk, ritual, trance, belly dance, and modern dances. I have
created this rich blend of contemporary movement, with roots in ancient
dance styles, based on a common non-verbal language and group impro-
visation, which is esthetically pleasing, spiritually grounding, and physically
rewarding. Not only do we use this dance, which is ultra-feminine, intoxi-
catingly sensual, earthy and organic, extremely beautiful, and profoundly
moving, but we also add lots of different cross-training techniques—like
yoga, Zumba ®,fitness, meditations, nutrition, journaling, and more—to
get a full body, spirit, and brain workout!28
The music provided by Gypsy Caravan and other groups provides much
of the rhythmic backdrop and phrasing for the improvisations. Global in
its compositional influences, the music blends the musical styles of North
Africa and the Middle East with others from around the world.
From twenty years of teaching students, Paulette has witnessed how
life-changing her course is for students as they discover, through its inte-
gration of personal safety, breath, focus and movement improvisation, a
constant reminder to approach each day with a beginner’s mind. As she
states in an email to students: “because every morning we are born again.
We have the choice to make that day special, sacred, beautiful, powerful.
86 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
We have the choice to enjoy life, let go of the past, step it up and bring it
on. With joy and pleasure and personal achievement, and feel delighted
and empowered.”29 Paulette’s anecdotal observation is the fulfilment of
her courses she teaches in North America, Europe and Asia; that of pro-
moting an increased level of consciousness awareness which opens new
cognitive pathways and related avenues of problem-solving that the par-
ticipants can then apply to their personal and professional lives.
TRIBAL FEST: FROM THE ROOT TO THE FRUIT

AND BEYOND
Sitting in the main auditorium of Sebastopol, California’s cultural centre,

watching three days of performances at Tribal Fest 14: From the Root
to the Fruit, I was reminded of the global history of belly dance from its
arrival at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 to the transnationalization of
the form as it exists today in popular culture. Visually and aurally, the fes-
tival is a convergence of images of bright colours, flowers, heavy jewellry,
piercings, elaborate tattoos, electronic music with its pulsing rhythms that
is a testament to the impact of the dance and specifically Tribal Fest on
individual lives. American Tribal Style Belly Dance is an embodiment of
the San Francisco Bay Area’s embrace of alternative gendered life styles
and related aesthetics, many of which have their roots in the turbulent
politics of the 1960s. It is a stylistic version of belly dance that in its inclu-
sion of straight and gay male dancers and straight and lesbian female danc-
ers would not have developed outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The individual dance performances at Tribal Fest seem to span the his-
tory of the dance itself, with nods to the dances from North Africa and the
Middle East, dances that tie their roots to the movement vocabulary and
choreographic style of ATS’s founder Carolena Nericcio-Bohlman, and the
extensions of this movement vocabulary into versions of ATS with com-
pany names such as by Black Sheep Belly Dance, Ultra Gypsy and Tribal/
Bellygroove. Other belly dance companies describe themselves as fusion
and dark fusion performances. African, Indian, Bollywood, urban dance,
modern dance and ballet are just some of the many movement vocabular-
ies and related moving images incorporated into Tribal Fest performances.
The world’s dancers come to Tribal Fest from Canada (Mat Jacob, Tribal
Fusion), Italy (Linda Melani, Tribal Soul and Le Serpent Noir), France
(Illan Riviere, Imajaghan), England (Hilde Cannoodt, Masmoudi Dance
Collective), Mexico (Steven Eggers, Isidis), India (Queen Harish, Drag
Queen), Australia (Devi Mamak, Ghawazi Caravan) and elsewhere. They

bring with them new versions of tribal, fusion and dark fusion that are
a consequence of the cultural contexts and aesthetics of their distinctive
communities.
Tribal Fest 14: From the Root to the Fruit is just one example of the
tribal dance festivals with similar titles taking place in Bucharest, Goa,
Tokyo, Barcelona and other locations around the globe. It is ultimately
a hybrid form conceived at the convergence of a San Francisco ethos and
the 1960s’ response to questions of gender and ethnicity and evolved from
nineteenth- and twentieth-century media interpretations of the Middle
East. It is not an ethnic tradition passed on through a process of somatic
enculturation from the body of one generation to that of another. Thus,
tribal, like many popular forms, is contradictory in its incorporation of some
stereotypes while challenging others: a woman’s body that undulates and
circles her hips motivated not by a male gaze, but by the movement phrases
of the woman she is following; a male dancer who performs his masculin-
ity not through leaps in the air but through the careful articulations of his
torso. The sensual fantasies from which the form originates are rooted in
the Western cultural memory of a colonial orient. Regardless of the images
that initiated the development of tribal, this is a body that defines its spiri-
tual core within the dance’s technical vocabulary and staged community of
the tribe. A tribe that in its evolution has moved beyond its place of home
in San Francisco and can now be found throughout the world.
Although Tribal Fest is a live-on-stage, face-to-face event, it is the
danced realization of a world in which the technological flows of transpor-
tation and communication bring images and bodies into correspondence
with each other, and through the transcultural convergence of danced
images in popular culture and related media new vocabularies and related
images are created. At the time of writing, Tribal Fest is sixteen years old
(having started in 2000), the moving global dialogue that it represents is
over 100 years old; and slowly over that period the Western perception of
belly dance, of which the belly features so predominantly in the movement
and the costuming has become a form separate from the individual dances
of North Africa and the Middle East. There is an increasing global separa-
tion between those in the belly-dance community such as the performers
Morocco, Aisha Ali, Laurel Gray, Cassandra Shore and the Al Andalus
Company of Spain, who research and perform the dances of North Africa,
and the Middle Eastern and the Tribal/Fusion community, which concen-
trates on new adaptions of the form.
88 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
NOTES
1. The festival was started in 1992 by Charles Wallace and John Pickerel,
owners of the local newspaper and Winters’ primary restaurant, the
Buckhorn, respectively. They convinced the Chamber of Commerce to
create a summer festival that celebrated the 100th anniversary of the 1892
earthquake. The goal of the festival is to acknowledge the community
spirit that rebuilt the town following that event. There have been several
American Tribal groups from the region around Winters that have per-
formed at the Earthquake Festival in past years.
2. The tribal belly dance community and its extension into fusion and are
explored, and members share ideas and perspectives, through Fuse: A
Tribal and Tribal Fusion Belly Dance Magazine. Accessed January 2, 2015:
http://www.fusetribalmag.com/Current_issue.html.
3. The initial production, with book and lyrics by James Rado and Jerome
Ragini, was first presented in 1967 as part of the New York Shakespeare
Festival.
4. Currently, San Francisco and the surrounding area, is home to approxi-
mately 150,000 people who trace their ancestry to some part of North
Africa and the Middle East. Their cultural home is the Arab Cultural and
Community Center (ACCC), founded in 1973. The largest organization
in California dedicated to promoting Arab and Arab American culture, the
ACCC has a staff of eleven full- and part-time employees who organize a
variety of programmes for an immigrant community whose members trace
their individual ancestries to Egypt, Palestine, Yemen, North Africa, Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon. Beyond the events the ACCC sponsors, such as the
Arab Cultural Festival, the organization also partners with other San
Francisco-based organizations, of which the San Francisco International
Arts Festival is one, to bring Arab and Arab American artists to the atten-
tion of the Bay Area community. For example, in 2007, the centre orga-
nized “Beyond Walls—Beyond Wars.” This was a performance series which
featured fourteen Bay Area performances by local, national and interna-
tional Arab artists of all genres.
5. Aziza (2009) “The Beginning,” The Gilded Serpent, accessed January 5,
2010: http://www.gildedserpent.com/articles6/Azizacolumn1.htm.
6. Jamila Salimpour, accessed December 4, 2002. http://www.jamilasalim-
pour.com/01.htm.
7. Op. cit.
8. Op. cit.
9. Personal communication, Salimpour, 2002.
10. Op. cit.
11. Aziza (2009) “The Beginning,” The Gilded Serpent, accessed January 5
2010: http://www.gildedserpent.com/articles6/Azizacolumn1.htm.
12. During the 1970s and early 1980s, there began to evolve movement
vocabularies associated with specific teachers such as Morocco, Ibrahim
Farrah and Serena Wilson in New York, Dahlena in Chicago, Suraya Halal
in London and Beta and Horacio Cifuentes in Berlin. These developments
were accompanied by the impact on Egyptian dance of the movement
vocabulary and style of Mahmoud Reda’s company.
13. This is the site for the official site for the Society of Creative Anachronism:
http://www.sca.org/.
14. An account of the Khawals of Egypt can be found in Lane (1973).
15. John Compton (1999) Accessed December 27, 2010: http://www.home-
stead.com/masuda/Compton.html.
16. The description of John Compton’s performance is taken from a videotape
of his company titled Hahbi ‘Ru Desert Wanderers. It was filmed in 1995
at Studio E in Sebastopol, California.
17. John Compton. 1999. Accessed December 27, 2010. http://www.home-
stead.com/masuda/Compton.html.
18. American Tribal Style Belly Dance or ATS® is a registered trademark, as is
FatChanceBellyDance®, the dance company that Carolena Nericcio-
Bohlman founded.
19. FatChanceBelly Dance. Accessed November 15, 2007: http://www.fcbd.
com/.
20. India Alexis and Meaghan Madges (November 6, 2002) “A Dance of Her
Own,” Dance Magazine, pp. 52–53.
21. Carolena Nericcio, accessed February 1, 2000: http://members.aol.
com/_ht_a/Ghaziya/carolina.html.
22. FatChanceBellyDance. Accessed March 5, 2008. http://www.fcbd.com/
about/.
23. Quoted in: India Alexis and Meaghan Madges. (November 6, 2002) “A
Dance of Her Own”, Dance Magazine, pp. 52–53.
24. There are listed on the Fat Chance website over 240 dancers and studios
in North America, Europe, Latin America and Australia that trace their
lineage to ATS. Accessed March 26, 2013: http://fcbd.com/
sister-studios-listings/.
25. Two essays that discuss the local/global nature of tribal belly dance are:
Teresa Cutler-Boyles’ “Local Performance/Global Connection: American
Tribal and its Imagined Community,” and Brigid Kelly’s “‘I Mean, What
Is a Pakeha New Zealander’s National Dance? We Don’t Have One’: Belly
Dance and Transculturation in New Zealand,” both in Belly Dance Around
90 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
the World (McDonald and Sellers-Young 2013), pp. 106–120 and 138–151

respectively.
26. Tribal Con website. Accessed March 28, 2014: http://www.tribalcon.
com/portfolio-items/jeff-rees.
27. Paulette Rees-Denis, online course material incorporated into email of
March 2014.
28. Paulette Rees-Denis’ website (February 7, 2014), http://paulettereesde-
nis.com/about/.
29. Paulette Rees-Denis, email, December 9, 2015.
CHAPTER 5
Fusion, Dark Fusion and Raqs Gothique
In recent decades belly dance has increasingly been performed at the inter-
section of popular culture and identity politics. As it evolved in the 1960s
and 1970s, it was a space of resistance to, and related experimentation
with, the gender identity culturally assigned to women. The dance contin-
ued to evolve in the 1990s, under the umbrella term of tribal belly dance,
as a form that challenged the patriarchal heteronormative formation of
society by using the concept of the tribe as the performative construct in
which women and some men could redefine their identity. Female and
male dancers performed a complex improvised interplay of music, cos-
tume and movement which borrowed from the new age primitivism of
popular culture, in which performances were as much for the other mem-
bers of the tribe as they were for the non-tribal members of the audience.
Fusion, dark fusion, Gothic belly dance or raqs gothique and other
hybrid forms are spaces of resistance sometimes infused with nostalgia
in response to inclusiveness of the tribe of American Tribal Style. They
provide an example of the ongoing evolution of belly dance in popular
culture. Like their predecessors, cabaret and tribal, they exist because of
belly dance’s primary enactment as an improvisational form encourages
each new generation of dancers to explore the form’s embodiment. As
such, the dance is in constant tension with its history in global culture,
as a symbol of North Africa and the Middle East, and the strongly held
belief pervading Western culture that individuals create their own perfor-
mance history, which may be related to, but still distinct from the previous
generation.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_5
92 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
FUSION
Fusion is defined as the mixing of two or more things together to create a
union in the service of something new. Within the studio dance commu-
nity, the term fusion is often used to describe a student who takes ballet,
tap, modern and jazz classes in the same location. Or as in the case of the
New York Studio, Dance Fusion, it represents an opportunity to study
with a “premier group of New York dancers who have been key in the
evolution and innovation of Hip Hop and House Dance Culture.”1 An
argument could be made that belly dance as it has evolved in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries has been a series of fusions, from the melding of
the Oriental images into the popular imagination through evocations of
Little Egypt and dancers portraying Salome, the integration of Hollywood
images and staging in the cabarets of 1920s and 1930s Cairo, the blend-
ing of music from North Africa and the Middle East in the ethnic res-
taurants of major urban centres, and the Hollywood images of the dance
by such choreographers as Jack Cole in the 1950s and 1960s. Although
clearly uniting different approaches to costume and stage movement,
these fusions were following the cultural trend of the moment: from the
consumption of the Orient into the homes of the middle class in the early
decades of the twentieth century, through the Westernization of Cairo’s
entertainment industry, to the blending of music and movement from
North Africa and the Middle East that was part of the integration of immi-
grant communities, and the fusion of images and movement that is the
basis for American Tribal Style.
Fusion, as it exists today in the belly-dance community, as a mode of
composition, is a self-conscious response of the dance to its immediate
cultural environment as well as a response on the part of an increasing
number of dancers in the belly-dance community who have been trained
in a variety of different movement forms and who teach these forms along-
side belly dance in private dance studios. Laura Tempest Schmidt suggests
that there are two forms of fusion: those from other dance forms that are
layered onto the vocabulary of belly dance and those that are aestheti-
cally integrated into that vocabulary. She places Gothic belly dance and
Steampunk belly dance in the latter category.2 Ultimately, some dancers
perform the history of the dance and various forms of identity by embrac-
ing Egyptian, Turkish and American cabaret forms of belly dance along-
side American Tribal Style (ATS) and Gothic Belly Dance (GBD). Other
dancers have evolved an amalgamation of movement vocabularies that can
FUSION, DARK FUSION AND RAQS GOTHIQUE 93
include ballet, modern, hip-hop, Bollywood, classical Indian dance forms

and Hawaiian hula. In this regard, belly dance evolves its identity by incor-
porating various forms from traditional stage forms (ballet, modern, clas-
sical Indian) and popular culture (hip-hop, Bollywood). Thus, it works to
achieve stage legitimacy by expanding its repertoire to include an integra-
tion of the vocabulary from other dance forms.
Dancers who have wanted the legitimacy and status of arts council fund-
ing provides have followed one of two strategies. Some developed dance
companies that integrated belly dance with folk dance from North Africa
and the Middle East, as did New York based dance companies, Near East
Dance Company led by Ibrahim Farrah and the Casbah Dance Company
led by Morocco; or they created thematic evenings in which staged belly
dance was the primary vocabulary, as did Serena Wilson in New York and
Surya Hilal in London. In each case, they encouraged a context of impro-
visational fusion as dances from North Africa and the Middle East were
placed side by side with cabaret, folk or tribal forms on the stage.
This staged fusion was always in dialogue with past and current images
of North Africa and the Middle East and with ongoing global politics,
which in the twenty-first century became more complex with the rise of
radical Islam and political transformations and conflicts associated with
the Arab Spring and the wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
More recent performances have mixed a variety of styles and vocabularies
to conceive of belly dance as a theatrical form.3
DARK FUSION, GOTHIC SUBCULTURE AND RAQS GOTHIQUE

In the centre of a small cabaret stage at Israel’s 2nd Gothic Festival stands
a man in a pirate hat holding a translucent veil in front of his face and
body. Electronic music by Family Force Five ( “Zombie” from their album
III.V) comes on and he drops the veil, to reveal the following: his heav-
ily made-up face which appears to have one eye blackened as if he were
wearing a mask; his torso, covered by a large necklace; a split skirt which
reveals his legs, clad in mid-thigh leggings; and finger extensions on his
left hand. The audience screams in delight as he starts to move in a series
of hip locks, hip circles, body and arm undulations while the music pulses.
Without a smile on his face he reaches one arm out to the audience and
then returns to lower himself in a backbend that places him horizontal
to the floor. He finishes his short three-and-a-half-minute performance
with a wave to the audience as he leaves the stage. The performer is Israeli
94 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
dancer Eliran Edri Amar, who identifies himself as a tribal fusion dancer
and founder of the Monera Company and producer and art director of the
Jerusalem Belly Dance Spring Festival. In his complex overlay of elements
of Gothic costume and industrial music with the movement vocabulary of
belly dance, he is indicative of the intersection that exists between tribal
as an improvisational fusion form and its relationship to the dark fusion
and Gothic belly dance of urban popular culture, as well as of the ongoing
inclusion of male dancers.4
Eliran Edri Amar’s performance is emblematic of the Gothic subcul-
ture which emerged in England in the 1980s was inspired by such punk
bands as Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees (Brill 2008). The unique,
eerie electronic sound of these bands was combined with song lyrics which
“revolved around the dark recesses of the human soul: death, suffering and
destruction as well as unfulfilled romance and isolation” (Brill 2008: 3).
The historic backdrop to the aesthetics of the Goth was the history of
European romanticism and literature; and an atmosphere of mythology
and magic found in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), Edgar
Allan Poe (1809–1849), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), Charles Baudelaire
(1821–1867) and H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). This historical lineage
carried on into the latter half of the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first with the vampire novels of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer
and vampire films from Bela Lugosi’s 1931 performance as Dracula and
the Twilight films released from 2008 to 2012. Golding and Saren (2009)
describe the Goth subculture as:
Goth represents a microcosm of behaviors ranging from the spectacular in

terms of dress through sacred and mythical consumption to fragmented
sexualities. It represents a site of creativity with an eclectic range of individu-
als drawn to its various communities through a common appreciation of
myth, make-believe and freedom of expression. Within the subculture, there
is a play on resistance, melancholy and spirituality. It is a means of resisting
prevailing economic, religious and sexual regimes, and although the major-
ity of goths are sexually “straight,” it is a scene that tolerates homosexuality
and unconventional gender roles. (Golding and Saren 2009: 28)
Although sharing distinct preference for a theatricality that includes

pale make-up and black as a predominant colour, the Goth subculture
has distinct manifestations which predominate in the USA, England and
Germany and related forms that are developing in Asia (Brill 2008). The
Goth belly-dance resource page addresses the question of the intersection

between Goth and belly dance through this statement:
A common question is do you have to be Goth to perform Gothic Bellydance?

The short answer is no—BUT the dancer should have a strong understand-
ing of Gothic culture—just as one would study the culture behind any genre
of art. It may not be rooted in a country, but it definitely has all the qualities
of a cultural identity and truly can be studied in great detail through it's [sic]
literature, art, and music. To not understand the culture, or not even make
an attempt to do so, while claiming to perform GBD, is the equivalent of
mocking another person's creed or background. Gothic Belly Dance is not
about “playing dress-up” or ‘looking weird.’ It's about the expression of
your darker self, baring your soul in a theatrical dance performance.5
Performance researcher Tina Frühauf (2009) describes Gothic belly dance

or raqs gothique as primarily a style of performance developed by female
dancers in the 1990s, at the intersection of the Goth scene of England and
North America, with the deliberate goal of resisting “cultural colonialism
as embodied in belly dance, while still remaining rooted in it” (2009: 119).
She notes the vocabulary of the form is primarily from belly dance but the
fashion and make-up of the stage costumes, as well as the attitude of the
dancer are influenced by various aspects of Goth subculture. She argues that
the gestural style of the Gothic belly dancer created a new version of the
dance form, which places it directly in a subcultural group that both repli-
cates and disassociates itself from the framework of Orientalism associated
with cabaret and tribal forms of belly dance. As she phrases it, “The highly
individualized makeup and costuming of GBD exhibit a postmodern pas-
tiche of materials, designs, and colors, comprising a self-created Other that
has significantly transformed the Oriental Other. Not only does GBD give
belly dance a new name, it also gives it a new face” (Frühauf 2009: 125).
Within Frühauf’s thesis, it is not the general movement vocabulary
of the dance that primarily differentiates cabaret and tribal belly dancers
from Gothic belly dancers. It is the integration of this movement with
a Goth aesthetic that rejects the joyous playfulness of mainstream belly
dance and its related gender identity to embrace the dark, illusive and mys-
terious; a genre in which melancholy, angst and sometimes direct anger
are accepted expressions. Internationally acclaimed Gothic belly dancer
Tempest describes the movement vocabulary of the dance as engaging “a
trance-like feeling to the movements, a mysterious or passionate intensity
96 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
to facial expression and actions, integrating ritual accents and folkloric ele-
ments, evolving traditional belly dance movements to merge with moves
from the Gothic club scene, with an inherent sense of theatricality.”6
In this embrace of the dark and mysterious the GBD dancer is, accord-
ing to Tempest, “part actress, part vamp, part rebel, part sorceress, and
part priestess—and all focused on a known or perhaps unknown (occult)
intent.”7
Tempest argues many dancers are attracted to the Gothic subculture
because of its association with alternative neo-pagan spiritualities that chal-
lenge mainstream religions. This creates an imaginal space of the liminal
that resists mainstream notions and its ties to specific conceptions of gen-
der to allow for a transgressive space of individuality and a fluidity of gen-
der identification. Frühauf argues that this positioning of the raqs gothique
aesthetic is liberating to women because it emphasizes a distinct turn away
from the desire to please the male gaze (it is assumed in her argument that
the gaze is only male, and that darkness is automatically undesirable to the
male gaze); a move away from the bejewelled harem-girl aesthetic, and
towards an image of a still exotic, but not colonized other (2009: 136).
According to Frühauf Arabic nightclubs are places where the colonial con-
nections of belly dance get eternally rehearsed. Because Goth performers
stay away from the space of the Arabic nightclub (or perhaps are not well
received in those spaces), and more generally, because they reject belly
dance as an ethnic performance—then, Frühauf argues, the emergence of
Gothic belly dance constitutes the decolonization of belly dance.
Amy Wilkins (2004) and Melissa Dearey (2014) suggest that while
middle-class and in some cases middle-aged women seek out the Goth
community as a site of play in which to enact identities that resist what
they perceive as the cutesy femininity and artifice of the tease and related
seduction associated with cabaret belly dance. In the alternative spaces
of the Goth community the Gothic belly dancers, “dance, work, laugh
and play, often mischievously, with potent femininities that menace,
that threaten, unsettle, enchant, amuse, repel, and are sometimes even
‘creepy’” (Dearey 2014: 378). In the process, they “negotiate (inter)
subjective experiences of deviance, sexuality, transformation and change”
(2014: 379). However, as Frühauf explains, there are those in the belly-
dance community that are attracted to Gothic belly dance but only become
marginally involved:
GBD negotiates oppositional and antagonistic elements, and is conceived to

create an in-between identity in belly dance. GBD also attracts some curious
“ordinary” belly dancers who are drawn to Goth music, the dark, the occult,
and the mysterious—and to unusual clothing. These belly dancers do not
immerse themselves in Goth subculture; they merely live on its surface tem-
porarily. Despite the fact that these dancers are not convincingly Goth, Goth
belly dancers accept such outsiders as long as they treat the dance and the
culture it embodies respectfully. (2009: 122)
Dunja Brill points out in Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style (2008)
that this permission to challenge and transgress mainstream gender norms
is not limited to its female participants but is embedded in the core values
of enacting Goth for both women and men. These values incorporate a
general embrace of an ideology of genderlessness or androgyny as a sign
of equality that defies the easy binary of heterosexuality. This provides for
a diversity of gender identities that cross the spectrum from the hyper-
feminine, to the androgynous masculine, to the transgender. Brill refer-
ences media scholar Lisbet van Zoonen’s argument that the disciplinary
power of gender discourse is not fixed but is always in a state of contesta-
tion. This attitude creates a subcultural ethos in which participants engage
a variety of gender identities. In this regard the Goth subculture allows for
an exploration of gender identity that is at the margins of popular culture.
FUSION, DARK FUSION AND RAQS GOTHIQUE FESTIVALS

Historically, belly dance was positioned outside the artistic circles for clas-
sical, modern and ethnic dance that would provide arts council fund-
ing for staged productions. The result was, as Paul Monty (1986) points
out in his extensive work on belly dance, that dancers created day-long
or weekend-long workshop/festival formats that combined classes with
evening performances, most often taking place in an urban hotel. These
workshops and evening performances have evolved since the 1980s and
have often featured a variety of dances from North Africa and the Middle
East alongside cabaret and tribal forms of belly dance; or, more recently,
they have concentrated on the intersections of forms, such as Egyptian
and cabaret or tribal fusion and Gothic belly dance. Prominent festivals
associated with dark fusion and Gothic belly dance are GothlaUK, held in
Leicester, England, and Waking Persephone, held on both coasts of the
USA.
98 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
These dark fusion and Goth festivals are organized similarly to the many
belly-dance festivals that are held in cities around the world in East and
South East Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe and North and South America.8
Attended by both serious amateurs and some professional dancers, all of
whom embrace fusion, dark fusion and Gothic styles, the festivals are gen-
erally held over a weekend at a major urban centre.9 During the festival,
the event space is filled with dancers who stay in the hotels rooms, eat
in local cafes, and visit the festival marketplace, which features vendors sell-
ing CDs of Goth music styles, DVD performances of noted Goth dancers
(with such titles as Dark Fantasy, Revelations and Belly Dance for Beautiful
Freaks) and Goth-style costumes, make-up and other dance-related items.
When not shopping the dancers take dance classes during the day and
attend the evening performances, which showcase the workshop teachers
and provide an open dance stage for the conference attendees. The week-
end is an intense round of conversing, buying, selling, learning, teaching
and performing.
GothlaUK: Leicester, England

Held since 2007, GothlaUK is the result of an internet conversation on
tribe.net initiated by the release of a DVD which featured well-known
dancers such as Tempest. Five dancers—Bridie, Alexis Southall, Christine,
Akasha and Sue Hutton—make up the team that organizes the yearly
event. Leicester, England was chosen as the location as it has a large Goth
community which provides custom for Goth-supportive businesses such as
Zatheka. It is also centrally located in the UK and easy to reach from other
parts of the UK. The workshops and performances take place in a com-
bination of a theatre, dance studios and hotel spaces in the centre of the
city. As the GothlaUK website states, “Although style is important to any
dance form, ‘attitude’ is one of the main foundations of GBD. Finding
and maintaining that dark, ethereal presence on stage and communicating
it to the audience while belly dancing requires a loosening of fetters on the
imagination. This does not require you to be ‘strictly tribal’, or cabaret, or
Egyptian etc. In many ways, the elements can be added to whatever style
you choose to dance in.”10
The seventeen workshop teachers at the 2015 GothlaUK represented
the global diversity of the Gothic belly dance community and included
those whose primary focus was the dark fusion and Goth aesthetic as well
as those who represented fusion more generally, having adapted their
vocabulary to integrate their training in tribal, hip-hop, yoga, Bollywood,

martial arts and Gothic cabaret. Many of the workshops at the festival
featured issues common to all forms of dance such as the use of impro-
visation, moving through space, movement intention and relationship
to phrasing and rhythmical structures. Other teachers’ workshops have
a slant that is directly related to the Goth ethos. For example, Ida Mahin
was originally trained in ballet and has united this background with her
study of belly dance, classical Indian and other dance forms in the evolu-
tion of an approach that combines characterization and storytelling. Her
workshop “Temple of Doom” introduced mudras (hand gestures from
classical Indian dance) as a potential extension of an individual dancer’s
movement vocabulary. Morgana of Madrid, Spain brought together a
variety of elements from her background such as martial arts, modern
dance, hip-hop and funk as well as Egyptian and American Tribal Style to
teach several workshops, including “Enter the Animus” which took the
dancer on a journey through their past to create the now. She also taught
a workshop on the characters from Alice in Wonderland.
Other workshops incorporated movement from popular culture, such
as that by Fulya which used a combination of fusion belly dance, flamenco
and burlesque to teach the imagistic art of the Hollywood femme fatale,
with a particular focus on the alluring, seductive and magnetic power
of the image. Influenced by rock and metal music, Manchester dancers
Emma and Saskia, performing under the name of their company RockIt
Dance, taught a workshop named “Rockit Femme Metal” in which dancers
learned to use the heavy beat of Gothic music to release their Amazon war-
rior and build thighs of steel. Cis Heavside and Boomshanka, a group from
Sheffield, UK, focused on how to integrate the vocabulary of belly dance
with metal music by using the vehemence of such movement vocabulary
from the Gothic cabaret scene as boot-stomping, head banging and hair-
tossing in a workshop called “Putting the Boot In.” Gothic Belly Dance
festivals such as GothlaUK diverge from typical belly-dance festivals in that
they incorporate the Goth community through the local club scene.
A showcase performance features the workshop leaders in performances
that highlight what they taught in the workshop. For example, Ida Mahin,
who taught storytelling via classical Indian dance, performed a tribute to
Mother Nature and her dark side, which she refers to as Monster Nature.
It was performed in a bright yellow skirt with choli top and bare belly.
The narrative of the dance was in two parts. It began with Mahin moving
through a series of extended gestures and poses with a veil of a similar
100 B. SELLERS-YOUNG
colour to the skirt. Facing upstage she dropped the veil and began the
second half of the dance, which increasingly incorporated gestures from
a combination of ballet and classical Indian dance to convey the image
of Monster Nature.11 Morgana, whose workshops focused on ritualistic
past and fantasy, taught a choreographic piece in the workshops with the
theme of the sorceress that was performed as part of the showcase. Staged
as a set of interacting circles and lines the dancers moved in deliberate
sustained gestures of the arms and torso that at some points focused out-
ward toward the audience and at others inward to a rotating circle of
dancers. Ultimately, the showcase evening provided images of dark fusion
and Gothic belly dance through movement and music that ranged through
the vocabulary of belly dance, the martial arts, popular culture of break
dancing, and classical dance forms performed to diverse music from Raul
Ferrando to variations on folk tunes from Eastern Europe.
Waking Persephone: Seattle, Washington

Seattle is often associated with two international corporations, Starbucks
and Microsoft, but to those who live there it is also the “Emerald City,”
named for the evergreen forests and mountains that surround it, and the
harbours and lakes that reside within it. A port city, Seattle is located on
the Pacific Ocean with Lake Washington to the east at the mouth of the
Duwamish River, which empties into the city's chief harbour, Elliott Bay.
The Kitsap Peninsula and Olympic Mountains are to the west of Seattle,
and east beyond Lake Washington are Lake Sammamish and the Cascade
Range. Seattle is also a politically liberal city that embraces a variety of
lifestyles and an alternative music scene that includes a Goth private mem-
bership club, the Mercury.
Waking Persephone is an autumn festival in celebration of the Greek
queen of the underworld, Persephone, who was kidnapped by Hades while
playing in a meadow. Her mother Demeter longed for her return and
appealed to Zeus, who ruled that because Persephone had eaten six pome-
granate seeds while in the underworld she would divide the twelve months
between six months on earth and six in the underworld. Persephone thus
symbolizes the changing seasons as well as innocence lost and a life shared
between light and dark. The festival began in 2012 in Providence, Rhode
Island but moved to Seattle in 2014. Waking Persephone is produced by
Laura “Tempest” Zakroff, who describes the festival as a unique dance
event:
Waking Persephone is a different kind of dance event experience, with a core

focus on education and exploration, creating community while breaking
borders. While there are indeed performing opportunities, the main goal is
an intensive series of classes, lectures, and activities featuring both new and
established faces in the genres of dark, gothic, steampunk, experimental,
theatrical, and ritual dances. Over the course of the event, there is a ritual/
community gathering, two gala shows, live music performances, workshops,
master classes, panel discussions, vending, an after party ball, and more.12
Unlike its counterpart GothlaUK, the 2015 Waking Persephone festival

designated the workshops under three interrelated areas: Body and Spirit,
Technique and Style and Trade Secrets (Fig. 5.1).13
As the title suggests, the Body and Spirit workshops concentrated
on improving a dancer’s conscious awareness and the application of
this awareness to the creation of, or participation in rituals. The “body”
section was comprised of workshops which engaged Asian physical disci-
plines of yoga and qigong as well as those derived from somatic, alignment
and anatomical approaches to the body/mind. The descriptive vocabulary
Fig. 5.1 Tempest and husband Nathaniel Johnstone at the 2015 Waking
Persephone Saturday Night Gala Show. Photo by Carrie Meyer
of the workshop abstracts encouraged the participants to “become cen-

tered,” “increase awareness of self,” “let creativity bubble out,” “become
calm,” “explore alignment,” “build strength,” and “solidify your ener-
getic boundaries.” The “spirit” workshops brought a ritual form called the
Guedra from Morocco into conversation with ritual formats allied with
belly dance in general (Ritual E*motion, Evoke, Invoke ) or those tied
specifically to aspects of the Gothic community allied with paganism (the
Witch’s Cone of Power). The “Sacred Dance History and Experiential
Workshop” by Artemis, a member of the first generation of the belly-
dance community in the USA, provided a historical backdrop by stating
“Using ancient traditions, we can connect and reconnect with why we
dance.”14 Dancers who participated in the spectrum of body and spirit
expanded their self-awareness, which they could then apply to their par-
ticipation in new or ancient rituals.
The technique and style workshops varied from those focused on an
increased ability to work with music (e.g. “You've Got Rhythm! Improv
Games for Belly Dancers,” and “Playing Finger Cymbals with Modern
Music”) to opportunities for dancers to increase their movement vocabu-
lary (“Signature Moves and Combinations Creation,” “Life is a Cabaret:
Fosse-Influenced Bellydance!,” and “Pop, Lock, Freeze and Flow”).
There were also workshops that encouraged dancers to explore their alter-
egos as in a workshop by Bevin Victoria named “Vintage Vamp Noir” and
described in the following way: “It’s 1929. You just robbed a bank, stole
the Mona Lisa, set the Louvre on fire and shot a man. You’re wearing all
the diamonds your pretty little neck can hold and this is the choreogra-
phy you do in the holding cell to convince the feds not to give you the
death penalty. This is hot jazz belly dance fusion choreography for all
levels and it is full of sass! Don’t forget to rouge your lips beforehand.”15
Combining jazz and the image of the vamp, the workshop integrated the
contemporary stage dance with images of women from film from Theda
Bara, who starred in Cleopatra in 1917, to Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and
Clyde (1967).
The third category of workshops, Trade Secrets, was for those dancers
who have determined that they want to move from being professional
amateurs to someone who makes their living as a dancer. These covered
such basic knowledge as how to take a good photograph, shooting a video,
developing a marketing plan and creating a website.
As in other festivals, Waking Persephone includes a space where ven-
dors can sell costumes, music, jewellery, headdresses, make-up and other
items specific to the Gothic belly-dance community. It also has a set of

performances at the Gala event and the Underworld Ball. Unlike other
festivals, the performance events are not limited to be given by those
teaching workshops. Instead, anyone can apply to perform through fill-
ing out an application. As explained on the Waking Persephone website:
“Waking Persephone does not have the typical festival dancing found at
other events. We have opportunities to perform in our Gala Show, along-
side our teaching staff and at the Underworld Ball—and the performances
do NOT overlap our workshops/classes/other events.”16 Dancers who
will be performing are encouraged to consider using live music; in the past
bands have included the New York-based Euro-American folk-punk caba-
ret duo Frenchy and the Punk, Stoneburner, a solo project from Steven
Archer that combines tribal fusion electronic dance music with experimen-
tal sound and The Nathaniel Johnstone Band from Seattle, who integrate
a blend of “European, Middle Eastern, and South American music with
Jazz, Rock, Surf, Folk, Gothic, and Steampunk influences.”17
Framed within what has become a staple of belly-dance culture and
community—the festival—the dark fusion and Gothic belly-dance com-
munity articulates a vision of the dance that continues themes from the
1960s and 1970s, with a focus on self-awareness, transformation and
ancient goddess religions. The projected image of this discourse in dance,
costume and music is not the standard cabaret or tribal dancer. The dancer
and the dance, as Frühauf suggested, is informed by and crafted in popu-
lar culture from elements such as images from Gothic literature and film,
Gothic and Steampunk music, and a movement vocabulary that integrates
the movement style of belly dance with global forms from around the
world to create very individualized danced identities.
FUSION, GOTHIC BELLY DANCE, RAQS GOTHIQUE

AND THE GLOBAL STAGE
In its ongoing global transformation belly dance has moved further and
further away from a dance that is the visualization of the complex musical
ethos of North Africa and the Middle East. Although the derivative forms
of belly dance such as tribal and Gothic belly dance have expanded around
the globe, they have not become part of the dance context in its initial area
of historical origin. Instead, raqs sharqi in Egypt and Lebanon as well as ory-
antal dansoz in Turkey have participated in very specific internal dialogues
associated with the social/cultural dynamics and politics of their individual
countries. Examples of this include the impact on raqs sharqi of the

increased influence of Islam in Egypt and the purposeful art movement as
discussed in Chap. 2; and the impact of neoliberal gentrification of Istanbul
on oryantal dansoz in Turkey, discussed by Potuoğlu-Cook (2006, 2011).
Potuoğlu-Cook draws upon Pierre Bourdieu’s (1997) conception of
class and corporeal knowledge in a discussion of power and exoticism as
suggested by Marta Savigliano (1995). She explores the complex relation-
ship between belly dance as part of the tourist industry and as part of
cultural life in Turkish urban environments. The study suggests the dance
is a symbol of “chic” status among middle- and upper-class women in
Istanbul associated with neo-Ottomania and its position in Turkish poli-
tics. According to Potuoğlu-Cook, “before its gentrification, the pub-
lic performance of belly dance denoted lower-class status” (2006: 644).
However, Potuoğlu-Cook notes this position has changed, as “belly dance
itself has transformed from a participatory social form into a presentational
codified dance technique” (2006: 644) which is due in part to the legiti-
mization of the dance form as entertainment.
Potuoğlu-Cook argues that belly dance has come to signify “cultural
and economic proximity to cosmopolitan culture. It is a localized element
in a redeveloped, gentrified, and thus, socially and economically more
segregated Istanbul, in its aspirations for status as a global city” (2006:
644). Furthermore, she points out the political positioning of belly dance
within the framework of new Islamic style veiling, or tesettür, in which
the complete head and forehead are covered, a practice that is also related
to neo-Ottomania and contemporary Ottoman aesthetics; therefore belly
dance in Istanbul, in Potuoğlu-Cook’s analysis, is a site of neo-Ottomania
and is in cultural dialogue with tesettür, which is also a result of another
component of neo-Ottomania. As she phrases it: “Thus tesettür and belly
dance are fraternal twins—noble and nasty savage—of Islamic Turkey,
delineating the contours of morally and materially acceptable female pres-
ence in public space. Engendered by neoliberalism, both tesettür and belly
dance oscillate between abjection and sophistication” (Potuoğlu-Cook
2006: 649).
The situations in Egypt and Turkey are just two examples of the speci-
ficity of belly dance’s cultural meaning, as transnational discourse through
film, stage and media intersects with local social/cultural values regarding
the positioning of the body in performance. Ramy Aly (2015) and John
T. Karam (2010) provide examples of the role of the dance in immigrant
communities in London and Brazil. Anu Laukkanen (2010) considers
the ethical dilemmas for Finnish dancers who travel between Finland and

Egypt. Brigid Kelly (2013) describes the integration of American Tribal
Style with Maori forms of performance. Galina Khartulari (2014) explains
the relationship between belly dance and gender identity in Russia.
Yu-chi Chang notes that dance in Taiwan has evolved outside of input
from North Africa and the Middle East: “There are not many immigrants
from Arabia and the Middle East in Taiwan. Apart from foreign masters
who visit Taiwan for short-term workshops, no Middle Eastern teacher
has taught belly dance in Taiwan for a sustained amount of time. Most
Taiwanese learn the dance from Taiwanese instructors, and the lack of
native teachers possibly contributes to the success of ‘fusion’ or ‘hybrid’
belly dancing style” (2012: 22). This fusion of belly dance with other
forms from hip-hop to Bollywood has increasingly become part of the
performative identity of the global belly-dance community. This inclusive
approach to the incorporation of new vocabulary allows for an even more
expanded self-definition within the form. One such example is that of
Manca Pavli who is based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She leads a company of
dancers from across Europe, including Estonia, Slovenia, Italy, Sweden
and Croatia, in a company called the InFusion Project that unites cabaret
and tribal styles of belly dance.
Jane Desmond suggests that “while the notion of appropriation may
signal the transfer of source material from one group to another, it
doesn’t account for the changes in performance style and the ideologi-
cal meaning that accompany that transfer” (1997: 33). Throughout the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, belly dance has existed in a matrix
of contradictions. It has been a consistent site of resistance for culturally
specified gender identities for women and some men. At the same time,
it has participated in an eroticized global discourse as depicted in popular
media such as James Bond films or cruise ship and casino entertainment.18
Yet in its primarily solo form, individual performers negotiate their staged
presence through the contextual complexity of their locality influenced
by their community’s demographics, politics, social values, religious
beliefs and conceptions of gender. In performing their subjective iden-
tity, they are according to feminist theorist Angela McRobbie (2007)
following the path of individuation that has become part of the context
of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Supported by numerous
self-help groups (of which belly dance counts as one, for some of its
adherents) people are according to McRobbie now dis-embedded from
communities where gender roles were fixed. And, as the old structures
of social class fade away, and lose their grip in the context of late or sec-
ond modernity, individuals are increasingly called upon to invent their
own structures. They must do this internally and individualistically, so
that self-monitoring practices (the diary, the life plan, the career path-
way) replace reliance on set ways and structured pathways” (McRobbie
2007: 260). A role for amateur forms in popular culture including all
styles of belly dance is to provide a place for the evolution of the self-
identity that ultimately becomes a part of personal display on the stage
and in social media. If you are involved in the Goth community your
ever-present motto is: “Remember: Being goth/gothic does not mean
you're obsessed with death—it means you find beauty in even the most
dark and unusual of things.”19
NOTES
1. Dance Fusion New York, viewed 14 September 2015: http://www.dance-
fusionnyccrew.com/.
2. Laura Tempest Schmidt (2011) ‘Fundamentals of Fusion’, Gilded Serpent,
accessed November 19, 2015: http://www.gildedserpent.com/
cms/2011/04/17/tempest-fundamentals-of-fusion/#axzz1L5QKrnUU.
3. One example is the Theatrical Belly Dance Conference. Accessed January
19, 2005: http://theatricalbellydance.com/.
4. Eliran Edri Amar, performance, accessed November 1, 2015: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXVslLM_3S8.
5. The Gothic Belly Dance Resource. Accessed September 14, 2015: http://
gothicbellydance.com/defined.html.
6. Laura Tempest, email to author, November 27, 2015.
7. Op. cit.
8. A reference to the many different festivals can be found at the following
website, World Belly Dance. Accessed November 1, 2015: http://www.
worldbellydance.com/.
9. Although Gothic dancers such as Mayu in Tokyo teach and perform,
Gothic belly dance is not prevalent in Asia, but Tribal Belly Dance has
many adherents.
10. Op. cit.
11. Ida Mahin, “Mother Nature/Monster Nature,” GothlaUK 2015. Accessed
November 19, 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R80orsQeuxc.
12. Waking Persephone. Accessed November 1, 2015: http://www.waking-
persephone.com/.
13. Op. cit.
14. Op. cit.

15. Op. cit.
16. Op. cit.
17. Nathaniel Johnstone’s website. Accessed November 28, 2015: http://
nathanieljohnstone.com/.
18. The talent agency International Rising Stars recruits dancers from around
the world to appear at casinos and on cruise ships as well as festivals around
the globe. The female (and one male) dancers from around the globe are
not listed by name but by number as, for example, “Belly Dancer 1929,”
and clicking on their photo provides no name but additional information
about their performance history, photos and in some cases videos. Accessed
January 1, 2016: http://www.risingstars.com.ua/dancers/solo-dancers/
male-dancers/.
19. GothlaUK. Accessed December 12, 2015:http://www.gothla.co.uk/
about.php.
CHAPTER 6
Belly Dance, Gender and Identity
In his seminal essay on male dancers, Ramsay Burt (2009) writes “Who is
performing and what kind of affective, political, and intellectual relation-
ship is created between dancer and spectator are crucial to ideas about
gender that are brought into play during a performance” (2009: 153).
This chapter reflects on Burt’s statement with a consideration of the posi-
tion of gender in belly dance. The initial focus is the historical role of
male dancers in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly concentrat-
ing on Egypt. The focus then shifts to the male dancers in contemporary
Egypt, North America and China. Finally, the chapter considers the role
of belly dance and gender more broadly in terms of identity formation in
popular culture.
Twenty-first-century stories in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal
and placed by the Associated Press note the performances of male dancers
in such captions as “Making a Comeback: Male Belly Dancers in Egypt,”1
“Male Belly Dancers Make a Comeback in Istanbul,”2 “For Chinese Man,
A Gut Instinct For Belly Dancing,”3 and “It's Hard Out Here for a Male
Belly Dancer.”4 The articles document male dancers on stages across the
globe who in their performances challenge the belief that only a woman’s
body is anatomically built for belly dance. Their performing presence as men
performing might challenge Orientalism’s image of the dance as a highly
charged site of female eroticism. Yet, the dance is so firmly entrenched in
Orientalism’s image that the male performers are often considered to be
gay men performing the feminine, regardless of whether or not this is true.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_6
The myth of the female belly dancer was encouraged by European

writers, such as Edward Lane, who focused their attention on the danc-
ers of the Ottoman Empire that included female dancers the Ghawâzi,̑
(Egypt) and Cengi (Turkey) rather than the male dancers known as
Khawal in Egypt or Köçek and Zenne in Turkey.5 In Lane’s 1836 work
An Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, he writes
primarily about female dancers. When he writes about male dancers he
describes them as impersonating women, “They are Muslims, and they are
natives of Egypt. As they personate women, their dances are exactly of the
same description as those of the Ghawâzi;̑ and are, in like manner, accom-
panied by the sounds of castanets: but as to prevent their being thought to
be really females, their dress is suited to their unnatural profession; being
partly male, and partly female” (Lane 1973: 381–382).
Coming from a European aesthetic in which the image of dance was
dominated by the female dancers of ballet who displayed an ability to dex-
terously move their legs and feet, Lane and other writers simply could not
imagine a joyous celebration of the male and female body in which the torso
and pelvis of the body was integrated into the movement vocabulary. In
fact, Lane and others interpreted the solo dances of the Middle East using
the gender positioning of European culture and performance—according
to which, as Susan Foster points out, “the female dancer affirmed and
even enhanced the assumptions concerning feminine docility and attrac-
tiveness, but at the same time, she announced a kind of sexual availabil-
ity” (1998: 220). European male dancers were in contrast viewed as very
effeminate; in his performance, the dancer “contravened the requirements
made on him to legislate, uphold, and defend social order” (Foster 1998:
220) by limiting his public display to his intellectual supremacy rather than
physical dexterity. Nor did Lane, Gustave Flaubert (1961, 1972, 1980),
George Curtis (2014), and other Europeans who wrote about the dancers
consider the public/private dimension of Egyptian life in which entertain-
ment was in general separated between male and female spheres of influ-
ence (Fig. 6.1).
In Dancing Fear and Desire (2004), Stavros Stavrou Karayanni cri-
tiques the position reflected in the writings of Flaubert and Curtis, in their
response to famed Egyptian dancer Kuchuk Hamem. He observes, “The
European gaze translated the experience of Eastern dance into a medium
of aberrance and illicitness. In the Western imaginary, the dancer’s body
loomed threateningly and enticing, mapping in motion always an interme-
diate zone, a threshold signifying liminality and indeterminacy, qualities
often used to represent the East as a whole. Dancing women were a threat
BELLY DANCE, GENDER AND IDENTITY 111
Fig. 6.1 Nineteenth-

century Turkish male
dancer
but at least their dancing body could be subjected to symbolic Western

domination through sexual intercourse” (Karayanni 2004: 96).
As noted by Said (1978), Shay (2014) and Karayanni (2004), European
and American artists and writers projected an erotic subjectivity onto
these solo dancers’ expressive gestures which, as discussed by Edward
Said, they then disseminated in paintings, novels, journals and postcards.
Furthermore, these artists’ depictions of dancers as primarily women
defined the dance’s movement vocabulary of feet, hips, torso and arms in
the popular Western imagination as feminine. In due course, this image
of the Orient was embedded in Western visual and performing arts of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dance scholar Noha Roushdy (2009)
has noted that it became so ingrained that the elite in countries such as
Egypt disavowed the roots of their expressive culture. This disavowal
included a denial of the legitimacy of solo dance as an expressive form and,
specifically, of the dance’s history of male performers and performance.
One of the roots of this disavowal of male dancers as discussed by

Anthony Shay (2014) was the desire to rid the dance of any allusion to
homosexuality. Shay references Gustave Flaubert’s description of male
dancers, including famed Egyptian dancer Hasan el-Balbeissi. Shay notes
Flaubert is particularly intrigued by the relationship between the dancers
and their manager: “From time to time, during the dance, the impresa-
rio, or pimp, who brought them plays around them kissing them on the
belly, the arse, and the small of the back, and making obscene remarks in
an effort to put additional spice into a thing that is already quite clear in
itself. It is too beautiful to be exciting” (Flaubert quoted in Shay 2014:
201). As Shay points out the British colonizers used such performances as
an indication of the debauchery of society and therefore legitimized the
need for their mission to civilize Egypt.
MALE DANCERS IN CAIRO

Despite periodic suppression by the government in Cairo and religious
officials, male performers have in the last ten years wiggled into popularity
at cafes, clubs and celebrations (Williams 2010). Cassandra Lorius (1996a,
b) and Karin van Nieuwkerk (1995), in their writings on the professional
female dancers of Egypt, point out the dancer’s negotiation of social/
cultural expectations and her role as public performer. The professional
female dancer is a fixture of Egyptian films, restaurant entertainment and
weddings; at the latter, her sensual and joyful presence at the reception
blesses and brings good luck to the newly married couple. Yet dancers
are expected to perform in a style that communicates joyful sensuality
devoid of obvious suggestiveness. Each female dancer devises an individ-
ual approach to this contradictory dilemma. The same is true of Egypt’s
male dancers, for whom the obstacle is not modesty but the need to com-
municate masculinity in a movement vocabulary that since the nineteenth
century has been identified on stage and in films as feminine, both in
Egypt and around the globe.
Tito Seif is one dancer who has managed to successfully negotiate this
culturally loaded position. Born after the death of Nasser (1918–1970),
in 1971, Seif’s personal project is distinct in its projection of a masculine
vocabulary. His goal is not to create a vision of an Egyptian national iden-
tity but to become an established performer of raqs sharqi, which he began
studying at the age of fourteen. A technically proficient, innovative and
charismatic performer, he performs in either a floor-length gallabiyah, the
common village dress of men in Egypt, with a scarf tied around his hips,
or in black pants and sequined T-shirt with a simple hip belt. He states: “I
don’t believe that a male belly dancer should imitate a woman. We should
not forget we are men, and dance in a manly way” (Williams 2010). With
a smile of delight on his face, Seif performs a combination of gestures that
combine hips, torso, arms, hands and head in intricate and very precise
interpretations of the complex Arabic music. His performance does not
contain the playful coquetry of Egypt’s female performers. Instead, his
body commands attention through its precise and direct integration of
hips in relationship to torso and arms and both in relationship to space;
all gestures are a revelation of the music. Periodically, he gestures to the
audience as if to say “I am having a great time; are you equally enjoying
yourselves?”
Seif challenges Egyptian folkloric companies definitions of masculinity
which engage gestures reminiscent of Western concert dance. For exam-
ple, the raks al assaya or cane dance is historically a performance of a
masculine fighting skill. Female dancers of Egypt use the cane, but they
do so coquettishly to highlight a movement of the hips or torso. Male
folk-dance performers in groups such as the Reda Troupe combine leaps
and jumps with a spacial adjustment of the cane. In contrast, Seif performs
with four canes, which he manoeuvres in a complex vocabulary of the rela-
tionship between canes, canes and the body, and canes in the space around
him as he twirls, throws, catches and balances them on various parts of his
body and in various states of connection to each other and to his hips and
torso. Thus, like the female dancers of Egypt, he combines the urban flair
of the contemporary dance and its associated music with an acknowledge-
ment of rural Egypt. Unlike the female dancers, his rendition of the cane
dance demonstrates his masculine control while still maintaining hip and
torso gestures and a general air of playfulness, a key component of his
onstage personality. Seif’s performance demonstrates the potential for a
male performer in Egypt to oppose current prejudices against male danc-
ers through a carefully composed interplay of socially accepted images.
Part of his success is that he resists Hollywood costume styles in favour of
village or contemporary urban dress and by extension resists one the trap-
pings of Western Orientalism that define the dance as feminine.
Although Tito Seif has become famous in Cairo, where his picture is
plastered on McDonald’s cups, his company, Tito’s Oriental Dance Show,
is linked to the resort of Sharm El Sheikh, a community at the end of the
Sinai Peninsula on the Red Sea that is populated with numerous Europeans
on vacation. And although a popular performer in Egypt, he has, as a result

of the exposure to this tourist audience, become even more popular as a
teacher and performer on the international belly-dance circuit. Currently,
he travels throughout the world performing and teaching his style of per-
formance, primarily to women, but also to some men. His performances
and his workshops are often recorded and broadcast on YouTube. Seif’s
distinct performing life demonstrates the changing position of the male
dancer in Egypt. His career intersects with the evolution and develop-
ment of the global belly-dance community, which combines a veneration
of Egypt as the site of the dance’s origin with enhanced communication
through the internet and the increasing inclusion of male dancers.
HERITAGE AND THE MALE DANCER IN THE DIASPORA

While nightclubs and restaurants featuring belly dancing in New York and
elsewhere have, in their advertising, focused on the female performers,
male dancers such as Ibrahim Farrah (1939–1998) have also performed in
such venues. Born of a Lebanese family, Farrah grew up dancing at fam-
ily celebrations. In a series of articles for the magazine he edited, titled
Arabesque, he explained how he learned the dance through imitation of
his male relatives. He divides these culturally somatic memories into three
categories. The first he refers to as “expressionist,” in reference to the
dancer’s deep connection to gravity and space: “They would stamp their
feet on the ground, and one could feel the entire weight of their body and
strength push through the earth. With a slow shift of weight and a wave
of arms, their energy would suddenly transfer from weighing on the earth
to floating in air, giving the appearance of someone about to take flight”
(Farrah 1993: 15–17). He described a second style as “conservative” in its
reliance on simplicity and its constrained movement vocabulary, and saw it
as similar to a feminine style in its limited use of space. He wrote:
Step patterns in the men’s dance had a touch of heaviness as opposed to

the light footedness of the women’s style. While women shook their shoul-
ders softly and loosely, the men’s shoulder motions were those with rhyth-
mic sharpness and more defined accents. Their shoulders would pulse up
and down or thrust forward and be released in a honed fashion. Although
extremely graceful, they used few decorative arm patterns, moving their arms
rhythmically from pose to pose (and gesture to gesture) with a musicality
and poetry that can only be described as extraordinary. (Farrah 1993: 15–17)
The third category he defined as “freer”: “Men moved with more free-
dom of motion. Their dances were decorated with more turning patterns,
a quick shuffling of feet that could send them scurrying across the room
and through space, unconstrained: Shoulder shakes were loose: arms were
more decorative; a little hip action; and an emotion of sheer exuberance”
(1993: 15–17). Ibrahim’s dance style evolved as an integration of these
masculine styles that united the movement vocabulary of hips, torso, head
and arms with a clear definition of the strength of a male body’s command
of space delineated by a use of feet, hips, shoulders that was outlined by
the position of the arms.
Ibrahim Farrah rarely performed as a soloist in urban environments
on the east coast of the USA. Instead, he performed with female danc-
ers such as Emar Gemal, Marta Zorina and Phaedra. These perfor-
mances were a Middle Eastern version of the nightclub performances
of ballroom dance of the pre-World War II era, in which the role of
the male performer was to highlight the fluidity and beauty of the
female dancer. Regardless, Farrah’s personal dance style was based on
the movement of the male dancers he had observed as a child. He
notes, “The simple truth is, my gait, emotions, body posture, general
ambience actually came from the men I was raised with and surrounded
by as a child” (1991: 10). He found the term male belly dancer “popu-
lar, and peculiar, an appellation fostered in the West by the public and
through the media” (1992/3: 8). It was a term he felt did not repre-
sent the dance he performed and which only created “confusion and
perhaps misplaced curiosity” (1992/3: 10). Instead he preferred to be
thought of as an oriental dancer who, in his performances, represented
an integration of the movement vocabulary of his grandfather, uncles
and cousins. Of course, in performing professionally, he was stepping
outside the social norms of his contemporaries in the Lebanese com-
munity, in which men only performed in private family celebrations.
Yet, his performances disputed the popular culture’s designation of
Oriental dance as feminine. The synthesized unity of Farrah’s hybrid
identity provided an alternative image of the Arab male body for the
ethnic community as well as for the dominant culture.
Ibrahim Farrah discovered Yousry Sharif when Sharif came to New York
as part of Egyptian dancer Nagua Fouad’s company. Impressed with his
abilities, Farrah invited Sharif to join his Near East Dance Group. Born in
Cairo, Yousry Sharif became entranced with dance by watching Egyptian
films. As a young adult, he studied with the Reda Troupe and became
a principal dancer for this company as well as performing with other

Egyptian folkloric groups. In the 1980s, he relocated permanently from
Egypt to New York and eventually opened a dance studio.
Sharif’s position in the dance community is that of a transnational per-
former/teacher whose vision of Egyptian traditional and popular dance is
considered authentic by the belly-dance community because of his native
heritage. His teaching integrates the folkloric style of Mahmoud Reda
with the movement vocabulary of Egypt’s popular contemporary dancers.
This vocabulary represents a century of cross-fertilization between Eastern
and Western influences that began in 1926 with Bedia Masabni’s Opera
Casino and continued throughout the century with borrowed images of
Western film musicals as well as the 1950s impact of Russian choreogra-
phers during the era of Gamal Abdul Nasser. In Sharif’s style of Egyptian
oriental dance, the body is lengthened in gestures of the arms and legs
which extend away from the body while gestures of the torso and hips
enact the interplay of musical rhythm and phrasing.
Sharif teaches the dance’s movement by providing a framework for
the student through an integration of movement and music. In a mir-
rored studio, he presents an eight-beat phrase which he repeatedly illus-
trates with limited verbal explanation. After a period of repetition, Sharif
observes the students to determine the degree to which they have learned
the eight-beat phrase. If necessary, he repeats the pattern. If not, he adds
to the original phrase another eight-beat phrase. Using their optical con-
sciousness, the students carefully imitate his gestures and their muscula-
ture is slowly transformed into a representation of the rhythm and gestures
of Sharif’s body.
Whereas Ibrahim Farrar taught extensively in New York with peri-
odic workshops elsewhere, Sharif is constantly travelling. In any month,
he may teach three to four weekend workshops in such diverse locations
as Italy, Japan, Canada, Missouri and Finland. In an interview in May
of 2000, Sharif shared his commitment to dance which echoes Farrah’s
desire to “elevate the dance” from its popular image, that of commercial
belly dance, and educate people in the real raqs sharqi as opposed to the
Western versions of Egyptian dance that go by names such as fusion, tribal
and so on. Sharif believes this goal can be accomplished because audiences
want to see real things. Sharif participates in this dialogue through an
annual festival he helps to sponsor in Egypt, titled Cairo Khan, which
brings together male and female dancers from around the globe.6
BELLY DANCE MAN FROM AMERICA TO CANADA TO CAIRO

Farrah’s and Sharif’s performances were distinctly different from those
of the other male dancers of 1970s and beyond, such as Bert Balladine
(1927–2009) of the USA and Viraj Wanigasekera of Canada. Early in his
life, Bert Balladine studied modern dance and ballet in Paris and Berlin
and Spanish dance in Madrid. He discovered belly dance while traveling
as a performer in Lebanon and Egypt. Incorporating costumes based on
images of the orient, he and his female partner would perform a duet that
combined the movement vocabulary of North Africa and the Middle East
with European-style staging derived from ballet. Like his counterparts in
the ballet pas de deux, Balladine’s role in the duet was to activate the dis-
play of the female dancer’s body. Photographs of performances show him
with a dancer on his knee or holding a prop, referred to as a veil, about to
be draped over the body of the dancer who is prone on the floor. In this
style of performance, they were enacting the fantasy relationship between
the masculine and feminine that was derived from films of Hollywood
star Valentino. Balladine functioned as a contemporary Valentino who was
both the admirer and the protector of the dancer.
Viraj Wanigasekera grew up in a Sri Lankan community in Edmonton,
Canada, in which dance was a part of daily life. While an undergradu-
ate in biochemistry at the University of Alberta, he started taking belly-
dance classes as an antidote to academic pressures. He discovered he felt
at one with the movement vocabulary and, following graduation, gave up
biochemistry to pursue the dance full-time. This decision has not been
without its challenges. As one of the few male belly dancers in Canada, he
has found the assumption that he is performing a feminine vocabulary dif-
ficult to overcome. As he phrases it: “I knew men could do it and can be
successful at it, but when you don't have any male peers or male mentors
to talk to, study from or learn from, it's a very lonely road. You think: Do
men even do this, can men do this, should men do this, can you do justice
to an art form in which you will not be accepted in your own culture?”7
Wanigasekera is enamoured with the form, a fact he illustrates by stat-
ing, “Dance is the worst girlfriend I ever had. When she walks in the
room, that’s all I can focus on. Nothing else matters” (Lillebuen 2005:
n.p.). Ultimately, his perseverance has paid off, and he has been increas-
ingly asked to perform and teach in venues in Edmonton and elsewhere in
Canada. Wanigasekera has also used his athletic background as a sprinter,
brown belt in karate, kick-boxer and tae kwon do practitioner to create
a workout that he describes as a “belly dance form of Tai Bo” (Lillebuen

2005: n.p.). The belly dance aerobic workout takes the participant (he
does not distinguish between men’s and women’s movements) through
a set of highly choreographed physical gestures of the torso in relation-
ship to the legs and arms, which integrate core strength with flexibil-
ity as well as impacting on the dancer’s cardiovascular capability. Titled
“Viraj's Occidental/Oriental Belly Dance Fitness Program” and held at
a local YMCA, the class has developed a following among students at the
University of Alberta and the general public.
In 2009, Panacea Entertainment filmmaker Sameer Singh followed
Wanigasekera on a trip to a belly-dance festival and competition in San
Francisco and finally to the global place of pilgrimage for dancers, the
Ahlan Wa Sahalan Festival in Cairo, to create the documentary film Belly
Dance Man: From Canada to Cairo.8 The film discusses both the chal-
lenge of being a male belly dancer and Wanigasekera’s desire to be an
expressive artist who does not rely on the commercialization of himself
as a male dancer. In San Francisco, the film shows him as the only male
dancer participating in the city’s 34th annual Belly Dancer of the Year pag-
eant, a contest that does not make a distinction between male and female
performers. For the contest, Viraj performs in a black vest and pants deco-
rated with gold beads that move with each physical gesture. Playing the
finger cymbals in counterpoint to the music’s underlying rhythm, his ges-
tures are clear and concise, his persona poised and centered. Following the
performance, he critiques himself for a lack of feeling and connection with
the audience. This connection to the moment of movement, both within
himself and with the audience, is a phenomenon he often refers to when
describing how he negotiates each moment, in the liminoid frame of the
stage, as an intricate interplay between himself, the expressive quality of
the dance’s vocabulary and the audience’s expectation, interpretation and
reception of his performance—that is to say, his masculinity and its recep-
tion by the audience. As each stage and audience is distinct, each perfor-
mance is itself a discursive moment betwixt and between Viraj’s personal
conception of masculinity, the movement vocabulary, media images and
the normative structure of the global belly-dance community.
At the international 2009 Ahlan Wa Sahalan Festival in Cairo, the film
records Wanigasekera’s presence as a student at the numerous classes and as
a performer. Prior to his performance, the announcer informs the audience
that just as there are male ballet dancers, there are also male belly dancers.
Despite this statement of acceptance, sensing the difference in the audience,

Wanigasekera did not wear the costume he wore in San Francisco; instead,
he wore a white shirt with a tie loose around his neck and black pants
with a white hip scarf. As he later acknowledged, he felt that his costume
style clearly identified him as a male for this audience. The international
dance audience at the Cairo conference was receptive to a male dancer; but
the response, as documented in the film, to the concept of a male dancer
from anonymous people on the street or from Egyptian belly dancers,
such as Dina, was negative. Despite this, the former co-director of Egypt’s
national folk company Mo Geddawi is quoted in the film suggesting that
the presence of male belly dancers is becoming more accepted.
While Wanigasekera used the same movement vocabulary and impro-
visational style in performances in San Francisco and Cairo, it is note-
worthy that he did change the costume in recognition of the distinctive
difference in audience expectations. The San Francisco audience con-
sisted primarily of US belly dancers in a city noted for its advocacy of
diverse life styles. Cairo is a city divided between its elite classes who have
internalized an Orientalist worldview from the former colonial powers
and thus embarrassment surrounding traditional Egyptian performance
styles, and an increasingly Islamist politics which would outlaw all dance
and dancers. Wanigasekera’s performance in San Francisco was a reflec-
tion of the 1970s belly dance craze in the USA, which was associated with
women redefining the sensuality of their bodies. On this stage, his per-
formance was part of the move towards increased equality between men
and women, a movement that draws from various discourses from specific
human rights to a more generalized revision of the roles of men and
women in society. His performance in Cairo, in contrast, was as a mem-
ber of the international belly-dance community for which Cairo, through
its historic association with the dance, is a legitimizing pilgrimage site.
Thus, the stakes for the two performances were very different. The San
Francisco audience would determine whether or not he was the belly
dancer of the year. The audience in Cairo would determine his stylistic
legitimacy as a male belly dancer. Wanigasekera’s Cairo strategy was to
make certain that the attention would be put on the quality of the move-
ment and not on a style of costume by performing in what was essentially
a variation of masculine streetwear. An astute performer, Wanigasekera
read the social context of each audience and incorporated the appropriate
masculine style of performance for each.
INTERNATIONAL PERFORMERS: CHINA AND ELSEWHERE

Belly dancing has become the new hip thing in twenty-first century China.9
An initial advocate for belly dance in China was singer Wen Kexin, who
learned to belly dance when she went to Egypt in 1999 to record a music
video. She returned to establish Beijing’s first belly-dancing club and
school. Today she has sixty-three licensed belly-dancing schools around
China serving 100,000 students. She suggests there are three kinds of
belly-dance students:
There are quite a lot who come to learn to be belly dancing teachers and
open their own schools because belly dancing is hot right now. Secondly,
we have students who want to be belly dancing stars. They don’t necessarily
want to dance in bars or Arab restaurants, rather they want to join a dance
troupe and perform in theatres and stadiums, which is popular in China.
Many would like to be in my dance troupe or in another troupe called the
China Belly Dancing Superstars. And then, finally, we have many students
who dance to keep fit. For them it’s a hobby.10
Wen Kexin has plans to expand to eight other cities and has sponsored a
major Egyptian festival that would bring the biggest global stars in belly
dance to China.
Although the majority of those taking classes in China are women, there
are several male dancers who have made reputations for themselves in the
country’s quickly changing belly-dance scene. One of the best known in
China and elsewhere is Guo Wei, who was born in the northern industrial
city of Handan. Guo Wei’s parents divorced when he was young and his
life became one of wandering from one job to the next. By chance, he
ended up in Cairo, Egypt in 2004 and was introduced to belly dance.
With a professional history as a gym coach in Beijing, he was fascinated
by the intricate movement of the form and ended up taking lessons from
a male teacher. As he noted in an interview, “I had wanted to study with
a woman, because I thought women made better belly dancers. But men
are more careful teachers.”11
The response by the Chinese public to Guo Wei has been mixed. As
Anthony Kuhn of National Public Radio noted in 2009, “A generation
ago, his performances would have been banned as ‘spiritual pollution’ or
‘bourgeois decadence’.”12 Guo Wei observes, “At first, some folks were
simply attracted by the novelty of something they had never seen before.
Others, as soon as they heard that I was a male dancer, had no interest
in watching. They just weren't able to accept it.”13 Despite the reticence
of some members of the public, Guo Wei has established a belly-dancing
studio. One of his students Hu Linga states “I found him on the Internet,
and at first I thought it was a bit odd. But then I saw him dance. He was
just so natural—more feminine than a woman, and very attractive. There
was nothing more to consider, so I just came here.”14 Guo Wei has also
become a popular teacher on the international belly-dance festival circuit.
Another Chinese male dancer who is challenging the social bias is Yan
Chenbin, who grew up in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, an
area known for its singing and dancing. He was introduced to belly dance
via media images and at a party imitated the dance style for friends. Their
delighted response and his utter enjoyment of the movement vocabulary
caused him to leave his job in real estate and despite opposition from his
parents, who were Chinese intellectuals, start studying the dance form.15
Currently, Yan Chenbin teaches dance at several gyms and is often an
award-winning contestant in Chinese belly-dance contests. When he was
confronted by hosts on China Central television regarding choosing a
career so many identified as feminine, Yan Chenbin replied, “I don’t think
that art has international boundaries, or boundaries between men and
women. Take the role of Dan in Peking Opera for example, in which a
man performs the female character.”16 In pursuing what for him is a cho-
reographic dream, Yan Chinbin is in the process of exploring methods of
combining the vocabulary of belly dance with elements of Chinese dance.
A festival and competition sponsored by Belly Dance China in 2013
titled “Dance for Unity” incorporated male and female dancers from
Argentina, Russia, the USA, Australia, South Africa, Korea and elsewhere
in its teaching staff and in its competition. According to Belly Dance
China’s mission statement:
Dance is individualism at its finest. Its meaning is unique to us all. Its pur-
pose is profound to the dancer. It is the ultimate form of liberation from the
shackles of conformity. A dancer is never freer than when he/she dances and
their body flows with the music. Their soul and body united in its pursuit of
oneself. At BDC our mission is simple to provide the dancers with the best
platform to enrich their love of dance and unite the cultures of the world
through the universal language of dance.17
The winner of the 2013 professional festival competition was Chinese male
dancer Wang Ji, who performed a tribal fusion piece. Dressed in pants that
stopped below the knee, fringed hip belt, fringed shoulder sleeve over his
left arm, and appearing with belly tattoos and a Mohawk haircut, Wang
Ji performed a highly muscular dance that moved from sustained gestures
to held angular poses that highlighted his deeply muscular stomach and
upper torso, finally incorporating a set of rapid hip shimmies. His gaze was
not on the audience but on some inner aspect of his being and as audience
members we were permitted to watch, but not invited to do so.
Other global festivals feature workshops by male “global stars,” which
currently include such dancers as Horatio Cifuentes and Zaidel (Berlin),
Tarik Sultan (New York), Ozgen (London), Jamil (Sydney), Aleksey
Parashchuk (Russia), Oscar Flores (Argentina), Prince Kayammer and
Malek (Greece), Serkan (Turkey/Belgium), Ekrem (France) and Dansci
Ahmet (Turkey). Like Tito Sheif, Yousry Sharif, Viraj Wanigasekera and
Guo Wei, they each perform and teach a unique combination of move-
ments which, they have determined, define their masculine presence.
DANCING GENDER
Jennifer Fisher and Anthony Shay in their volume Why Men Dance:
Choreographing Masculinities across Borders (2009) write, “In many soci-
eties of the past, there have been male performers who contravened or
ignored the well-defined borders between masculine and feminine that
seem so well patrolled in many parts of the west today. In both medieval
Japan and the Islamic Iranian world, for example, male dancers deliber-
ately created an air of sexual ambiguity and often became ‘stars’ because
of it” (2009: 13).18 The examples provided by Fisher and Shay suggest
that, as noted previously regarding the development of tribal belly dance,
the stage is a subjunctive space where alternative realities can be pro-
jected and in which the cultural signifiers of gendered identity are in a
dialogue between performer and audience. The male dancers discussed
in this chapter access the community in which they are performing and
revise their performances to either reflect public perceptions or challenge
them. Seif is an example of a performer who reworks the vocabulary of
raqs sharqi in Egypt to provide an opportunity for male dancers. Despite
the differences in where they learned the dance Farrah and Balladine both
perform as a partner to a female dancer. Wanigasekera adjusts his per-
formance depending on whether he is in San Francisco or Cairo. Guo
Wei, Yen Chinbin and Wang Ji explore their onstage personalities within
the framework of the history of the dan or male-as-female characters
of Chinese opera. All perform against the transnational backdrop of

increased exploration of gender that includes lesbians, bisexuals, trans-
gender and transsexual performers.
Within the community of belly dancers, there are dancers who decide
to transit from women to men and perform as such. One such example is
Draconis from Dallas, Texas.19 Draconis Von Trapp started dance classes in
elementary school and was a cheerleader in high school. Although living a
life as a girl, he felt the “first inklings of gender variance when I was in third
grade and cut all my hair off. I distinctly remember younger kids asking, as
unapologetically and bluntly as young kids are apt to, whether I was a boy
or a girl.”20 He discovered belly dance in 2008 when he was sixteen and
as he phrases it “confused not only myself, but all those with whom I had
confided in about my gender issues, by joining a weekly belly dancing class
at the Isis Studio of Performing Arts in Bedford, Texas. My interest in belly
dance, in their eyes, conflicted with my gender variance.”21 Regardless, he
enjoyed the class and got along well with the other students so he con-
tinued to study the form. At the same time, he felt odd performing as a
woman when he did not feel like one. A year after starting these classes,
he started hormone replacement therapy and shared his decision with his
belly-dance friends. His decision was supported by the belly-dance com-
munity and he continued to perform, winning a local amateur competition
in 2011. Since then he has had surgery to create a masculine chest. These
physical changes have helped him come to an acceptance of his androgy-
nous identity and have influenced the evolution of his style of the form
that he refers to as eclectic fusion: a combination of ballet, modern, West
African, samba and Balinese dance styles. Draconis’ goal is to provide stu-
dents with an experience that does not fit easily into a fusion belly-dance
category. Instead, he challenges students to explore eclectic movement pat-
terns to create unique blends of their personal dance vocabulary and in the
process keep everything fresh and evolving. In this approach, he is mirror-
ing his life experience of ongoing transformation and change.
An ocean away, Noor Talbi, is walking the red carpet of the Moroccan
film festival; she is a famous local belly dancer who is a sought-after celeb-
rity asset at high-profile arts events.22 A native of Casablanca, she grew
up in Hay Mohammedi, one of the city’s many sprawling slums. Despite
the fact that her long legs were ideal for running and she excelled as a
track star she preferred dancing. Associated Press reporter Paul Schemm
observes, “In this conservative Muslim country where homosexuality is
illegal and punishable by up to three years in jail, a transgender woman
like Noor is not only accepted but is a celebrity. Her ability to seemingly
transcend the restrictions of her culture speaks both to her star power
and to a certain kind of tolerance toward sexual minorities in this North
African nation—and even in the wider Middle East.”23 Personally, Noor
compares her position as a film star, performer at elite weddings and media
personality to that of movie icons Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth.
Director of the news site www.goud.ma, Ahmed Najim, gives Noor credit
for strengthening the position of Morocco’s entertainment industry on
the world stage, “She introduced Moroccans to the costumes, music and
choreography (of belly dancing) and made it famous.”24
In another aspect of the discussion of dancing and gender, Anthony
Shay in Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic
Dance Forms (2008) quotes an anonymous lesbian dancer acknowledging
the impact of cabaret belly dance on her life: “The heterosexual codes that
were inherent in belly dancing helped me to become more socially adept
and thus more consciously accepting of my lesbian identity. Learning the
codes of socially accepted femininity I was transformed. Instead of feeling
confused and concerned because my social behaviour was clumsy because
I was confused … I could now read the situation and use the appropri-
ate gender display. Thus, the feminine codes became something to either
embrace or transgress depending upon the community. The more I under-
stood the codes the more I understood myself and of course the under-
standing paved the way to the freedom to be me” (2008: 49). Thus, Shay
provides an example of how a member of the lesbian community living
in a heterosexual society could use the gesture language of cabaret belly
dance to physically adjust to and transform her personal identity.
Milestone and Meyer in Gender and Popular Culture (2011) state that
“there is no one, unitary masculinity; rather there are several masculinities
in contemporary Western culture” (2011: 113). This statement also applies
to femininity. As noted in previous chapters, the increased emphasis on the
individual in the postmodern era implies that each dancer will negotiate a
unique performance of gender. In 2009 a male amateur transgender belly
dancer from Iraq helped to launch an initiative for gay, lesbian, bisexual
and transgender Arabs in Stockholm.25 In 2012 and 2013, the New York
Times described two new club scenes for Arab gays and lesbians that fea-
tured Middle Eastern music and dancers. The spaces were created as an
initiative of the Gay and Lesbian Arab Society of New York City to provide
a space where people from the Arab community could come and dance
freely.26
Contrary to popular myths about belly dance that focus on it as a dance

of women, the form’s history of exotic and erotic imagery embodied in
a vocabulary that engages the complexity of the neurological system pro-
vides a gateway to the performance of a diversity of gender identities. The
dancer breathes into the center of the pelvis, and explores the internal
pathways through circles that originate in the pelvis and travel up the spine
to discover the possibility of undulations and the release of a shimmy. This
internal energy is expressed outward through gestures of the arms and the
expressiveness of the eyes. The vocabulary is a reclaiming of the concept
of “the erotic” and the related mind-body connection advocated by Audre
Lorde (1982). As she suggests, conceptually, the erotic can be framed
within the cultural production of a normative sexuality but when the body
is dancing within the erotic spaces of self an individual identity emerges.
As Alsultany and Shobat (2013) point out, in the fluidity of popular cul-
ture there is a complex imagistic interplay of Orientalism and gender in
the performances of Beyoncé, Shakira, U2 and Jay-Z. This transnational
discourse, particularly in digital spaces (Osborn 2016), provides the limin-
oid context for the revelation of desire, as defined by Elizabeth Grosz as a
“yearning for what is lost, absent, or impossible” (1994: 222). Belly dance
as a form embedded in popular culture satisfies this yearning by providing
a stage space for the enactment of personal gender journeys.
The engagement of belly dance to pursue individual desires creates a
dilemma for members of the Arab community, as Ramy Aly describes in his
manuscript Becoming an Arab in London (2015). For example, respond-
ing to the inclusion of a belly dancer dressed in the standard two-piece
costume at a King’s College London Arabic and Iranian Society event, he
writes “The belly dancer is one of the principal symbols of Arabic culture
in London; she is the trope for erotic Oriental or Arab sexuality and it is
used unabashedly for cultural and commercial capital at parties and restau-
rants around the city” (Aly 2015: 147). He observes cabaret belly dance is
a popular and prolific image that is antithetical to the dance as performed
at family gatherings and wedding-related henna parties and therefore not
representative of the everyday life of Arabs in London. Dance at family
gatherings is spontaneous, improvisational and carried out in street wear
in which the only addition is a scarf placed around the hips of the dancer.
Aly’s comments underscore the consequences of Orientalism’s ongoing
dialogue with belly dance as a form: on the one hand its images provide a
site for self-exploration and new identity formations, and yet belly dance’s
public display in commercial venues is in conflict with the traditional
orientation of the form. Aly advocates for a delineation of two separate

dance forms: there is the solo improvisational form of family and com-
munity, which may have different names depending upon the region in
North Africa or the Middle East where it is practised, and there is the
popular culture form called belly dance. They may share the same general
history but they have very different meanings in their individual perfor-
mative contexts. Instead of popular culture subsuming any gesture of the
torso and hips as belly dance, there would then be an acknowledgement of
the individual popular forms of raqs sharqi, raqs misri and baladi of Egypt,
the cifte telli of Greece, majlesi of Iran, the cifte cifte and karsi-karsija of
Serbia and Macedonia, the oryantal dansoz of Turkey and the raqs alfar-
rah or dance of happiness of Lebanon. Thus the synthesizing role of popu-
lar culture and Orientalism’s imagery, for which the phrase belly dance is
an example, would be replaced with an acknowledgement that the local
still exists in a globalized world.
NOTES
1. Daniel Williams (January 2, 2008) “Making a Comeback: Male Belly
Dancers in Egypt,” New York Times. Accessed December 12, 2015:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/world/africa/02iht-let-
ter.1.8984242.html.
2. Joe Parkinson and Ayla Albayrak (March 10, 2015) “Male Belly Dancers
Make a Comeback in Istanbul,” Wall Street Journal. Accessed December
12, 2015: http://www.wsj.com/articles/male-belly-dancers-make-a-come
back-in-istanbul-1425949434.
3. Anthony Kuhn (October 13, 2009) “For Chinese Man, A Gut Instinct For
Belly Dancing,” Asia. Accessed December 12, 2015: http://www.npr.
org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113315240.
4. Mark Hay (April 29, 2014) “It’s Hard Out Here for a Male Belly Dancer,
VICE. Accessed December 12, 2015: http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/
its-hard-out-here-for-a-male-belly-dancer.
5. For an extensive discussion of male performers in North Africa and the
Middle East see, Anthony Shay (2014) The Dangerous Lives of Public
Performers: Dancing, Sex and Entertainment in the Islamic World. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
6. See the following advertisement for the 2016 Cairo Khan, for which
Yousry Sharif is a sponsor. Accessed December 15, 2015: http://www.
nour-orientaldance.com/en/events/news_number_154/.
7. Jamie Hall (March 26, 2011) “The Loneliness of a Male Belly Dancer,”
Calgary Herald. Accessed December 12, 2015:http://www2.canada.
com/calgar yherald/news/entertainment/stor y.html?id=dd53af1f-
f15b-4dd5-95b4-7b8dc8f14b50.
8. For further information on the film Belly Dance Man: From Canada to
Cairo (2009, dir. Sameer Singh), see the IMDB entry. Accessed January 2,
2011: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1518681/.
9. Mark Godfrey (November 29, 2013) “How Belly Dancing In China Has
Become The Hip New Thing,” World Crunch. Accessed February 3, 2014:
http://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/how-belly-dancing-in-
china-has-become-the-hip-new-thing/belly-dancing-wen-kexin-schools-
egypt/c3s14166/.
10. Op. cit.
11. Op. cit.
12. Anthony Kuhn Ibid.
13. Op. cit.
14. Op. cit.
15. Wu Jin (September 24, 2013) “Male Belly Dancer Challenges Social Bias,”
China.org.CN. Accessed December 12, 2015. http://www.china.org.cn/
arts/2013-09/24/content_30115289.htm.
16. Op. cit.
17. Belly Dance China website. Accessed January 2, 2016: http://belly-
dancechina.com/about.
18. This gender fluidity on the stage is not limited to male performers: there
are examples elsewhere, for example Japan. Besides the all-male Kabuki,
there are the all-female Takarakuza, who perform highly theatrical musicals
in which all the male parts are played by women. See, Jennifer Robertson
(1998) Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan.
California: University of California Press.
19. Draconis von Trapp (August 10, 2012) “Trans man Draconis von Trapp
Explains Transitioning … to Belly Dancing,” DallasVoice.com. Accessed
December 10, 2015: http://www.dallasvoice.com/belly-10123297.html.
20. Op. cit.
21. Op. cit.
22. Paul Schemm, “Morocco’s Transgender Dancer Courts Acceptance,”
Yahoo News. Accessed December 12, 2015, http://news.yahoo.com/
moroccos-transgender-dancer-courts-acceptance-073411390.html.
23. Op. cit.
24. Op. cit.
25. “Transgender Belly Dancer Helps Launch Arab Gay Initiative” (August
21, 2009) The Local. Accessed August 10, 2015: http://www.thelocal.
se/20090821/21608.
26. Michael T. Luongo (May 18, 2012) “For Arab Lesbians, a Place to Dance
Freely,” New York Times. Accessed August 10, 2015: http://www.nytimes.
com/2012/05/20/fashion/for-arab-lesbians-a-place-to-dance-freely.
html and Chadwick Moore (January 13, 2011) “For Gay Arabs, a Place to
Dance, and Break Down Walls,” New York Times. Accessed August 10,
2015: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/for-gay-arabs-
a-place-to-dance-and-break-down-walls/.
CHAPTER 7
Belly Dance and the Stage: Nationality,

Ethnicity, Identity
Benedict Anderson, speaking specifically of the development of the nation

state and corresponding feelings of nationalism, argues that the nation is
an imagined community: “I propose the following definition of the nation:
it is an imagined political community––and imagined as both inherently
limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them,
or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their com-
munion” (2006: 5). Anderson suggests in his definition of nation that it is
a horizontal comradeship that unites various ethnic groups under the gov-
ernmental organization of a state. The ethnic groups to which he refers
have been considered a site of the complex weaving of identity markers
shared by a group, markers that can include ancestry, homeland, language
and/or dialect; and these are supported by such symbolic representations
as food, music, dress, poetry, literature and dance. Throughout the twen-
tieth century, nations have established national dance companies to create
a horizontal identity of diverse ethnic communities (Shay 2002). For those
countries associated with the Soviet Bloc the model was the Moiseyev
Dance Company, which had been established in 1936 by ballet-trained
Igor Moiseyev at the request of the Russian government. Members of the
diasporic communities of these nations looked to these companies as a
means of continuing their identity within their new country.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_7
At the same time that diasporic folk dance companies such as the
Iranian-focused Avaz of Los Angeles were establishing themselves as the
representation of a nation, belly dance-affiliated companies were forming
that aimed to present belly dance in conjunction with the folk dances
of North Africa and the Middle East. Anahid Sofian and Morocco of
New York City established their respective companies Anahid Sofian Dance
Company and Casbah Dance Experience, Cassandra Shore of Minneapolis
created the Jawaahir Middle Eastern Dance Company and Adam Basma
of Los Angeles established the Adam Basma Music and Dance Company.
Other similar companies were set up in cities and towns across the globe.
Although they were started by dancers from the belly-dance community,
these companies focused on dance forms from throughout North Africa
and the Middle East as an extension of a growing interest in folk dance in
the West. These companies developed as an attempt on the part of immi-
grant communities to maintain their cultural roots and expressive iden-
tity through dance for those who felt rootless in the politics of the Cold
War (Shay 2002). This chapter discusses the intersection of this local/
global discourse through the production history of three dance compa-
nies: the Reda Troupe of Cairo, Egypt; the Arabesque Dance Company
and Orchestra of Toronto, Canada; and the global touring company
Bellydance Superstars.1
THE REDA TROUPE

The founder of the Reda Troupe, Mahmoud Reda, was born on March
18, 1930 in Cairo, Egypt into an upper-middle-class family. Early in his
life, Reda established himself as an athlete, first in swimming and later in
gymnastics, winning a gold medal for free exercises in the Pan Arab Sports
Championship in 1950 and competing in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.
However, for Mahmoud and his brother Ali, dance was a passion, in par-
ticular as shown in the films of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. As Mahmoud
Reda puts it:
I used to see the same movie, maybe 30 times. Every single night I went,
even when I had exams, I’d take my book and sit in the lounge of the Metro
Cinema, for example, and study during the first part—not the movie but
the cartoons and the news—but once I heard the movie start, I’d close my
book and go. If I learned something, I’d try it on the street at night, in the
dark street, like this. I’d try before I could forget. So, Fred Astaire and Gene
Kelly were my inspiration (Reda 1968: 1).
BELLY DANCE AND THE STAGE: NATIONALITY, ETHNICITY, IDENTITY 131
Following graduation from Cairo University in 1954, Mahmoud joined

the Argentine dance company Alaria and toured with them for a year. This
gave him an opportunity to study ballet when he was not on stage and also
gave him an insider’s view of a professional dance company. This was an
unusual step for an Egyptian man, as dance for men was considered a rec-
reational part of ritual and family occasions, but not an anticipated career
choice, in particular not for someone from an upper-middle-class family
with a degree in commerce. Regardless, Reda’s dancing imagination had
been enlivened by his time with the Argentine company and he returned
to Egypt in 1955 with the desire to create an Egyptian dance company.
Mahmoud Reda’s career, as a dancer, choreographer and company
founder, evolved at the intersection of family and the political context of
Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president from 1956 to 1970. Nasser’s politi-
cal era featured a coming of age of the integration of Egypt with the Soviet
bloc and a period of ascendancy for middle-class educated Egyptians whose
children studied at English-style private schools and public universities,
watched American movies and participated in the growing international
sports community; and in the bacground of all this, of the classical voice of
the revered singer Umm Kulthūm’s monthly radio broadcasts and songs
of love, loss and longing could always be heard. As Seibert suggests in her
analysis of the positioning of the history of the Reda Troupe, there was at
this point a debate in Egypt on Egyptian nationhood, which was “charac-
terized by tension between Eastern and Western identifications. Western-
ness offered models for success and advancement necessary to achieve the
parity with Europe desired by the middle and upper classes. Yet the legacy
of colonialism and the devaluing of Eastern identity led to Islamic pan-
Arab identification in the wake of decolonization” (2002: 55). As founder
of the Reda Troupe, Mahmoud Reda would negotiate a choreographic
style that would negotiate a middle ground between these tensions.
In 1959 Reda founded the troupe, the first folk dance company in
Egypt, ; it consisted of only fifteen members, all dancers. Aided by the
support of his brother Ali Reda and the family of dancer Farida Fahmy,
Reda devised a vocabulary and pedagogical approach that gave structure
and form to the teaching of Egyptian dance and brought the regional
dance forms of Egypt to the proscenium stage. Prior to the Reda Troupe,
Egypt was host to many professional dance companies from Europe and
elsewhere, but did not have one of its own.2
The movements used in Reda’s choreography combined his personal
background in gymnastics and ballet with borrowings from the musical
theatre vocabulary of Hollywood films and his personal research, conducted

in 1965–1967, into Egypt’s village dances. In his book Choreographic
Politics (2002) Anthony Shay suggests two primary influences on Reda’s
hybrid movement vocabulary. The first was the impact of colonialism on
the psyche of the Egyptian elite and the second was the role of Russia, spe-
cifically the tours of the Moiseyev Dance Company. In order to appeal to
the Egyptian upper class and therefore contribute to the process of nation-
building under Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mahmoud Reda’s gestural language
needed to resist the Orientalist discourse of the West while at the same
time living comfortably within the political identity of the Soviet bloc and
pan-Arab identity. And yet, it still needed in its hybrid structure to be
recognizably Egyptian and as such appeal nostalgically to the popular con-
ception, acquired from Egyptian films, of baladi or village life. Thus, his
goal was not to recreate the traditional dances but to integrate the villages’
movement vocabulary in a project that would gesture towards an Egyptian
national identity. Farida Fahmy, a former principal dancer with the com-
pany, who was lauded throughout Egypt for her graceful rendition of the
baladi style vocabulary, describes Reda’s method:
In Egypt, prior to this method, professional dancers such as belly danc-

ers and their rural counterparts, the Ghawâzı̑, learned through copying the
movements that they were being shown by their teachers or other dancers.
In his teaching method, Mahmoud Reda segmented, codified and all the
possible variations were extracted, then developed into warm up exercises
and various routines. Popular movements and folk dance steps were col-
lected, studied and developed into exercises that were practiced every day.
Not only were the dancers improving their dance skills, but the logical prog-
ress of the sequence of exercises and the order by which the classes were
formed brought about a discipline that helped further the professionalism
that all dancers need. (Fahmy 1987: 10)
In keeping with the gender dichotomies of Egyptian society, the physi-

cal style of the Reda vocabulary is separated by gender. Men spin, leap,
jump, hop, lunge and pose, often in relationship to the women on the
stage. Women swirl, sway and subtly move their hips or gently move
their torsos. Men and women appear individually, as groups of either
men or women, and in intricate spatial organizations of men and women.
Women’s presentation is happy, quietly flirtatious and demure. Men are
openly friendly, bold and vigorous, and project themselves into space.
What women and men do not do is dance together with the same physical
partnering one finds in the films of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, in which
the man physically manipulates the body of the female dancer. Instead, the
graceful continuous fluid movement through space, which was the hall-
mark of either Astaire or Kelly, is performed separately, with distinctively
different movement vocabularies for men and women.
Like other national ensembles from Eastern Europe, the Reda
Troupe features moments when men and women are in separate lines, but
often this is replaced by pairs of women or pairs of men, or pairs of a man
and a woman. In male/female pairings, the man often poses with his gaze
apparently on the woman, as she demurely smiles and twists or shifts her
hips in happy rhythm to the underlying drumbeat. One such example can
be seen in an early filmed performance of a village dance. In the begin-
ning segment, Mahmoud Reda leaps in the air as he turns to the right; he
then drops to his knees, quickly switches balance on his knees, and begins
to clap as Farida Fahmy comes over the rise of the hill using an inner and
outer arm gesture to swish her floor-length skirt. Facing Reda, Fahmy
sways from side to side side and turns in a circle while Reda stands, hops
back, does a quick “side, touch, side” on either side, hops with one leg
back and the opposite leg forward and lands on one knee, looking up at
Fahmy as she continues dancing and he claps.
In other choreographies, there are variations of this theme. A man
lunges to the side of a woman and bends deeply on one knee while she
dances. He might circle her with a hopping or leaping step as she dances in
the centre. In this respect, the spatial organization of Reda’s choreography
is reminiscent of the appropriate social dancing between related relatives at
social gatherings. As such, it mimics the social positioning and responsibil-
ity of both men and women. A woman is at the centre of the home and a
man is both the observer, and by the barrier of his body, her protector. The
family is therefore the center of honour and woman its physical manifesta-
tion. This physical representation of men and women is the opposite of
the Orientalist fantasy of the seductive female and overly libidinous male.
Mahmoud Reda’s popularity as a choreographer can be attributed to
the fact that he captured on stage fundamental images and social rela-
tionships of Egyptian society based on family and community, and placed
them within the conversational context of the larger global network of
the Soviet Era. The set of relationships that was depicted onstage mir-
rored the organization of the company backstage. The Reda Troupe oper-
ated as a family, with Farida Fahmy’s parents Hassan and May Fahmy
acting as chaperones to protect the reputations of the young women

dancers. Mahmoud’s brother Ali brought his extensive experience and
entertainment-world connections and his wife, Melda, was a dance/artist
with the company. Mahmoud’s wife, Nadeeda, also Farida Fahmy’s sister,
used her art training to design costumes, while her mother May was the
wardrobe mistress. The image of the Reda Troupe as a family company
in which many marriages actually took place among company members
gained it popularity with the Egyptian press.
The combination of the choreographic style and the organization of
the company allowed Mahmoud Reda to project an image of Egypt in
the group’s concerts that moved across the class divide between Western-
educated elites and the working class of Cairo, and between urban and
rural populations. This representation of Egypt in performances all over
the world during a time of pan-Arab unity was a counter discourse to
depictions in Hollywood films and other representations by Western art-
ists. Thus, the Reda Troupe’s impact was not limited to nation-building in
Egypt, but also encompassed re-visioning of the Arab community.
During the mid-1970s, the Western belly-dance community, primar-
ily American, started travelling to Egypt in search of its historic roots.
By the 1990s, this pilgrimage to Egypt was being made by dancers from
all over the world. In the process, they discovered the Reda Troupe and
other companies such as the National Folk Troupe started in 1961 by
Russian-trained Boris Ramazin, a former member of the Moiseyev Dance
Company (Shay 2002: 155). Dancers such as New York’s Morocco made
recordings of both companies and shared them at international dance
workshops. Ultimately, dancers gravitated towards study with Mahmoud
Reda, as the lightness and fluidity of his movement vocabulary for women
dancers more closely matched their image of femininity; an image familiar
from Hollywood musicals. In the spring of 2001, Mahmoud Reda was
honoured by the global Middle Eastern Dance Community at a confer-
ence in Southern California for his role in bringing the folkloric dances
of Egypt to the world stage. The event represented a convergence of two
distinct dance communities that were increasingly influencing the global
belly-dance community—Egyptian professional dancers and Egypt’s
folkloric companies. In 2005, dancers from Spain, Finland, France, Italy
and Switzerland gathered in tribute in an evening of eighteen of Reda’s
choreographies in a programme titled “Homage to Mahmoud Reda: A
Life for Dancing.”
In response to this increasing popularity Mahmoud Reda began tour-

ing the globe, travelling to New York, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco,
London, Berlin, Moscow, Hong Kong and elsewhere, teaching the Reda
movement vocabulary to eager fans. As the Reda Troupe continued into
the 1990s and beyond, members of the company, such as Youry Sharif of
New York, have relocated and are teaching a version of Reda’s style. Other
former members of the company such as Aida Nour and Raqia Hassan are
located in Cairo and teach at events held within the city for foreign danc-
ers as well as workshops in other parts of the world. In these workshops,
the phrases taught feature arms that glide gracefully through space, and
support turns which evolve into an intricate hip lift, a twisting of the hip
or an undulation of the body. In the workshop’s Reda’s masculine style
is limited to raqs al assaya, the cane dance, which is taught equally to men
and women. The specific gender dichotomy of the Reda Troupe is, in the
global marketplace, replaced by an equality of gesture. Moved from its cul-
tural origin, the language of the Reda style has moved across gender defi-
nitions and has promoted a repositioning of that language among dancers
outside of Egypt whilst yet keeping Egypt at the centre of the discourse.
THE ARABESQUE DANCE COMPANY AND ORCHESTRA

The home of the Arabesque Dance Company and Orchestra is Toronto,
Ontario, the seat of government for the province of Ontario. Historically,
the population of Toronto primarily consisted of men and women of
British heritage; however, this British dominance has changed with the
influx of immigration in the twentieth century. It is currently a diverse
urban environment with over 5.5 million people in the greater Toronto
area. Only 50% of Toronto’s population have European roots; the rest
trace their lineage to Asia, Africa and Latin America. At 1.1%, the Arab
community is a relatively small percentage of the total population.3 There
are numerous dance companies in Toronto, including those such as the
National Ballet and the Toronto Dance Theatre, which trace their aes-
thetic lineage to Western stage dance, and fifty other dance companies that
integrate Western staging with South and East Asian, African and Middle
Eastern dance. Arabesque is included in the latter group.4
The artistic director and choreographer for Arabesque, Yasmina Ramzy,
grew up in Rosedale, a section of Toronto noted for its middle- and upper-
class families. One of the major influences on her upbringing was Tibetan
meditation, her guide in it, Lama Jampa Rabjampa Rinpoche, and the
Orgyan Osal Cho Dzong Temple he founded in the middle of the forest
of eastern Ontario. In her late teens she spent several years living with the
monks and nuns of the monastery and she still spends part of each day in
meditation and visits the temple on a regular basis. It was Lama Jampa
Rabjampa Rinpoche who advised her in 1980 to learn to belly dance and
never stop as it would play an important role in reviving women’s spirituality.
Ramzy was still a novice belly dancer when she was invited by Lebanese-
Canadian singer Joseph Salama to become part of his act in Amman,
Jordan. She agreed to take the contract if she could bring her mother with
her, and the hotel agreed. This initial contract led to years of perform-
ing in a variety of venues throughout Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.
Beyond the opportunity of seeing and learning from the dancers in Egypt
and elsewhere, there was for her the joy of being immersed in the music,
whether she was listening to it on the radio or performing with a live
orchestra. From this experience, she learned the depth of the relation-
ship that existed between the musicians and the dancer and by extension
between them and the audience. Consequently, her consistent advice to
dancers studying belly dance is that they spend two years of listening to the
music with specific reference to great Egyptian artists such as Abdel Halim
Hafiz, Farid Al-Atrash, Mohamed Abdel Wahab and Umm Kulthūm.
Yasmina Ramzy was also impressed at the inclusive dance environment
that was part of Middle Eastern family events and celebrations. On many
occasions she would be invited to a home for dinner, following which
women would gather separately from the men to play drums and dance.
What was striking to her was that women of all ages were dancing.
I was always in awe of how the five-year-old girl, the pregnant mom and
the eighty-five-year-old grandma would each shake her hips and strut her
stuff with the same glint in her eyes and the same chin held high. They all
had a sweet but knowing smile, looked down at their hip and chest move-
ments admiring their own body and then held their chins high proud to be
a woman. Each embodied confidence, becoming a queen in her own right
as she danced. This confidence had nothing to do with fleeting, superficial
beauty. The only thing I could find that these women based their pride
on was the fact that they were the proud owners of a miraculous woman’s
body.5
While travelling and performing in Egypt and elsewhere, she often thought
of the women she knew in Toronto who would not be comfortable danc-
ing or moving with the same sense of female pride and wished they were
there to share the experience with her.
On her return to Toronto, Ramzy became involved in Toronto’s dance
community. Her experience travelling and working in the Middle East
had given her a multicultural perspective that she was determined to
bring to teaching and creating dances. As she has noted, “I am familiar
with and teach fourteen different styles of Middle Eastern dance, three
of which are under the category of belly dance and the other eleven are
folkloric or spiritual trance dances, such as the Zar Exorcism ritual or the
Whirling Dervish. Each style has a character, a musical style and a realm
of movement. Within each realm, there are limitless ways of expression.”6
In the mid-1990s she produced a festival that brought together dance and
music groups that represented the diversity of Toronto. Following the
festival’s success, the local producing group Harbourfront approached her
about the process she had used to organize it. This was her first foray into
an expanded relationship with the dance community across the greater
Toronto area, which has since 1997 included her involvement as a mem-
ber of the Board of Directors for Dance Ontario. Ramzy also began to
play an increased role in the global belly-dance community through teach-
ing workshops in major cities, bringing dancers from Egypt to Toronto,
taking dancers on tours to Egypt and organizing four international belly-
dance conferences which brought together dancers and academics from
around the world.
With the ongoing expansion of Arabesque as a studio and dance com-
pany, Ramzy created relationships with Toronto-based Arab musicians in
order to provide opportunities for students to experience the relation-
ship between dancer and musicians that she had while performing in the
Middle East. This was achieved through informal improvisational eve-
nings of dance and music and more formal staged choreography. Her goal
for the choreographed pieces was to create a unique experience for the
audience that would shift its members’ relationships to each other in a
multicultural city. As she phrases it:
I am always striving to open the hearts of audiences with powerful emo-

tion. The kind of emotion that reminds us of the miracle that the universe
exists and that we are blessed with the pleasure of enjoying its experience.
There is something profound in the multitude of subtle layers and weaving
interconnections of Arabic dance, music and poetry that I feel is a key to this
experience in that it forges new paths into areas of one’s mind and emotions
they have not yet discovered.7
Her choreographic inspiration was a combination of the music, dance and

culture of the Middle East. However, the style and form of the choreogra-
phy was influenced by two modern choreographers, Czechoslovakian Jiri
Kylian and Canadian Robert Desrosiers.
Desrosiers has been a particular influence. Ramzy described working
with him as euphoric. Despite the fact that they do not engage the same
movement vocabulary, they do share the same visual attitude towards
movement: “I knew many, many years ago that Robert and I used diamet-
rically opposed ways of moving but we both expressed essentially the same
message. When we met in person, we found we had too much in com-
mon. Working with him is euphoric. He is such a fountain of creativity. We
found it was impossible for him to choreograph on my dancers because
they cannot move like him, but when he describes a feeling or vision,
I can translate it to our movement.”8 Consistently curious about the
potential of different choreographic approaches, Ramzy also incorporates
diverse members of the Toronto dance community in the choreographic
courses. A recent course attended by dancers from across North America
included such Toronto choreographers as Desrosiers, Ofilio Sinbadhino,
Jeff Dimitriou, Sashar Zarif and Keiko Kitano from the modern dance,
hip-hop and ethnic dance communities.
Since 1996, Ramzy has also choreographed and produced evening-
length themed shows. Her primary vision for these productions is “to cre-
ate dance and music work that embodies contemporary and often Western
sensibilities steeped in ancient Arabian tradition. The purpose is to pro-
mote awareness of and further the artistry of Middle Eastern dance and
music arts while often exploring their connection to spirituality and emo-
tional healing.”9 In the increasing complexity of the politics of the Middle
East, she also wants to offer a different framework for contemplating this
region of the world.
One of her earliest pieces was the The Descent of Ishtar (2003) which
was dedicated to Lama Jampa Rabjampa Rinpoche, and acknowledged his
profound impact on her life in the programme, with a dedication followed
by: “Who taught me the profound meaning of the Seven Veils and the
search for truth. Who also guided me every step of the way and at whose
request this choreography was created.”10 With music composed by noted
Canadian theatre composer Richard Feren, The Descent of Ishtar enacts
the myth of Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar’s visit to the underworld. In

Ramzy’s version of this myth the dancer travels through the seven levels of
the underworld, which are depicted as releasing aspects of the self at each
level, enabling one to discover a deeper level of conscious being. The ini-
tial level is the revelation “I am not my body,” followed by “I am not my
thoughts,” “I am not my emotions,” “I am not my ego,” “I am not my
will,” “I am not my memories” and “I am not time and space,” with the
final revelation: “I am consciousness.” Each level is represented by a set of
gestures that uses movement from belly dance or the vocabulary of other
dances from the Middle East. The individual movement phrases represent
the release of thoughts, emotions, ego, will, memories and time and space.
Accompanied by Richard Feren’s intricate score, each section culminates
in the release of a veil that has been introduced by the soloist (Ramzy),
acknowledged, manipulated and then released by the chorus of danc-
ers accompanying her. The finale scene of the Descent of Ishtar is a duet
between Yasmina Ramzy as Ishtar and Sashar Zarif as the Lord of Death.
Ishtar has been searching for the Lord of Death to ask him why there is
suffering, old age, sickness and death. The Lord of Death opens the black
cape he is wearing to reveal a mirror which reflects her image. At this point,
she, as a representative of the consciousness of all people, acknowledges
that she is the source of the cycle of birth and death. Ishtar’s reflection
in the mirror causes her to become one with conscious awareness. Dance
reviewer Deidre Kelly described The Descent of Ishtar as “a Jungian wonder
studded with arresting archetypal imagery and symbolic power, intelligent
and inventive choreography that seduces completely” (Fig. 7.1).11
Ramzy’s impetus for the dance of multiple veils was not to suggest or
to challenge the previous images of Salomé and her dance of the seven
veils made famous by Oscar Wilde’s script (1895); Richard Strauss’s opera
(1905); the subsequent movies based on these, beginning with Theda
Bara’s portrayal in 1918; or the Salomania craze that followed, when
women throughout North America attended classes in how to become
Salomé. Yet, The Descent of Ishtar, in which the veil represents the release
of illusion and not a piece of clothing to be removed to capture the gaze of
a male audience, challenges the sexualized Orientalist image of the Middle
East propagated by the arts since the novelist Gustave Flaubert, the artist
Jean-Léon Gérôme and others visited Egypt (Said 1978; MacKenzie 1995;
Brenstein and Studlar 1997; Beaulieu and Roberts 2002; Ziter 2003). The
Descent of Ishtar also indirectly acknowledges the spiritual path that many
women around the world take up with the study of belly dancing.
Fig. 7.1 Yasmina Ramzy in the Arabesque Dance Company and Orchestra produc-
tion Noor, March 3–6, 2011, Fleck Dance Theatre, Toronto, Canada, Photograph
by Nomad
Yasmina Ramzy’s return to Toronto did not mark the end of trips to

Egypt and the Middle East. She has continued to visit the area, particu-
larly Egypt, and has travelled there so many times that she has actually lost
count. This integration of Egypt into her life is revealed in choreographic
themes she chooses, which are derived from the history, myths and images
of Egypt. Her 1999 production In Search of the Almeh explored the sub-
ject of the nineteenth-century female entertainers of Egypt from the per-
spective of their potential relationship to the ancient Egyptian religion
and to the contemporary entertainers of Muhammad Ali Street in Cairo.
Egyptian-based themes have also included the 2002 production in honour
of the Egyptian goddess Isis, a journey through the four chambers of the
temple of Isis—a procession ritual to the River Nile, a Feast in the Inner
Court, discovering the pantheon of ancient Egyptian gods in the Hall
of Pillars and finally entering the Inner Sanctum to meet Isis herself. In
2009, there was Oum, the celebration of two great mothers; the mother of
Arab music, Umm Kulthūm and the Mother of the Universe, the ancient
Inanna of Babylon. Egypt, also created in 2009 and undertaken with the
choreographic supervision of Robert Desrosiers, explored the subtle
nuances and profound spiritual poetry in classical Middle Eastern music.
More recent productions include Noor (2010) Jamra (2011) and Sawah
(2012). Each production was accompanied by the Arabesque Orchestra
with music that was composed, in Egypt or in Toronto, by such noted
musician/composers as Richard Feren and Bassam Bishara, and arranged
by musicians George Sawa, Suleiman Warwar and Walid Najjar.
The critical reception of the Arabesque Dance Company and Orchestra
has been positive from its inception. Paula Citron wrote in 1997 for Dance
International that the company performed with “consummate profession-
alism hypnotic to the eye and ear, well appreciated by the audience for its
artistry and passion with expertise in blending elements of modern dance
with Middle Eastern dance.”12 The movement vocabulary for this all-
female ensemble is primarily derived from the eclectic belly-dance vocab-
ulary which Yasmina Ramzy integrated into Oum her tribute to Umm
Kulthūm, in 2009. Writing for Canada’s Globe and Mail, Citron wrote
of Oum that it “is structured around what Ramzy calls a montage of the
singer's most beloved musical moments. The two segue neatly together,
bonded to each other by the distinctive sound of the Arabic oud (lute) and
the dumbek (drum).”13 Adelina Fabiano’s review of the 2010 production
of Noor, meaning light, noted the vitality of the company’s performance,
“Both visually and audibly stunning, Noor combines traditional Egyptian
dance and music. From spectacular belly dancers, to a passionate Flamenco
guitarist and dancer, to powerful vocalists, and finally to a full orchestra of
incredible masterful musicians, audiences are enlightened by the world of
Arabian nights.”14 Toronto Star reviewer Michael Crabb further describes
the diversity of the company’s vocabulary in his account of the production
Jamra (2011), which includes dances from Iran and Turkey:
Arabesque is taking a journey through a variety of regional dances, from

Upper Egypt to southern Iran, and the results suggest there’s much more
to Middle Eastern dance than shimmering shoulders, hip hits and seductive
undulations. Take, for example, a Lebanese dance entitled Dabki Montage,
revived from an earlier Arabesque show. The women in their trousers, knee-
high boots and silky tunics are a world apart from the bubble-gum blow-
ing, audience-enticing sirens of Cairo’s Mohamed Ali Street, later evoked
in Ali Loz. In fact, for a moment, you could imagine you’re looking at
Russian folk dance as they stomp the floor, dance in circle formations and
criss-crossing lines. Equally, the regional dances presented in the show’s sec-
ond half cover a wide gamut, including a choreographically well-structured
“bandari” dance from Iran and a Turkish gypsy number that’s a riot of
flower baskets and swirling colour.15
The Arabesque Company and Orchestra is similar to other companies

throughout North America and Europe in that it produces concerts
which, in performance, integrate belly dance’s syncretic vocabulary with
the specific dances of Egypt, Turkey and other areas of North Africa and
the Middle East. What makes the Arabesque Company distinctive is the
sophistication of the choreography, in which the dances are an intricate
visual revelation of the music through the interweaving of moving bodies
on the proscenium stage. With each piece, the audience member is taken
on a journey of aural and visual discovery of the vocabulary of North
African and Middle Eastern dance, through the use of a variety of choreo-
graphic strategies, with solo performers or the group in unison: the group
divided with separate movement phrases; the interlacing of dancers with
each other; dancers moving on and off the stage in groups; or dancers
moving on the diagonal or into a circle and ending up in a set of triangles.
The visual revelation of the dance’s vocabulary is in emotional synch with
the onstage musicians and the audience’s experience is that the dancers
are the realization of the music. Yasmina Ramzy’s ability to choreograph
this visual and aural integration is the result of her discovery of tarab, the
relationship between dancer, musician and audience she experienced dur-
ing her years of performing in the Middle East.
BELLYDANCE SUPERSTARS
Miles Copeland grew up in the Middle East, where his father worked for the
CIA. During his teenage years he attended high school in Beirut, Lebanon,
listened to popular Arab music and became fluent in Arabic. Ultimately, he
became involved in the music industry with his brother’s band, The Police.
Copeland’s interest in belly dance was initiated when he hired dancers to help
sponsor Arabic artists on his Mondo Melodia and Mondo Rhythmica labels.
Noting the audiences’ positive response to the dancers, Copeland orga-
nized dancers to be in 2003 Lollapalooza on the second stage. The suc-

cess of this endeavour encouraged him to develop the Bellydance Superstars
group, with the aim of creating a belly-dance version of Riverdance, the
popular Irish step-dancing company. In 2004, Miles Copeland teamed up
with Motorola to promote a four-month, fifty-two-location US tour by the
Bellydance Superstars and Desert Roses, which was also incorporated into a
documentary on belly dance, titled American Dancer.16
Copeland admits he started the company because of the large global
population of amateur belly dancers who he believed identified with the
popular concept of the “star,” and the imagination this engenders as a
result of television programmes such as So You Think You Can Dance, Star
Search and American Idol. He reasoned that the belly dance community
would not only buy tickets to the concert but such belly-dance items as
CDS, DVDs or costume pieces that could be sold in the lobby. At the same
time he argued that he wanted the rest of the world to understand what
belly dance had come to mean for the dancers in the USA, or as he phrased
it, “‘I want the world to understand us and for the US to understand the
rest of the world.’”17 He rejects the idea that this American interpretation
of belly dance was an appropriation; instead, it was a sign of appreciation of
the dance and music culture of North Africa and the Middle East.
The fourteen dancers in the company were chosen partly on the basis
of their national reputation. Previous company choreographer Jilliana is
such an example.18 A Los Angeles dancer, with her own company, she
has an established status in the belly-dance community. Other dancers
were selected by Miles Copeland based on auditions held in major cities.
The all-female company represents a diversity of dancers who were born
in New Zealand, Cuba and elsewhere, but none trace their lineage to the
Middle East. Beyond a strong technical background in the vocabulary of
belly dance, the dancers have a common visual appearance that combines
long, lean, muscular bodies such as those one would find on the pages of
Sports Illustrated, with hair that drapes down their backs and costumes
that imitate early Hollywood films and accentuate the breast and hips. Not
surprisingly, their appearance has more in common with Hollywood ver-
sions of Middle Eastern dancers than with the more voluptuous dancers of
the historical or contemporary Middle East.
Bellydance Superstars began as an all-female company. Initially, the only
male in the ensemble was the drummer, Issam Houshan, who was brought
onstage to play for the dancers. Copeland, in fact, promoted the dance as
a female form. At one point, the company added a former Cirque du Soleil
dancer, Samir aka Arthur Bulkarov, who was originally from Tajikistan but
had moved to the USA in 1993. Bulkarov argues that his movement style
is neither masculine nor feminine—nor is he a drag queen. As he phrases it,
“I’m not a belly dancer, I’m not an Indian dancer, I’m not a ballet dancer,
I’m not a jazz dancer. I'm a fusion dancer.”19 This mirrors the evolution of
Bellydance Superstars, which by 2010, in its production Bombay Bellywood,
was fusing cabaret versions of the dance with American tribal, Hawaiian
hula and Indian bhangra to create an eclectic and exotic performance,
integrating other popular culture forms and their related imagery with
that of belly dance, in the assumption that this would expand the appeal of
Bellydance Superstars for its international tours to Europe and Asia.
Bellydance Superstars’ performances combined the visual and aural
impact of a rock concert, complete with over-amplified music and pro-
jected abstract images, with the intimacy of a cabaret performance in
which there is an expected relationship between audience and performer.
The latter was particularly the case in the drum solos, which combined a
solo drummer with a dancer. Following the performance, the Stars were
available in the lobby to sign copies of the collection of DVDs featuring
the group as well as to sell other “Bellystar” apparel, such as necklaces,
tank tops, crop tops and so on. In her dissertation, “From Harem Fantasy
to Female Empowerment: Rhetorical Strategies and Dynamics of Style
in American Belly Dance,” Sheila Bock describes reactions to Bellydance
Superstars that she encountered in Columbus Ohio: “some criticize the
troupe ‘for presenting the most American or Disney acceptable, you know,
young, pretty, hard bodied, not too many older women, not too many
larger women,’ perpetuating the stereotype of the harem fantasy, and fos-
tering unhealthy attitudes about body image” (2005: 4). This critique has
continued to resonate with the global dance community on which the
Bellydance Superstars relied for its audience. Ultimately, like that of many
rock bands, the Bellydance Superstars’ performance life was limited and
though there is still a website selling costumes and DVDs, there has not
been an international tour since 2013.20
IDENTITY AND SOCIAL IMAGINARY ON THE GLOBAL STAGE

Arjun Appadurai defines the media image and subsequent imagination as
a social practice (1996). Susan Bordo notes the dilemmas in intercultural
communication created by a mediated social imaginary: “For one effect of
this critique of the pervasive dualism and metaphors that animate repre-
sentations of the body is to call into question the assumption that we ever
know or encounter the body—not only the bodies of others but our own
bodies—directly or simply. Rather, it seems, the body that we experience
and conceptualize is always mediated” (1999b: 5).
The production history of staged, DVD and YouTube performances by
the Reda Troupe, the Arabesque Dance Company and Orchestra and the
Bellydance Superstars are indicative of the transnational flow of mediated per-
formance. The performers of each company did not integrate all modes of
attention (aural, visual and kinaesthetic) so as to imitate the movement of
a family member at a ritual celebration. Their engagement with the form
was defined by the controlled studio environment in which the vocabulary
had been created for the stage. The intensity of the lived experience of family
was replaced by a self-conscious observation of self and of the critical gaze of
an audience, with the dancer viewing these from distinct social, cultural and
political viewpoints. Within the global flows of the social imaginary it is the
media-documented stage performances that dominate the global imagination.
Within the social history of belly dance, there have been entrepre-
neurs, such as Sol Bloom at the end of the nineteenth century and Miles
Copeland at the beginning of the twenty-first, who have embraced the
social imaginary of Orientalism; in order to increase audience attendance.
Bloom and Copeland created catchphrases such as “belly dance” or “bel-
lydance superstars,” and thus participated in the marketing schemes of
their day. Both of these business moguls were astute readers of popular
culture; the former realized that making the form sound salacious would
sell tickets—the latter “cashed in” on a form that had already achieved
popularity by uniting its public persona with a glamorized media image.
The history of belly dance from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first
century is an example of the impact of the desiring imagination on the
(re)definition of a cultural form. In the process, the dancing Arab body,
male and female, has been reified within the concept of Orientalism and
propagated by the forces of commercialization.21
Mahmoud Reda and Yasmina Ramzy, in their communities of origin,
Cairo, Egypt and Toronto, Canada, have presented a counter-discourse
that has had an impact on the global dance form’s reception. Mahmoud
Reda found a means to create an image of Egypt that brought the village
and baladi forms into contact with the bodies of young, upper-middle-class
Egyptians, whilst using a vocabulary that did not offend Egyptian norma-
tive structures regarding gender and created a moving image that had sig-
nificance in the Soviet-influenced pan-Arab world. The primary critique of
the Reda Troupe is that it did not stage the actual bodies of Egyptians,
but a representation of them that fit within the aesthetic vocabulary of
the Western stage. Regardless, this was a physical representation of Egypt
that had become part of the vocabulary of the global dance community.
Ultimately the hybrid form Reda created within the framework of middle-
and upper-class Egyptian perceptions of sophisticated performance has
dominated globally over renditions that more closely reflect the village style.
Yasmina Ramzy’s productions synthesize, via the stage and primarily
the female body, the dances from across North Africa and the Middle
East for audiences that represent Toronto’s diverse multi-ethnic popula-
tion, but Egypt, as the historic cultural capital of the represented regions,
is always staged thematically as the central visual and aural image. At her
shows, members of Toronto’s Arab population have an opportunity to
view the performative lives of the local community as well as experience
the music which, in its complex rhythms and subtle melodic nuances, asks
the dancing body to respond in series of circles, undulations and intricate
gestures that emotionally engage the audience in a joyous moment of
community. The integration of Arab and Toronto composers and musi-
cians, old and new, allows aesthetic integration of movement and music,
and the development of the tripartite relationship between musicians,
dancers and audience that is the revelation of tarab.
A consideration of the individual companies and the performance his-
tory of each demonstrates the continuing impact of the mediating force
of Orientalism as social imaginary. The commercialization of this form by
Bellydance Superstars would not have been possible without the exotic pop-
ularization of belly dance which has occurred throughout its history, from
its first presentation at nineteenth century international fairs in Paris and
Chicago to its embrace by popular culture on stage and in film. The Reda
Troupe was influenced by the transnational politics of the Soviet Bloc and
the Arab League as well as its internalization of Orientalism’s disdain for, and
yet exotification of, Egyptian dance forms. The Arabesque Dance Company
and Orchestra continues what Anne Rasmussen (1989, 2000, 2001, 2002)
refers to as the cross-cultural dialogue in performance and musical styles
between countries in North Africa and the Middle East that was initiated in
the nightclubs and restaurants of North America and elsewhere.
This is a transnational flow of Orientalist imagery that, as Alsultany and
Shohat (2013) have noted, has continued to evolve in the twenty-first
century. The image of belly dance has been subject to a complex flow of
images of the Orient in popular culture; these have been influenced and
reinforced in turn by dancers both inside and outside North Africa and the
Middle East and by members of the diasporic communities. All of these
players are caught up in the convergent fluidity of media images as they are
conveyed in transnational culture. A counter to the impact of globilizing
image of belly dance is Ramy Aly’s suggestion that one acknowledge the
distinctiveness of the movement related dances in North Africa and the
Middle East (2015). By extension of this logic, one can also acknowledge
the specificity of the genres created as a consequence of popular culture as
in cabaret, goddess dancing, tribal, gothic, fusion as well as styles of dance
by individual artists.
NOTES
1. There are many belly-dance companies that produce work for the stage. Dr
Laura (of Amara Dances) Osweiler’s doctoral dissertation for the University
of California, Riverside, “Dancing in the Fringe: Connections Forming an
Evening of Experimental Middle Eastern,” discusses an approach to craft-
ing belly dance for the stage. The Theatrical Belly Dance Conference in
New York provides workshops for dancers who want to choreograph for
the stage; see website, accessed December 7, 2015: http://theatricalbel-
lydance.com/.
2. Today, the company has 150 members, including dancers, musicians and
technicians. As a dancer, choreographer and director, Mahmoud Reda has
performed globally at Carnegie Hall (NY, USA), the Royal Albert Hall
(London, UK), Congress Hall (Berlin, Germany), Stanislavsky and Gorky
Theatres (Moscow, Russia), the Olympia (Paris, France) and the United
Nations (in New York and Geneva). His contribution of bringing Egyptian
dance to the world stage has been recognized with the following awards:
he received Egypt’s Order of Arts and Science in 1967, the Star of Jordan
in 1965, the Order of Tunisia in 1973 and in 1999 was honoured by the
International Dance Committee/Unesco. In 2009, the Reda Troupe cel-
ebrated its fiftieth anniversary.
3. Anne Vermeyden, “A ‘Real’ Touch of Oriental Splendour: The
Popularization and Appropriation of dance du ventre in Toronto,
1880–1930,” graduate colloquium paper University of Guelph, December
18, 2015.
4. According to Belly Dance Toronto, there are twelve separate schools of
belly dance. Accessed November 25, 2015: http://www.bellydanceinto-
ronto.com/bellydance-schools/.
5. Yasmina Ramzy (March 1, 2011) “Feminism and Belly Dance,” The Dance
Current. Accessed November 15, 2015: http://www.thedancecurrent.
com/feature/feminism-and-bellydance.
6. Megan Andrews (February 23, 2009) “Yasmina Ramzy,” The Dance

Current. Accessed November 20, 2015: http://www.thedancecurrent.
com/column/yasmina-ramzy.
7. Op. cit.
8. Op. cit.
9. Op. cit.
10. Descent of Ishtar (2001) DVD. Arabesque Dance Company.
11. Deirdre Kelly (April 10, 1999) “Middle Eastern Dance Seduces
Completely,” Globe and Mail, p. C11.
12. Paula Citron (1997) “Reviews,” Dance International, Fall, 42.
13. Paula Citron (February 12, 2010) “Great Dance Inspired by Egyptian
Singer,” Globe and Mail. Accessed November 21, 2015: http://www.the-
globeandmail.com/arts/great-dance-inspired-by-great-egyptian-singer/
article4388109/.
14. Adelina Fabiano (March 9, 2011) “Review: Noor (Arabesque Dance
Company and Orchestra)”,
Mooney on Theatre. Accessed November 21, 2015: http://www.mooneyonthe-
atre.com/2011/03/09/review-noor-arabesque-dance-company-orchestra/.
15. Michael Crabb (February 9, 2012) “Jamra Gives Us a Lot More than
Classic Belly Dancing,” Toronto Star. Accessed November 20, 2015:
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2012/02/09/dance_review_
jamra_gives_us_a_lot_more_than_classic_belly_dancing.html.
16. American Belly Dancer (2005) DVD. Dir. Jonathan Brandais.
17. Pat McDonnell Twair (May 7, 2004) “Miles Copeland III: Belly Dance
Man,” The Daily Star. Accessed July 12, 2015: http://www.dailystar.com.
lb/Culture/Art/2004/May-07/92133-miles-copeland-iii-belly-dance-
man.ashx.
18. Jilliana served as the primary choreographer for Bellydance Superstars until
she left to form her own company, Bellydance Evolution. The latter has
produced a set of evening-length narrative choreographies in which belly
dance is used as the primary vocabulary. Bellydance Evolution website.
Accessed November 15, 2015: http://bellydanceevolution.com/.
19. Tresca Weinstein (November 18, 2010) “Bellydance Superstars Brings
World of Dance to The Egg,” Times Union. Accessed December 17, 2015:
http://www.timesunion.com/entertainment/article/Bellydance-
Superstars-brings-world-of-dance-to-818488.php.
20. Bellydance Superstars website. Accessed December 4, 2015: http://www.
bellydancesuperstars.com/content/workshops.html.
21. For an in-depth discussion of the market forces involved in the commer-
cialization of the dance see Amira Jarmakani (2008) Imagining Arab
Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in
the US (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adair, Christy. 1992. Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens. New York: New York
University Press.
Adra, Najwa. 2005. Belly Dance: An Urban Folk Genre. In Belly Dance:
Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy, ed. Anthony Shay and
Barbara Sellers-Young, 17–32. California: Mazda Press.
Albright, Ann Cooper. 1997. Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in
Contemporary Dance. Connecticut: Wesleyan Press.
Al-Faruqi, Lois Ibsen. 1976/77. Dances of the Muslim Peoples. Dance Scope 11:
43–51.
Al-Faruqi, Lois Ibsen. 1987. Dance as an Expression of Islamic Culture. Dance
Research Journal 10: 6–17.
Al-Rawi, Rosina-Fawzia. 1999. Grandmother’s Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and
Healing Power of Belly Dancing. New York: Interlink Press.
Alloula, Malek. 1986. The Colonial Harem. Trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad
Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Alsultany, Evelyn, and Ella Shohat (eds.). 2013. Between the Middle East and the
Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora. Michigan: University of Michigan
Press.
Alves-Masters, Judy. 1979. Changing Self-Esteem of Women Through Middle
Eastern Dance. Michigan: UMI Press.
Aly, Rmay M.K. 2015. Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing
of Identity. London: Pluto Press.
Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimaging the Urban. Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press.
And, Metin. 1976. Pictorial History of Turkish Dancing. Ankara: Dost Yayinlari.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0
150 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition. New York: Verso.
Angier, Natalie. 2000. Woman: An Intimate Geography. New York: Anchor Books.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Arvizu, S. 2004. The Politics of Belly Dancing in Cairo. The Arab Studies Journal,
12/2, 159–181.
Assaf, Nadra Majeed. 2013. Dancing Without My Body: Cultural Integration in
the Middle East. In Popular Culture in the Middle East: A Post Colonial Outlook,
ed. Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman, 95–109. London: Routledge.
Bagnole, Rihab Kassatly. 2005. Imaging the Almeh. PhD dissertation, Ohio
University.
Banacos, Christina M. 2006. Mechanical Goddesses: An Exploration of Middle
Eastern Belly Dancing and Culture Through Choreographic Fusion with Modern
Dance. PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma.
Barzel, Ann. 1964. Little Egypt Never Got to the Fair! Dance Magazine,
December, 62–65.
Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Beaulieu, Jill, and Mary Roberts (eds.). 2002. Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting,
Architecture, Photographs. Durham: Duke University Press.
Benson, Kathleen, and Philip M. Kayal (eds.). 2002. A Community of Many Worlds:
Arab Americans in New York City. New York: Syracuse University Press.
Bentley, Toni. 2002. Sisters of Salome. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Berger, Monroe and La Meri. 1970. Curious and Wonderful Gymnastic. Dance
Perspectives 1961, 4–43. (Reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corp).
Bernstein, Richard. 2003. Edward Said: Leading Advocate of Palestinians Dies at
67. New York Times, September 25.
Bernstein, Matthew, and Gaylyn Studlar (eds.). 1997. Visions of the East:
Orientalism in Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. Location of Culture. New York: Routledge Press.
Bloch, Avital H., and Lauri Umansky (eds.). 2005. Impossible to Hold: Women and
Culture in the 1960s. New York: New York University Press.
Bock, Sheila Marie. 2005. From Harem Fantasy to Female Empowerment: Rhetorical
Strategies and Dynamics of Style in American Belly Dance. Master’s thesis, Ohio
State University.
Bock, Sheila, and K. Borland. 2011. Exotic Identities: Dance, Difference, and
Self-fashioning. Journal of Folklore Research 48: 1–36.
Bordeon, Candace. 2013. Finding “the Feeling” Oriental Dance, Musiqa al-
Gadid, and Tarab. In Belly Dance Around the World: New Communities,
Performance and Identity, ed. Caitlin McDonald and Barbara Sellers-Young,
33–47. North Carolina: McFarland.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 151
Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bordo, Susan. 1999a. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private.
New York: Farrar, Starus, Giroux.
Bordo, Susan. 1999b. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from
Plato to OJ. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California.
Bossonis, Rania Androniki. 2004. Belly Dancing for Fitness: The Sexy Art that Tones
Your Abs, Butt, and Thighs. Gloucester: Fairwinds.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1997. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Brill, Dunja. 2008. Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style. New York:
Bloomsbury Press.
Brown, Helen Gurley. 2003. Sex and the Single Girl. New York: Barricade Books.
Brunett, Ron. 2005. How Images Think. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Buck, Elizabeth. 1991. Rakkasah – An American Middle Eastern Dance Festival:
Exoticism and Orientalism in the Twentieth Century. UCLA Journal of Dance
Ethnology 15: 26–32.
Buck, Elizabeth. 1995. The Rhythm is the Essence of the Dance: An Exploration
into Communication between Arab Musicians and American Belly Dancers in
a Performance Context. UCLA Journal of Dance Ethnology 19: 35–45.
Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen. 1997. Sense, Meaning and Perception in Three Dance
Cultures. In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane
Desmond, 259–268. Durham: Duke University Press.
Burnam, A.R. 2012. Bellydance in America: Strategies for Seeking Personal
Transformation PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
Burt, Ramsay. 2009. The Performance of Unmarked Masculinity. In When Men
Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Boundaries, ed. Jennifer Fisher and
Anthony Shay, 150–167. London: Oxford Press.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge.
Carlton, Donna. 1994. Looking for Little Egypt. Bloomington: IDD Books.
Çelik, Z., and L. Kinney. 1990. Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions
Universelles. Assemblage 13: 35–59.
Chang, Yu-Chi. 2012. Localized Exoticism: Developments and Features of Belly Dance
in Taiwan. Physical Culture and Sport Studies, Studies and Research 54: 13–25.
Cherniavsky, Felix. 1991. Salome Dancer: The Life and Times of Maud Allan.
Toronto: Mc Clelland and Steward.
Cooper, Michelle, and Carolyn Michelle. 2013. Dancing with Inspiration in New
Zealand and Australian Dance. In Around the World: New Communities,
Performance and Identity, ed. Caitlin McDonald and Barbara Sellers-Young,
93–105. Jefferson: McFarland.
Crosby, Janice. 2000. The Goddess Dances: Spirituality and American Women
Interpretations of Middle Eastern Dance. In Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of
152 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Healing, Identity, and Empowerment, ed. Wendy Griffin, 166–182. New York:

Rowman & LittleField Publishers.
Csoradas, Thomas. 2002. Body, Meaning, Healing. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Curtis, George William. 2014. Early Letters of George William Curtis. New York:
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Damasio, Antonio. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the
Making of Consciousness. New York: Mariner Books.
Damasio, Antonio. 2005. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human
Brain. New York: Penguin.
Damasio, Antonio. 2010. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.
New York: Pantheon.
Danielson, Virginia. 1993. Artists and Entrepreneurs: Female Singers in Cairo
during the 1920s. In Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in
Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, 292–309. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Danielson, Virginia. 1998. The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song and
Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Daniszewski, John. 2000. Tummy Trouble in Cairo. Los Angeles Times, August 2.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 1952. The Second Sex. New York: Random House.
De Koning, Anouk. 2009. Global Dreams: Class, Gender, and Public Space in
Cosmopolitan Cairo. Cairo: American University Press.
de Nerval, Gerard. 1929. Women of Cairo: Scenes of Life in the Orient. London/
New York: George Routledge/AMS.
de Nerval, Gerard. 2002. Journey to the Orient. London: Peter Owen.
Deagon, Andrea. 1995. Inanna Descent: An Archetype of Feminine Self-Discovery
and Transformation. Habibi 14: 16–19.
Deagon, Andrea. 2002. Image of the Eastern Dancer. Habibi 19: 10–18.
Dearey, M. 2014. ‘Dark Am I, Yet Lovely’: Tracing Diabolical Evil and Femininities
in Gothic Fusion Tribal Belly Dance. Dance, Movement and Spiritualities 1:
373–391.
Decoret-Ahiha, Anne. 2004. Les Dances Exotiques en France. Paris: Centre
National de la Danse.
Desmond, Jane. 1991. Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth
St. Denis Radha of 1906. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17:
28–49.
Desmond, Jane. 1997. Meaning in Motion New Cultural Studies of Dance.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Desmond, Jane (ed.). 2001. Dancing Desires. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Djoumanhna, Kajira. 2003. The Tribal Bible. California: BlackSheep Belly Dance.
Dodds, Sherril. 2014. Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular
Dance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 153
Dougherty, Roberta L. 2000. Badia Masabni, Artiste and Modernist: Egyptian

Print Media’s Carnival of National Identity. In Mass Mediations: New Approaches
to Mass Media in the Middle East and Beyond, ed. Walter Armbrust, 45–60.
Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Downey, Dennis J., Justine J. Reel, Sonya SooHoo, and Sandrine Zerbib. 2009.
Body Image in Belly Dance: Integrating Alternative Norms into Collective
Identity. Journal of Gender Studies 19: 377–393.
Downey, D.J., S. Zerbib, and D.C. Martin. 2010. Implicit Politics in a Free and
Open Space: Belly Dance, Leisure Activity, and Gender Identity. Research in
Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 31: 103–140.
Downing, C. 2012. A Model for the Facilitation of Mental Health Through Belly
Dancing as Movement. PhD dissertation, University of Johannesberg.
Dox, Donnalee. 2005. Spirit from the Body: Belly Dance as a Spiritual Practice. In
Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy, ed. Anthony
Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young, 303–323. California: Mazda Press.
Dox, Donnalee. 2007. Dancing Around Orientalism. TDR 10: 1–50.
Edwards, Holly (ed.). 2000. Noble Dreams and Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in
America 1870–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
El Hamamsy, Walid, and Mounira Soliman. 2013. Popular Culture in the Middle
East and North Africa: A Post Colonial Outlook. London: Routledge.
Eliade, Mircea. 1998. Myth and Reality. Illinois: Waveland Press.
Eller, Cynthia. 1993. Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality
Movement in America. New York: Crossroad.
Erenberg, Lewis A. 1984. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation
of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fahmy, Farida. 1987. The Creative Development of Mahmoud Reda, a Contemporary
Egyptian Choreographer. Masters thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.
Fahmy, Ziad. 2011. Ordinary Egyptians. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Farrah, Ibraham. 1991. A Dancer’s Chronicle: Growing Up Lebanese. Arabesque
17: 10–13.
Farrah, Ibraham. 1992/93. A Dancer’s Chronicle: Growing Up in Dance: Vis a
Vis the Masculine Motif Part I. Arabesque 18(1–5): 8–10.
Farrah, Ibraham. 1993. A Dancer’s Chronicle…The Lebanese Chapters: Vis a Vis
The Masculine Motif, Part II. Arabesque 18(6): 15–17.
Fisher, Jennifer, and Anthony Shay (eds.). 2009. When Men Dance: Choreographing
Masculinities Across Borders. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Flandez, R., and M. Brantley. 2003. Navel Maneuvers: Men Wiggle In On Female
Art Form—Some Say Belly-Dancing Is Great for Their Abs; Others Go for the
Outfits. Wall Street Journal Accessed July 1, 2015. www.isisandthestardancers.
com/News/JamesBrantleyWSJhtm.
Flaubert, Gustave. 1961. Three Tales. Trans. Robert Baldick. Baltimore: Penguin,
[1877].
154 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Flaubert, Gustave. 1972. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, ed. Francis

Steegmuller. London: The Bodley Head.
Flaubert, Gustave. 1980. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1857. Trans.
Francis Steegmuller. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1997. Dancing Bodies. In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural
Studies of Dance, ed. Jane Desmond, 235–258. Durham/Lond: Duke
University Press.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1998. Choreography & Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story
and Desire. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Franken, Marjorie. 1998. Farida Fahmy and the Dancer Image in Egyptian Film.
In Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts in the Middle East, ed.
Sherifa Zuhur, 265–281. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.
Fraser, Kathleen W. 2015. Before They Were Belly Dancers: European Accounts of
Female Entertainers in Egypt, 1760–1870. North Carolina: McFarland.
Friedan, Betty. 1976. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Random House.
Friend, Robyn. 1997. Jamileh: The Goddess of Iranian Dance. Habbi 16: 5–10.
Frühauf, Tina. 2009. Raqs Gothique: Decolonizing Belly Dance. TDR/The
Drama Review 53: 117–138.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Gazzaniga, Michael. 2008. Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.
New York: Ecco.
Gimbutas, Marija. 1999. The Living Goddesses. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Gioseffi, Daniela. 1977. The Great American Belly Dance. New York: Doubleday.
Gioseffi, Daniela. 1980. Earth Dancing: Mother Nature Oldest Rite. Harrisburg:
Stackpole Books.
Gitlin, Todd. 1993. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam
Books.
Glenn, Susan A. 2000. The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Golding, Christina, and Michael Saren. 2009. Performing Identity: An Analysis of
Gender Expressions at the Whitby Goth Festival. Consumption, Markets and
Culture 12: 27–46.
Grabar, Oleg. 2000. Roots and Others. In Nobel Dreams and Wicked Pleasures:
Orientalism in America, 1870–1930, ed. Holly Edwards, 40–59. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Grasso, Alado. 1999. The World Seen Through Metamorphoses. In Icons of the
Century, ed. Giorgio Taborelli, Trans. Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia, 8.
New York: Barrons.
Gray, Laurel. 1995. The Goddess Dances: Women’s Dances of Georgia. Habibi
14: 2–6.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 155
Greer, Germaine. 1970. The Female Eunch. New York: Bantam Books.

Griffin, Susan. 1976. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. San Francisco:
Harper and Row.
Griffin, Susan. 1995. The Eros of Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.
Griffin, Susan. 1999. What Her Body Thought: A Journey Through Shadows. San
Francisco: Harper Collins.
Grossman, K.L. 2000. Feminism and Belly Dance: Seeing Beyond the Illusion. PhD
dissertation, University of Manchester.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck (ed.). 2002. Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to
Citizens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1977. The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity. In
Culture, Globalization and the World System, ed. Anthony King, 30–40.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hamdy, Rasha. 2004. Allure of Belly Dance. Middle East Times. www.metimes.
com. Accessed Apr 25.
Hamera, Judith. 2007. Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and
Connection in the Global City. New York: Palgrave.
Hamilton, Lady Augusta. 1822. Marriage, Rites, Customs and Ceremonies of All
Nations of the Universe. London: Chapple and Son.
Hammond, Andrew. 2007. Popular Culture in the Arab World: Arts, Politics and
the Media. Cairo: American University Press.
Hanna, Thomas. 2004. Somatics. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.
Harper, Lynette. 2013. Performing Identity/Diasporic Encounters. In Around
the World: New Communities, Performance and Identity, ed. Caitlin McDonald
and Barbara Sellers-Young, 48–67. Jefferson: McFarland.
Hayles, Katherine N. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary
Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hicks, Robert. 1992. America Dances…Ibrahim Farrah. Arabesque 17: 35.
Hobin, Tina. 2003. Belly Dance: The Dance of Mother Earth. New York: Marion Boyars.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds.). 1983. Invention of Tradition.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hunt, Lynn (ed.). 1991. Eroticism and the Body Politic. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
Huss, E., and S. Haimovich. 2011. ‘The Hips Don’t Lie’: Dancing Around
Gendered, Ethnic, and National Identity in Israel. Body, Movement and Dance
in Psychotherapy 6: 3–16.
Issherman, Maurice, and Michael Kazin (eds.). 2004. America Divided: The Civil
War of the 1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jarmakani, Amira. 2004. Dancing the Hootchy Kootchy: The Bellydancer as the
Embodiment of Socio-Cultural Tensions. The Arab Studies Journal 12(13):
124–139.
156 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jarmakani, Amira. 2006. Belly Dancing for Liberation: A Critical Interpretation of

Reclamation Rhetoric in the American Belly Dance Community. In Arabs in
the Americas: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Arab Diaspora, ed. Darcy A. Zabel,
145–168. New York: Peter Lang.
Jarmakani, Amira. 2008. Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of
Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S.. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jarmakani, Amira. 2013. They Hate Our Freedom but We Love Their Belly
Dance: The Spectacle of the Shimmy in Contemporary U. S. Culture. In
Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of the Diaspora,
ed. Elvelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat, 130–152. Michigan: University of
Michigan Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
New York: New York University Press.
Johnson, Mark. 2008. The Meaning of the Body: The Aesthetics of Human
Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied
Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Johnstone, Janet, and G.J. Tassie, 2009. Egyptian Baladi Dances – A Contested
Tradition. In Managing Eygpt’s Cultural Heritage, ed. Ahmad Y. Al Hassan,
G.J. Tassie, Aloisa De Trafford, and Lawrence Owens. Pennsylvania: Golden
House Publications.
Jorgensen, Jeana. 2012. Dancing the Numinous: Sacred and Spiritual Techniques
of Contemporary Belly Dancers. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 6: 3–28.
Jullian, Philippe. 1977. Orientalists: European Painters of Eastern Scenes. Oxford:
Phaidon.
Kammen, Michael. 1999. American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and
the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books.
Karam, John T. 2010. Belly Dancing and the (En) Gendering of Ethnic Sexuality
in the Mixed Brazilian Nation. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6:
86–114.
Karayanni, Stavros Stavrou. 2004. Dancing Fear and Desire. Ontario: Wilfrid
University Press.
Karayanni, Stavros Stavrou. 2009. Sacred Embodiment: Fertility Ritual, Mother
Goddess, and Cultures of Belly Dance. Religion and the Arts 13: 448–463.
Karayanni, Stavros Stavrou. 2015. Modernism and Dance in the Middle East and
North Africa. The Modernist World 455–465.
Kasson, John F. 1998. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the
Century. New York: Hill and Wang.
Keft-Kennedy, Virginia. 2005. How Does She Do That? Belly Dancing and the
Horror of the Flexible Woman. Women’s Studies 34: 279–300.
Kelly, Brigid. 2013. I Mean What is a Pakeha New Zealander’s National Dance?
We Don’t Have One: Belly Dance and Transculturation in New Zealand. In
BIBLIOGRAPHY 157
Belly Dance Around the World: New Communities, Performance and Identity,
ed. Caitlin McDonald and Barbara Sellers-Young, 138–151. Jefferson:
McFarland.
Kendall, Elizabeth. 1979. Where She Danced. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Kennedy, Valerie. 2000. Edward Said: A Critical Introduction. New York: Polity
Press.
Kenny, Erin. 2007. Belly Dance in the Town Square. Western Folklore 66: 4.
Kharutulari, Galina. 2014. Russian Women and Belly Dancing: Body Work, Fun
and Transformation. PhD dissertation, DePaul University.
Koritz, Amy. 1994. Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan: The Vision of
Salome. Theatre Journal 46: 63.
Koritz, Amy. 1995. Gendering Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in
Early Twentieth-century Culture. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Kraus, Rachel. 2009. Straddling the Sacred and Secular: Creating a Spiritual
Experience Through Belly Dance. Sociological Spectrum 29: 598–625.
Kraus, Rachel. 2010a. They Danced in the Bible: Identify Integration among
Christian Women Who Belly Dance. Sociology of Religion 71: 457–484.
Kraus, Rachel. 2010b. “We Are Not Strippers”: How Belly Dancers Manage a
(Soft) Stigmatized Serious Leisure Activity. Symbolic Interaction 33: 435–455.
Kraus, Rachel. 2012. Spiritual Origins and Belly Dance: How and When Artistic
Leisure Becomes Spiritual. Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 4: 59–77.
Kraus, Rachel. 2013. I Really Don’t Do It For The Spirituality”: How Often Do
Belly Dancers Infuse Artistic Leisure with Spiritual Meaning? Implicit Religion
16: 301–318.
Lahm, Adam. 1979. Ibrahim Farrah: A Commitment to Dance, A Commitment
to Life. Arabesque 5: 4–5, 21, 23.
Lane, Edward William. 1973. An Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern
Egyptians. New York: Dover Publications.
Laukkan, Anu. 2010. Hips Don’t Lie? Affective and Kinaesthetic Dance
Ethnography in Working with Affect in Feminist Readings. In Working with
Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences (Transformations), ed.
Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen, 126–140. New York: Routledge.
LeDoux, Joseph. 1998. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of
Emotional Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
LeDoux, Joseph. 2003. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are.
New York: Penguin.
Leland, Charles G. 1873. Egyptian Sketchbook. London: Strahan & Co., Trubner & Co.
Lewis, Reina. 2004. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman
Harem. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Lillebuen, Steve. 2005. Undeterred by Strange Looks, the West’s Sole Male Belly
Dancer has Gone Pro, Started a New Fitness Craze and Wears the “Freak”
Label with Pride. Edmonton Journal, March 19, pp. D6.
158 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lockman, Zachary. 2004. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and
Politics of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lorde, Audre. 1982. Zami, Sister Outsider and Undersong. New York: Quality
Paperback.
Lorius, Cassandra. 1996a. Gaze and Desire. Women’s Studies International Forum
19: 3–4.
Lorius, Cassandra. 1996b. Oh Boy, You Salt of the Earth: Outwitting Patriarchy
in Raqs Baladi. Popular Music 15: 285–298.
McDonald, Caitlin and Barbara Sellers-Young, eds. 2013. Belly Dance around the
World: New Communities, Performance and Identity. North Carolina:
McFarland Press.
MacKenzie, John M. 1995. Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Maira, Sunaina. 2008. Belly Dancing: Arab-face, Orientalist Feminism, and US
Empire. American Quarterly 60: 317–345.
Martin, R. 2013. Pushing Boundaries: Reflections on Teaching and Learning
Contemporary Dance in Amman. Journal of Dance Education 13: 37–45.
Matter, Joan (ed.). 1997. From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor
of Marija Gimbutas. Connecticut: Knowledge, Ideas, and Trends.
McCullough, Edo. 1957. Good Old Coney Island. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons.
McGee, Kristin. 2012. Orientalism and Erotic Multiculturalism in Popular
Culture. MSMI 6: 209–238.
McGovern, John (ed.). 1894. Hulligan Illustrated World: A Portfolio of the Views
of the World Columbian Exposition. London: The Jewell N. Hulligan Company.
McRobbie, Angela. 2007. Post Feminism and Popular Culture. Feminist Media
Studies 4: 255–264.
Milestone, Katie, and Anneke Meyer. 2011. Gender and Popular Culture.
New York: Polity Press.
Mishra, Smeeta. 2013. Negotiating Female Sexuality: Bollywood Belly Dance,
‘Item Girls, and Dance Classes. In Belly Dance Around the World: New
Communities, Performance and Identity, ed. Caitlin McDonald and Barbara
Sellers-Young, 181–196. Jefferson: McFarland.
Moe, Angela M. 2008. Reclaiming the Feminine: Belly Dance as a Feminist
Project. Congress on Research Dance Proceedings, 40: 181–192.
Moe, Angela M. 2011. Belly Dancing Mommas: Challenging Cultural Discourses
of Maternity. In Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the
Rules, ed. C. Bobel and S. Kwan, 88–98. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Moe, Angela M. 2012. Beyond the Belly: An Appraisal of Middle Eastern Dance
(aka Belly Dance) as Leisure. Journal of Leisure Research 44: 201–233.
Moe, Angela M. 2014. Sequins, Sass, and Sisterhood: An Exploration of Older
Women’s Belly Dancing. Journal of Women & Aging 26: 39–65.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 159
Moe, Angela M. 2015. Unveiling the Gaze. In Feminist Theory and Pop Culture,
ed. Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, 56–70. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Monty, Paul Eugene. 1986. Serena, Ruth St. Denis, and the Evolution of Belly
Dance (1876–1976). PhD dissertation, New York University.
Morgan, Robin. 1984. The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global
Politics. New York: Anchor Books.
Morris, Chris. 2000. Male Belly-Dancers Dazzle Istanbul. BBC News. http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/726807.stm. Accessed Apr 26.
Mukerji, Chandra, and Michael Schudson (eds.). 1991. Rethinking Popular
Culture. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Naff, Alixa. 1985. Becoming American: Early Arab Immigrant Experience.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Naff, Alixa. 2002. New York: The Mother Colony. In A Community of Many
Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City, ed. Philip Kayal and Museum of the
City of New York, 3–10. New York: The Museum of the City of New York/
Syracuse University Press.
Nericcio, Carolena. 2004. The Art of Belly Dance: A Fun and Fabulous Way to Get
Fit. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Ness, Sally Ann, and Carrie Noland. 2008. Migrations of Gesture. Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press.
Ohanian, Armen. 1923. Dancer of Shamakha. Trans. Rose Wilder Lane. New York:
Dutton.
Ong, Alhwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Ortner, Sherry B. 1996. Making Gender: The Poltics and Erotics of Culture. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Osborn, Jonathan. 2016. (Re)Sequencing the Genetic Repertoire: Dancing in and
Out of World of Warcraft. The Other D Conference, University of Toronto.
Petzen, J. 2004. Home or Homelike? Turkish Queers Manage Space in Berlin.
Space and Culture 7: 20–32.
Popp, Ashley M., and Chia-Ju Yen. 2012. The Global Transformation of Belly
Dancing: A Cross-cultural Investigation of Counter-Hegemonic Responses.
Physical Culture and Sport: Studies in Research 55: 17–29.
Potuoğlu-Cook, Ő ykű. 2006. Beyond the Glitter: Belly Dance and the Neoliberal
Gentrification of Istanbul. Cultural Anthropology 21: 633–660.
Potuoğlu-Cook, Ő ykű. 2011. Night Shifts: Moral, Economic, and Cultural Politics
of Turkish Belly Dance Across the Fins-de-siecle. ProQuest: UMI Dissertation
Publishing.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes; Travel Writing and Transculturation.
London/New York: Routledge.
160 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Racy, A.J. 2003. Making Music in the Arab World. London: Cambridge Press.
Radner, Hillary, and Moya Luckett (eds.). 1999. Swinging Single: Representing
Sexuality in the 1960s. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Ramet, Sabrina Petra (ed.). 1996. Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures.
New York: Routledge.
Rashid, Stanley. 2002. Cultural Traditions of Early Arab Immigrants. In A
Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City, ed. Philip Kayal
and Museum of the City of New York, 74–82. New York: Museum of the City
of New York.
Rasmussen, Anne K. 1989. Musical Life of Arab Americans: Performance Contexts
and Musical Transformation. Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology 5: 15–33.
Rasmussen, Anne K. 1990. Middle Eastern Nightclub: Resurrecting Orientalism
for America. Arts Musica, Spring, 28–33.
Rasmussen, Anne K. 1992. An Evening in the Orient: The Middle Eastern
Nightclub in America. Asian Music 13: 345–365.
Rasmussen, Anne K. 1996. Theory and Practice in Contemporary Arab Music
Performance. Popular Music 15: 345–365.
Rasmussen, Anne K. 1998. The Music of Arab Americans. In The Images of
Enchantment, ed. Sherifa Zuhur, 135–156. Cairo: American University Press.
Rasmussen, Anne K. 2000. The Sound of Culture, The Structure of Tradition:
Musicians Work in Arab America. In Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream,
ed. Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, 551–572. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.
Rasmussen, Anne K. 2001. Middle Eastern Music. In Garland Encyclopedia of
World Music, Volume 3: The United States and Canada, ed. Ellen Koskoff,
1028–1941. New York/London: Garland Publishing.
Rasmussen, Anne K. 2002. Popular Music of Arab Detroit. In Garland Encyclopedia
of World Music. Volume 6: The Middle East, ed. Virginia Danielson, Scott Marcus,
and Dwight Reynolds, 279–288. New York/London: Garland Publishing.
Reda, Mahmoud. 1968. Fi ma’bad al-raqs. Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif.
Rees-Denis, Paulette. 2008. Tribal Vision: A Celebration of Life through Tribal
Belly Dance. Portland: Cultivator Press.
Roman, Leslie G., and Linda K. Christian-Smith (eds.). 1988. Becoming Feminine:
The Politics of Popular Culture. New York: Falmer Press.
Rosen, Ruth. 2000. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women Movement
Changed America. New York: Viking.
Ross, Andrew. 1989. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. London:
Routledge.
Roushdy, Noha. 2009. Dancing in the Betwixt and Between Femininity and
Embodiment in Egypt. PhD dissertation, American University in Cairo.
Roushdy, Noha. 2013. What Is Baladi about al-Raqs al-Baladi? In Belly Dance
Around the World: New Communities, Performance and Identity, ed. Caitlin
McDonald and Barbara Sellers-Young, 18–32. Jefferson: McFarland.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 161
Roushdy, Noha. 2014. Feminity and Dance in Egypt: Embodiment and Meaning in
Al-Raqs Al-Baladi. Cario: American University Press.
Rubin, Rachel Lee. 2012. Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American
Counterculture. New York: New York University Press.
Ruyter, Nancy Lee. 2005. La Meri and Middle Eastern Dance. In Belly Dance:
Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy, ed. Anthony Shay and
Barbara Sellers-Young, 207–220. California: Mazda Publishers.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Said, Edward W. 1990. Homage to a Belly Dance. London Review of Books
(September 13).
Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
Said, Edward W. 1998. Between Worlds. London Review of Books (May 7).
Said, Edward W. 1999a. Farewell to Tahia. Al-Ahram Weekly (October 7–13,
Issue 450).
Said, Edward W. 1999b. Out of Place. New York: Vantage Books.
Said, Edward W. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Said, Edward W. 2002. Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward Said.
Cambridge: South End Press.
Saleh, Magda Ahmed Abdel Ghaffar. 1979. Documentation of the Ethnic Dance
Traditions of the Arab Republic of Egypt. PhD dissertation, New York University.
Saleh, Magda Ahmed Abdel Ghaffar. 2002. Dance in Egypt. In Garland
Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 6: Middle East, ed. Virgina Danielson,
Scott Marcus, and Dwight Reynolds, 623–633. London/New York: Routledge.
Salem, L.A. 2001. Race, Sexuality, and Arabs in American Entertainment 1850–1900.
In Colors of Enchantment – Theatre, Dance, Music and the Visual Arts of the Middle
East, ed. S. Zuhur, 211–227. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.
Salimpour, Jamila. 1977. An Illustrated Manual of Finger Cymbal Instruction:
History, Evolution, and Related Instrument. Published by Author.
Salimpour, Jamila. 1978. The Danse Orientale. Published by Author.
Salimpour, Jamila. 1979. Belly Dance: The Birth Magic Ritual, from Cave, to Cult,
to Cabaret. Published by Author.
Salimpour, Jamila. 1999. From Many Tribes: The Origins of Bal Anat. Habbi 17:
16–18.
Saslimpour, Jamila. 1999. From Many Tribes: The Origins of Bal Anat. Habbi.
17/3, 16.
Savigliano, Marta E. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder:
Westview Press.
Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Pennsylvania:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Seibert, Lauren Marie. 2002. “All the Things that Portray Us as Individuals and as
a Nation”: Reda Troupe and Egyptian National Identity in the Twentieth
Century. Text, Practice, Performance IV: 51–63.
162 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sellers-Young, Barbara. 1986. The Exoteric/Esoteric Dimension and Changing

Traditions in an Arab Community in Oregon. Northwest Folklore 4, 18- Club
Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House (review).
Sellers-Young, Barbara. 2001. Nostalgia or Newness: Nihon Buyo in the United
States. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 23: 135–149.
Sellers-Young, Barbara. 2009. Ibrahim Farrah: Dancer, Teacher, Choreographer,
Publisher. In When Men Dance, ed. Jennifer Fisher and Anthony Shay, 355–374.
London: Oxford Press.
Sellers-Young, Barbara. 2013. The Interplay of Dance and the Imagined
Possibilities of Identity. In Around the World: New Communities, Performance
and Identity, ed. Caitlin McDonald and Barbara Sellers-Young, 3–16. Jefferson:
McFarland Press.
Shafik, V. 2001. Prostitute for a Good Reason: Stars and Morality in Egypt.
Women’s Studies International Forum 24: 711–725.
Sharafuddin, Mohammed. 1996. Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary
Encounters with the Orient. New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers.
Shay, Anthony. 1997. In Search of Traces: Linkages of Dance and Performative
Expression in the Iranian World. Visual Anthropology (Fall) 10: 335–360.
Shay, Anthony. 1999. Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World.
Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers.
Shay, Anthony. 2002. Choreographing Politics. Connecticut: Wesleyan Press.
Shay, Anthony. 2005. The Male Dancer. In Belly Dance: Orientalism,
Transnationalism & Harem Fantasy, ed. Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-
Young, 85–113. Costa Mesa: Mazda Press.
Shay, Anthony. 2008. Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with
Exotic Dance Forms. Jefferson: McFarland.
Shay, Anthony. 2014. The Dangerous Lives of Public Performers: Dancing, Sex, and
Entertainment in the Islamic World. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shay, Anthony, and Barbara Sellers-Young. 2003. Belly Dance: Orientalism-Self-
Exoticism-Exoticism. Dance Research Journal. 35: 13–37.
Shay, Anthony, and Barbara Sellers-Young (eds.). 2005. Belly Dance: Orientalism,
Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers.
Simonson, Mary. 2013. Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and
American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Simour, L. 2014. Blurring the Boundaries of Gendered Encounters: Moorish
Dancing Girls in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century American Fair
Exhibitions. Hawwa 11: 133–159.
Song, C.Z., and X.H. Zhu. 2008. Rational Analysis of Aerobics Value in China
from the Perspective of Belly Dancing Development. Journal of Jishou University
(Natural Sciences Edition) 5: 025.
Soueif, Ahdaf. 2012. The Map of Love. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 163
Starhawk. 1999. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Body.
New York: Harper.
Steegmuller, Francis. 1972. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour. London: The
Bodley Head.
Studlar, Gaylyn. 1993. Valentino, ‘Optic Intoxication’, and Dance Madness. In
Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven
Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 23–45. London: Routledge.
Studlar, Gaylyn. 1995. Out-Salomeing Salome. Michigan Quarterly Review 34:
487–510.
Suleiman, Michael W. (ed.). 2002. A Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans
in New York City. New York: Museum of the City of New York.
Taussig, Michael. 1992. Mimesis and Alterity. London: Routledge.
Terry, Walter. 1956. The Dance in America. New York: Harper Brothers.
Thelen, Esther, and Linda Smith. 1996. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the
Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thomas, Helen. 1995. Dance Modernity and Culture. New York: Routledge.
Tucker, Judith E. 1985. Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New
York: Performing Arts Journal Press.
Turner, Victor. 2001a. Anthropology of Experience. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Turner, Victor. 2001b. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.
New York: Performing Arts Journal Press.
Tzanelli, Rodanthi. 2013. From (Dis) Emobodied Journeys to Artscapes: Belly
Dancing as a Digital Traveling Culture. In Lifestyle Mobilities: Intersections of
Travel, Leisure and Migration, ed. Tara Duncan, Scot A. Cohen, and Maria
Thulemark, 65–80. London: Ashgate.
Valassopoulos, Anastasia. 2007. “Secrets” and “Closed Off Areas”: The Concept
of Tarab or “Enchantment” in Arab Popular Culture. Popular Music and Society
30: 329–341.
Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. 1995. A Trade Like Any Other Female Singers and Dancers
in Egypt. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. 2008. ‘Repentant’ Artists in Egypt: Debating Gender,
Performing Arts and Religion. Contemporary Islam 2: 191–210.
Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. 2013. Performing Piety: Singers and Actors in Egypt’s
Islamic Revival. Texas: University of Texas Press.
Vigier, Rachel. 1994. Gestures of Genius: Women, Dance and the Body. Stratford:
Mercury Press.
Wood, Leona and Anthony Shay. 1976. Danse du Ventre: A Fresh Appraisal.
Dance Research Journal. 8/2, (Spring/Summer), 18–30.
Wilkins, Amy. 2004. ‘So Full of Myself as a Chick’ Goth Women, Sexual
Independence, and Gender Egalitarianism. Gender and Society 18: 328–349.
164 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Williams, Rosalind. 1991. The Dream World of Mass Consumption. In Rethinking

Popular Culture, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, 198–236.
Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Williams, Daniel. 2010. Egyptian Tradition Revived: Men Muscle Back in to
Bellydancing. GBM News, http://www.gbmnews.com/articles/2559/1/
Egytian-Tradition-Revived---Men-muscle-back-in-to-belly-dancing/Page1.html
Wilson, Serena, and Alan Wilson. 1973. The Serena Technique of Belly Dancing.
New York: Pocket Books.
Wolf, Naomi. 1997. Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle of Womanhood. New York:
Fawcett Columbine.
Wynn, L.L. 2007. Pyramids and Nightclubs. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Zamora and Gomes. 2006. Learn the Art of Male Belly Dancing. DVD.
Zarrilli, Phillip. 1995. Acting (Re) Considered: Theory and Practice. London:
Routledge.
Ziter, Edward. 2003. The Orient on the Victorian Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Zuhur, Sherifa (ed.). 1998. Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts in
the Middle East. Cairo: American University Press.
Zuhur, Sherifa (ed.). 2001. Colors of Enchantment: Theatre, Dance, Music, and the
Visual Arts of the Middle East. Cairo: American University Press.
Zussman, Mira. 1995. Far From the Pink Chiffon: Reshaping Erotic Bellydance.
Whole Earth Review 1995: 35–39.
INDEX1
A B
Abdel-Nassar, Gamal, 27 baladi, 4, 24, 26, 126, 132, 146
Adra, Najwa, 22 Bal Anat, 74–6, 83
Ahlan Wa Sahalan, 118, 119 Balladine, Bert, 117, 123
al-Atrash, Farid, 26 Bateson, Gregory, 73
Albright, Ann Cooper, 2 Beaulieu, Jill, 4, 20, 139
Alloula, Malek, 20 Bellydance Superstars, 130, 142–6,
almeh, awâlim, 30, 35 148n18, 148n19, 148n20
Alsultany, Evelyn, 125, 147 Bentley, Toni, 43, 44
Alves-Masters, Judy, 62 Bhabha, Homi, 36
Aly, Rmay M. K., 104, 125, 126 bint al-balad, 26
Amar, Eliran Edri, 94 Bloom, Sol, 37, 145
Anderson, Benedict, 129 Bock, Sheila Marie, 55, 144
And, Metin, 17n20 Bollywood, 11, 86, 93, 99, 105
Appadurai, Arjun, 11, 12, 145 Bordeon, Candace, 23
Arab Americans, 46, 52, 70, 88n4 Bordo, Susan, 55, 145
Australia, 10, 12, 13, 16n12, Bourdieu, Pierre, 51, 104
16n14, 42, 72, 87, 89n24, Brazil, 2, 33, 34, 105
98, 121 Brill, Dunja, 94, 97
1
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to footnotes.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0
166 INDEX
Brown, Helen Gurley, 50, 68 Djoumanhna, Kajira, 78

Brunett, Ron, 9 Dougherty, Roberta L, 25, 26
Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen, 7 Downey, Dennis J., 63
Burt, Ramsay, 109 Dox, Donnalee, 53–5
Butler, Judith, 5, 20, 51
E
C ecology, 57
Cairo, Egypt, 19–20, 22, 23, 120, 130 Edwards, Holly, 20
Carioca, Tahia, 21, 22, 26–32, 35–8, Egypt/Egyptian, 3–5, 8, 10–14, 15n1,
38n2, 70 15n2, 15n7, 16n16, 19–39, 46,
Carlton, Donna, 56 47, 49, 53, 60, 61, 63, 68, 70,
Chang, Yu-Chi, 62, 105 72, 74–6, 88n4, 89n12, 89n14,
Cherniavsky, Felix, 43 92, 97–9, 103, 104, 109–14,
Chicago Faire of 1893, 31 116, 117, 119, 120, 122,
China/Chinese, 12, 43, 62, 109, 126, 130–7, 139–42, 145,
120–3, 127n9, 127n17 146, 147n2, 148n13
communitas, spontaneous e-learning, 8
communitas, 24 Eliade, Mircea, 44, 64n1
Compton, John, 66, 75–7, 89n15, Embodied Belly Dance, 59–63
89n16, 89n17 England, 12, 13, 86, 94, 95, 97, 98
convergence, 2, 10–12, 14, 32, 37, Erenberg, Lewis A, 47
45, 48, 52, 86, 87, 134 erotic, 37, 43–5, 48, 52, 62, 67, 69,
Copeland, Miles, 142–5, 148n17 77, 105, 109, 111, 125
Crosby, Janice, 54, 55 exotic/exotification, 3, 4, 14, 32, 33,
Csoradas, Thomas, 9 43–5, 47, 52, 62, 64n2, 71, 72,
Curtis, George William, 110 74–7, 96, 124, 125, 144, 146
D F
Damasio, Antonio, 61 Fahmy, Farida, 131–4
dark fusion, 11, 86, 87, 91, 94, 97, Fahmy, Ziad, 32
98, 100, 103 Farrah, Ibraham, 5, 89n12, 93,
Deagon, Andrea, 52, 53, 55 114–17, 123
Dearey, M., 96 femininity/feminine, 4, 12, 14, 31,
de Beauvoir, Simone, 41 42, 45, 48–53, 61, 62, 74–7, 82,
Decoret-Ahiha, Anne, 70 83, 85, 96, 97, 109–15, 117,
de Koning, Anouk, 32 121, 122, 124, 134, 144
Delilah, 15n2, 56–8 Finland, 105, 116, 134
Delsarte, 45, 57 Fisher, Jennifer, 122
Denishawn, 45, 48 Flaubert, Gustave, 27, 31, 38, 110,
Desmond, Jane, 105 112, 139
diaspora, 1 Foster, Susan Leigh, 110
INDEX 167
Franken, Marjorie, 133 Hollywood, 20, 25, 27, 28, 45–7, 52,
Friedan, Betty, 42, 50 73, 75, 82, 92, 99, 113, 117,
Friend, Robyn, 53 132, 134, 143
Frühauf, Tina, 95, 96, 103 hybrid, 81, 87, 91, 105, 115, 132, 146
fusion, 3, 14, 78, 85–7, 88n2,
91–100, 102, 103, 105, 116,
122, 123, 144 I
improvisation, 4, 10–12, 17n17, 24,
25, 56, 58–61, 67, 71, 81, 85,
G 91, 93, 94, 99, 119, 126, 137
Gallagher, Shaun, 61 Islam
Gazzaniga, Michael, 61 haram, 5
gender, 1, 5, 8, 11, 12, 14, 22, 42, 44, purposeful art, 34, 35, 104
45, 48, 51, 53, 73, 75, 87, 91,
94–7, 105, 106, 109, 110,
122–6, 132, 135, 146 J
Ghawâzî, 4, 10, 23, 31, 70, 87, Jarmakani, Amira, 20, 31, 32, 64n3,
110, 132 148n21
Gimbutas, Marija, 42 Jenkins, Henry, 11
Gioseffi, Daniela, 41, 42, 47, 80 Johnstone, Janet, 101, 103, 107n17
globalization, 32, 37 Jorgensen, Jeana, 54–6
goddess/goddesses, 11, 14, 15n2, 42,
44, 52, 53, 55, 64n7, 75, 80,
103, 139, 140 K
Golding, Christina, 94 Karam, John T., 105
Gothic Belly Dance (GBD), 11, 92, Karayanni, Stavros Stavrou, 16n12,
95, 96, 103, 106n5, 106n9 17n20, 110, 111
Goth subculture, 94, 95, 97 Keft-Kennedy, Virginia, 64n6
Grabar, Oleg, 43 Kelly, Brigid, 89n25, 105
Grasso, Alado, 38 Kennedy, Valerie, 27, 28
Gray, Laurel, 53, 87 Khwals, 4
Greer, Germaine, 42 Köçek, 4, 110
Griffin, Susan, 42 Koritz, Amy, 43
Grosz, Elizabeth, 55, 125 Kraus, Rachel, 52–4
Guo Wei, 120–3 KulthTm, Umm, 24, 26, 31, 33,
131, 136, 141
H
Hammond, Andrew, 32 L
Hanem, Kuchuk, 31 Lane, Edward William, 70, 89n14, 110
Hanna, Thomas, 6, 54, 71 Laukkan, Anu, 105
Harper, Lynette, 63, 64n2 Lebanon, 4, 47, 68, 88n4, 103, 117,
Hayles, Katherine N., 9 126, 136, 142
168 INDEX
LeDoux, Joseph, 61 New Zealand, 56, 89n25, 143

lesbian, 80, 86, 123–5 North Africa, 1, 3–5, 10–14, 16n12,
Lillebuen, Steve, 118 16n14, 17n20, 20, 22, 24, 25,
liminal, 2, 14, 15n2, 73, 75, 96, 110 44, 47, 52, 66, 70, 74, 78, 83,
liminoid, 2, 14, 15n2, 37, 47, 48, 52, 85–7, 88n4, 91–3, 97, 103, 105,
118, 125 109, 117, 126, 126n5, 130, 142,
Lorde, Audre, 69, 125 143, 146, 147
Lorius, Cassandra, 112
O
M Ohanian, Armen, 69, 70
MacKenzie, John M., 4, 20, 43, 139 Ong, Alhwa, 9
Maira, Sunaina, 48 Orientalism, 13, 14, 20, 31, 37, 38,
Masabni, Badia, 25, 26, 116 45, 47, 48, 63, 64n6, 95, 113,
masculinity/masculine, 14, 61, 66, 125, 145, 146
74–7, 87, 97, 112, 113, 115, Osborn, Jonathan, 125
117, 118, 120, 122–4, 135, 144 Ouled Nail, 4
Matter, Joan, 42, 51
McCullough, Edo, 43
McRobbie, Angela, 105, 106 P
Meyer, Anneke, 124 performative, 1, 2, 5, 12, 45, 50, 91,
Michelle, Carolyn, 56 105, 126, 146
Middle Eastern, 3, 19, 26, 46–8, 52, pilgrimage, 13, 22, 31–8, 53, 63, 118,
62, 68, 70–2, 74, 75, 83, 88, 119, 134
103, 105, 115, 125, 130, 134–8, popular culture, 1–17, 17n20, 20, 21,
141–3, 147n1, 148n11 26, 29, 38, 41–64, 74, 86, 87,
Milestone, Katie, 124 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103,
mimesis, 5–7, 42 106, 109, 115, 124–6, 144–7
Mishra, Smeeta, 56 post colonial, 20
modes of transmission, 5–11, 14 Potuo4lu-Cook, OykY, 17n20, 104
Moe, Angela M, 16n14, 54, 62
Mohanty, Chandra, 13
Monty, Paul Eugene, 97 R
Morgan, Robin, 42 Racy, A. J, 23, 24
Radner, Hillary, 68
Ramzy, Yasmina
N Arabesque Dance Company and
nature, 2, 29, 55–8, 60, 79–81 Orchestra, 135–42
Nericcio-Bohlman, Carolena, 66, raqs gothique, 91, 92, 94–100, 103
77–82, 86, 89n18 raqs sharki, 4, 5, 12, 16n10, 17n20,
FatChanceBellyDance®, 77–82, 21–3, 25, 28, 29, 32, 36, 37,
89n18, 89n22 38n5, 80, 103, 112, 116, 122, 126
Ness, Sally Ann, 13 Rasmussen, Anne K., 46, 47, 146
INDEX 169
Reda, Mahmoud, 116, 130–5, 145, Shohat, Ella, 2, 3, 147

146, 147n2 Simonson, Mary, 44
Reda Troupe, 14, 27, 113, 116, Smith, Linda, 61
130–5, 145, 146, 147n2 somatic, 2, 6, 9, 34, 54–6, 59, 61,
Rees-Denis, Paulette, 10, 66, 82–6, 64n8, 81, 87, 101, 114
90n27, 90n28, 90n29 Soueif, Ahdaf, 20
Gypsy Caravan, 83, 85 St. Denis, Ruth, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51,
Renaissance Pleasure Faire, 72–5, 80 57, 64n2
Roberts, Mary, 4, 139 Denishawn, 45, 48
Ross, Andrew, 2 Studlar, Gaylyn, 4, 20, 45, 139
Roushdy, Noha, 4, 15n1, 26, 111
Rubin, Rachel Lee, 73
Russia, 12, 33, 34, 105, 121, 122, T
132, 147n2 Talbi, Noor, 123
Ruyter, Nancy Lee, 57 tarab, 23, 24, 28–30, 35, 37, 38, 63,
142, 146
Taussig, Michael, 6, 7
S Tempest, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101
Said, Edward W, 4, 14, 20–2, 26–32, Thelen, Esther, 61
35–8, 111, 139 Toronto, Canada, 14, 130, 135–8, 140,
Salimpour, Jamila, 53, 66, 69–71, 141, 145, 146, 147n3, 147n4
74–6, 79, 82, 88n6, 89n9 transcendent, 24, 55, 56
Salome, 29, 31, 43, 45, 62, 92, 139 transgender, transsexual, 97, 123–5
San Francisco, California, 10, 12, 32, tribal belly dance, 75, 78, 80, 82, 83,
53, 65–9, 71, 72, 74–8, 81–3, 86, 86, 88n2, 89n25, 91, 95, 122
87, 88n4, 89n16, 118, 119, 123, Tribal Fest, 86–8
127n18, 134, 135, 147n1 Turkey, 3, 4, 8, 11–13, 15n6,
Sangiorgi, Maria, 56, 59–62 16–17n16, 38n3, 47, 68, 70, 75,
Saren, Michael, 94 103, 104, 110, 122, 126, 141, 142
Saudi Arabia, 32 Turner, Victor, 1, 2, 15n2, 24, 73
Savigliano, Marta E., 104 Tzanelli, Rodanthi, 38n3
Schechner, Richard, 12, 73, 74
Schikhatt, 4
Seattle, Washington, 100–3 U
Seibert, Lauren Marie, 131 UK Gothla, 97–101, 106n11, 107n19
Sharif, Yousry, 116, 117, 122,
127n6, 135
Shay, Anthony, 5, 13, 16n12, 17n17, V
17n20, 22, 24, 111, 112, 122, Van Nieuwkerk, Karin, 5, 17n20, 22,
124, 126n5, 129, 130, 132, 134 23, 30, 32, 34, 35, 112
Sheif, Tito, 122 Von Trapp, Draconis, 123, 127n19
170 INDEX
W Y
Waking Persephone, 97, 100–3, 106n12 Yan Chenbin, 121
Wanigasekera, Viraj, 117–20, 122, 123
Wen Kexin, 120
Wilkins, Amy, 96 Z
Williams, Daniel, 15n7, 112, 113 Zarrilli, Phillip, 6
Williams, Rosalind, 43 Zenne, 4, 10
Wilson, Serena, 48, 50, 89n12, 93 Zerbib, Sandrine
Wolf, Naomi, 66, 67 Ziter, Edward, 20, 139
World War II, 29, 46, 67, 115 Zuhur, Sherifa, 23, 24, 26, 29
Wynn, Lisa, 32 Zussman, Mira, 78–80

Barbara Sellers-Young (Auth.) - Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity-Palgrave Macmillan Uk (2016)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Barbara Sellers-Young (Auth.) - Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity-Palgrave Macmillan Uk (2016)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

belly dance,

ISBN 978-1-349-94953-3 ISBN 978-1-349-94954-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954976

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The global belly-dance community included me as a dancer and later

1 Introduction: Belly Dance: Transmission

2 Egypt: Place of Pilgrimage, Place of Home 19

3 Dancing the Goddess in Popular Culture: Resistance,

4 San Francisco and American Tribal Style 65

5 Fusion, Dark Fusion and Raqs Gothique 91

6 Belly Dance, Gender and Identity 109

7 Belly Dance and the Stage: Nationality,

Fig. 2.1 A young Tahia Carioca 21

Introduction: Belly Dance: Transmission

A dancer stands on the stage of an urban cultural centre. The dancer is

© The Author(s) 2016 1

mative (1982) discusses the relationship between the liminal and its rela-

Superstars entitled American Dancer (2003); an account of the dance

of their expressive culture. This disavowal included a denial of the legiti-

through an imitation of the performer by the observer. The performer

survival, is also the skill we use to adapt to environments including interac-

Websites contain photographs of dancers, renditions of the dance’s history

body image, gender and community of origin. The combination of differ-

GLOBAL CONVERGENCE OF IMAGES

Integrating Appadurai’s global flows with Jenkin’s convergence the-

CONTEXT OF THIS MANUSCRIPT

The underlying framework for this manuscript is Orientalism as the

Istanbul_Bellydance_inst.php). There is also a Mediterranean festival and

Egypt: Place of Pilgrimage, Place of Home

© The Author(s) 2016 19

EDWARD SAID, EGYPT AND ORIENTALISM

Fig. 2.1 A young Tahia Carioca

Throughout his life in interviews and writing (1990, 1999b, 2000),

EGYPT: DANCE, COUNTRY AND TARAB

(mawâlid) have also often featured performances by dancers. As van

related musical understanding to portray a series of emotional portraits that

TAHIA CARIOCA: DAUGHTER OF THE LAND, DANCER

On the stage and in films, Tahia Carioca performed a movement vocabu-

dance contemporary Samia Gamal (1924–1994), whose Western dance

EDWARD SAID, REFLECTIONS FROM EXILE

postcolonial powers impinge on scholarly writing and research” (2000:

Although clearly a fan of her performance, Said is still caught in the

lack of specific lineage system and associated vocabulary, had become an

those of Western imitators. In part, he makes his argument by locating Tahia

EGYPT RE(VISITED), A PLACE OF PILGRIMAGE

This conflict between attraction and aversion ultimately became part of

As part of his (re)positioning of Tahia Carioca, and by extension the

of the theory of Orientalism beyond a critique of the colonialist agenda to

Dancer Dina to perform at his son’s wedding as reported on October 12,

Dancing the Goddess in Popular Culture:

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her pivotal book The Second Sex:

Simone de Beauvoir’s words were a challenge to women to expand their

© The Author(s) 2016 41

contained rhythms of her walk” (1980: 22). In Gioseffi’s rendition of the

THE ORIENT, HOLLYWOOD AND THE IMMIGRANT

As film scholar Gaylyn Studlar points out in her essay “‘Out-Salomeing

(orgiastic) intensity seemed to have had a particular appeal to women both

This physical, psychological and emotional embrace of the orient of the

Encouraged by the precedents set in such media as Orientalist literature

Restaurant and club owners enticed customers with promises of a Middle

as part of the second wave of feminism. The integration of an erotic and