Chapter One

What is Belly Dance?

Belly dance is a 20^th century name for a dance practice and performance art that developed from a widespread social dance form of the Middle East. Its focus is the harmonious, expressive movement of the whole body, but its technique centers on hip and torso articulations, along with subtle, framing movement with the hands and arms. In its manifestation as performance, it is usually a solo dance, and at least part of any given performance is usually improvised. It is an expressive dance, in that it shows the flow of feeling in abstract form rather than telling a story – though you could argue that each dance has its own unspoken narrative flow. It is intimately related to its music, expressing the qualities and feelings the music evokes. In the West it is learned in classes and is done almost exclusively by women. In the East “belly dance,” absorbed from childhood, is a social dance form for both men and women. All the same, most of the leading Eastern performers today are women, and some Eastern women feel that the dance reflects their feminine experience.

The term “belly dance” is a literal translation of the French term “danse du ventre.” The French term was coined in the late 19^th century, when travel and tourism to the Middle East became more common and when Eastern dancers began appearing in Western venues.[1] It was an evocative choice of term to describe the native dance. For the French, used to social dances which focused on leg movement and traveling steps, the use of the torso in dancing seemed sexual and sordid. By calling this dance “belly dancing,” they associated the “danse du ventre” with the baser appetites of the belly, in contrast to their social dances and their own dance art, ballet. This reinforced their sense of cultural superiority. Those among the French who were interested in defining Eastern dance in more artistic terms used the term “danse orientale,” which means “eastern dance,” to describe it, or they used more specific terms, such as “the dance of the Almees” (almees were educated, professional singers and dancers).

In the United States, the term “belly dance” gained popularity after the Chicago Columbian Exhibition of 1893, where a number of different Eastern troupes offered music and dance performances to the public. Commentators on the Exhibition preferred to use the French term in describing these performances, but French was the most commonly studied second language at the time and the meaning of “danse du ventre” was hardly a mystery.[2] Despite the existence of the term “belly dance,” the dance of Eastern women, or of American women doing dances that looked “Eastern,” was usually described as “oriental dance” at the time. The term “oriental dance” remained commonly in use until the late 1960’s, when “belly dance” became the term of choice in the population at large.

Why was the polite “oriental dance” abandoned while “belly dance” became the popular term? In part, this may reflect the changing meaning of the word “oriental,” which is now usually used of the Far East rather than the Middle East. More to the point, though, the term “belly dance” reflects the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s, and the daring idea that women might want to embrace a sexual or at least sensual form of dance. The 1960’s saw Sonny Lester’s “How to Belly Dance for your Husband” and Ozel Turkbas’ “How to Make your Husband a Sultan” become hot selling albums, marketed to ordinary women who wanted to explore sensual movement for more or less sexual purposes. By the early 1970’s, the revolution was in full swing, and the “husband” dropped from the picture in popular books like The Compleat Belly Dancer and The Art of Belly Dance. “Belly dance” has been the default term for this dance ever since.

The Arabic name for the dance is raqs sharqi, which means simply “Eastern dance” or “oriental dance.” This term is in part ancient, and in part modern. The ancient part is raqs, a term that means simply “dance.” Raqs, like the English “dance,” means essentially “patterned movement for entertainment or aesthetic purpose.” Since belly dance arises from a widespread folk dance tradition, raqs may be how people thought about it before any special name was required.

Consensus among Egyptians in the theatrical profession is that the term raqs sharqi was coined in the early 20^th century in Egypt; sometimes it is attributed to the famous diva and entrepreneur, Badia Masabni. In venues that catered both to Western military officers and travelers and to the Westernized Egyptian elite, a term was needed for the dance that elevated it to the level of other kinds of dance performance (such as the vaudeville-type offerings available from traveling Western artists) while distinguishing it as an Eastern cultural product. A term meaning “Eastern dance” was required, and raqs sharqi it became. It is hard to know how much cultural trading went into the widespread adoption of this term. The French already called the dance “danse orientale,” so the Arabic may ironically be a direct translation of the French phrase.

In the 21^st century, there are many artists in the West who would like to be rid of the term “belly dance,” which carries the weight of its original derogatory usage. But there is no easy answer to what to call it instead. “Middle Eastern dance” includes a great many dances that are not raqs sharqi, and calling yourself a “Middle Eastern dancer” seems to imply that you are ethnically Middle Eastern. “Oriental” has come to mean the Far East – people envision kimonos rather than the bedlah-clad solo performer. “Raqs sharqi” and simply “raqs” are problematic, because Westerners have no idea what they mean. In any case, dancers who prefer a Turkish style might not want an Arabic name for their dance (the Turkish term is oryantal dans, which means “Eastern dance”). There are also a great many dancers in the West who perform interpretive styles that have a very different aesthetic from raqs sharqi as done in the East, so that raqs sharqi does not really describe them.

There is a move on to reclaim “belly dance” as a term for the dance – to embrace its association with the belly and the body’s other appetites, and use it as a term of power by refusing to accept its derogatory implications. Many dancers feel perfectly at home with the term. But there remains concern in the profession that the name holds us back in the public eye, and perpetuates the Western world’s tendency not to consider belly dance a valid art form.

The State of the Art

The debate about terminology is ongoing, and it reflects the many different perspectives on what belly dance is or should be. Belly dance is not a static art, despite the rhetoric you often come across that describes it as “timeless” or “ancient.” It has seen considerable change in the 20^th century, and you could argue that the dance as we know it now is largely a 20^th century creation, in the same category as tap dance, modern dance, and jazz music.

In the East, the past seventy years have seen steady development. Egyptian musical films that drew on Western cinema popularized a new vision of the elegant dancer, swirling through complex sets or a collection of chorus girls. The development of nightclub venues called out new uses of music and a new structure for shows, while television performances required a new way of framing the dancer and presenting the dance. In the latter half of the 20^th century, hip articulation techniques became sharper to draw out a new percussiveness in the pop-influenced music. Costume styles reflected changes in international fashion: the svelte and romantic styles of the 1950’s evolved into the long fringe and big hair of the 1980’s, which naturally gave way to the sleek, asymmetrical styles of the 2000’s.

In the West, the dance has burgeoned into many different forms. Already by the 1970’s, there were Turkish and Egyptian and American-style dancers, and by the 90’s, new forms and fusions had sprung up in abundance. At any given dance festival, sequined and beaded performers of raqs sharqi may share the stage with turbaned and tattooed Tribal dancers; Turkish style zils may ring jauntily into air just recently filled with the sighing of an Egyptian-style taqsim or with the pounding rhythm of a zar. At times, there is controversy about what should or should not be considered belly dance, as Internet dance discussion groups show. One recent controversy involves whether the popular traveling company the Bellydance Superstars actually performs anything that meets the traditional aesthetic criteria of belly dance; another concerns a performance by a popular dance duo which many observers felt was pornographic and ultimately destructive to belly dance’s quest for popular legitimacy; a third concerns the schism between such belly dance manifestations as “Gothic-Industrial Tribal Fusion” and the art as conceived in the East.

Despite these concerns about the shifting boundaries of the dance form, the belly dance world of the West is what the dancer Laurel Victoria Gray calls a “big tent.” It is the open-minded and inviting (if sometimes contentious) home to the main styles of belly dance in the East (Turkish, Egyptian, and Lebanese), the many different styles that have sprung up in the West (such as American Tribal and Tribal Fusion), various varieties of fusion (incorporating flamenco, kathak, or “Gypsy” theatrical styles). It also encompasses many ethnic dance forms (such as Khaleegy and Uzbek) that are not exactly belly dance, together with theatricalizations of some things that are not dance at all (such as the zar and guedra rituals and the men’s stick combat tahtib).

Ultimately, though, whatever their aims and aesthetics, all of the modern offshoots have evolved from a form of solo-improvised dance with deep roots in the Middle East. The elements of that art and its cultural surroundings are the focus of this chapter.

The Fundamentals

Because the term “belly dance” has so much modern baggage associated with it – harem girls, two-piece costumes, smoky cabarets, earth mothers, and so on – I will usually use the term SIDTA (from Solo- Improvised Dance based on Torso Articulation) when I talk about the ancient manifestations of the dance. This term comes from the rock-bottom trio of characteristics that define the dance now and should define belly dance in history:

· It occurs in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, northern India, and the southern Mediterranean. Or: it is consciously based on dances from those areas.

· It is based on hip and torso articulation, the arms generally used in countermovement to frame the body, often with delicate hand movements.

· It is solo-improvised, or it is a choreographed expression of a dance that exists primarily as a solo-improvised form.

Geographical Location: Belly dance occurs in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, Northern India, and the Southern Mediterranean. Or: it is consciously based on dances from those areas.

Today, the dance style of solo-improvised dance based on hip and torso articulation stretches through a wide area: the southern and eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, finally extending into northern India. There are many regional variations, and the manifestations of this dance you would find in Athens, Cairo and Tehran are clearly different. In some of these cultures, SIDTA may be the primary form of folk dance. In others, it may be limited to certain areas or certain kinds of occasions and exist side by side with different kinds of folk dances, such as line and circle dances that do not involve hip articulations.[3]

The modern phenomenon is a definable geographical and historical entity. It exists across these cultures because they share a history and have been continually in contact with one another, to some extent, for millennia. This is the area in which we should search for ancient belly dance as well. If we find dances involving hip articulation in South America, for example, they have little to do the evolution of belly dance. But if we find something that looks like belly dance in the target area, then it probably does have some relationship with the historical forces that led to the development of modern belly dance.

What are the historical forces that defined the range of modern SIDTA? They align along the two great channels of human movement and cultural exchange that bind this area together: The Mediterranean and the Silk Road.

The Mediterranean borders the Middle East and North Africa as well as southern Europe, and sea trade was a prime impetus for a great deal of early cultural exchange. Sea trade brought metalworking technologies from the Middle East to Europe in the 3000’s BCE, and iron technology 2000 years later. It promoted the international relations that brought Aegean tribute to the courts of the Egyptian pharaohs, and Egyptian faience and Syrian ivory into the Bronze Age Aegean.

There was colonization as well as trade, bringing larger populations in contact with one another. The Phoenicians, originating in what is now Lebanon, were wide-ranging seafarers, who established colonies in Tunisia (Carthage) and Spain (Gades) by the 10^th century BCE, where Phoenician culture took local roots and influenced North African and Spanish peoples. The coast of Turkey was settled by Greeks in the 10^th century BCE, and Ionia (as the Turkish coast was known in antiquity) influenced the Greeks and Romans in turn. There were Greek immigrants in coastal Egypt from the 7^th century BCE. Following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4^th century BCE, widespread immigration and population shifts changed the face of the Mediterranean. This intermingling of cultures only increased as political power shifted to the Roman Empire from the 2^nd century BCE to the 4^th century CE.

The story continues in the overland routes through the Middle East and central Asia. Beginning with the ancient city-states of the Sumerians in the 3000’s BCE to the ascent of the Assyrians in the 1000’s, there were both trade and conflict in the many different peoples that made up the ancient Middle East. With the growth of the Persian Empire in the 7^th century BCE and later, the overland trade routes into central Asia and throughout the Middle East were increasingly exploited. Cultural interchange flourished. 350 years later, the conquests of Alexander the Great, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, incorporated almost the entire area of modern SIDTA. By the 1^st century CE, the Roman Empire, expanding eastward, brought first conflict, then peace, trade, and cultural continuity to the region. Later movements of empire brought further cultural developments. The Moorish occupation of Spain from the 8^th to the 15^th centuries CE clearly had an influence on Spanish culture, developing trends that had been there for the millennia since the Phoenician settlements were founded. The emergence of the “Gypsies” from India into Iran in the 8^th century CE, and their eventual dispersal throughout Europe and North Africa, affected the dance traditions of many countries. The Silk Road continued to be avenue of trade and cultural interchange. Immigration, travel, the experience of the foreign that was also the familiar, continued to have its impact on the cultural heritage of all the parties involved.

This long history of exchange, continually renewing itself at key points in history, fluctuating with the rise and fall of the many empires that dominated these areas over time, inevitably left its mark. What does it mean, to trade with foreigners? To live among them? To have them live among you? To be subject to their empires, or subject them to yours? One result of this continuing interchange was that the cultures involved developed their own stereotypes of the foreigners they encountered: the effete Greek, the luxury-loving Persian, the all-too-earthy Egyptian, the intractable and warlike Jew, the fierce and independent nomad, the blunt Roman, and so on. Some of these cultural prejudices continued to develop into the present day, where they still trouble our international relationships.

While these stereotypes showed how people understood their differences, there are also threads of similarity as well. You might see them in some artistic traditions, or in attitudes toward hospitality, domestic architecture, ideas of family honor, or in attitudes toward gender and sexuality. In modern times, dance is one element of this shared cultural milieu. It may have been so in antiquity as well.

SIDTA today is not the same in every culture that practices it. In Egypt, for example, SIDTA is the most common form of social dance, and central in the dance life of the people. In Iran, as is common in the SIDTA area, it is more of an urban phenomenon.[4] In Turkey, SIDTA coexists with other forms of folk dance, such as line dances; in Greece, SIDTA exists but it regarded with some suspicion and dismissed as foreign (despite a longstanding presence in Greece that may date back thousands of years). Modern SIDTA does not mean the same thing in every culture where it plays a role, and in the past, we would probably find equal variety.

All the same, the different roles it plays in this geographical area evolved together over millennia, sometimes in relative isolation, sometimes in periods of expanded cultural interchange. This complex and diverse area is the homeland of belly dance.

Today, belly dance is practiced widely outside of its native environment, so I add the addendum, “Or it is consciously based on the dances of these areas.” A statistic dancers are fond of quoting – though it’s based on instinct and not on actual research – is that there are more professional belly dancers in the United States than in the Middle East. Since the 1970’s, when it made its first forays into dance studios and recreation centers in America (and by the end of the decade, into Europe as well), belly dance has become an international art. It is performed and taught and danced for pleasure all over the world.

It is not quite the same dance, though, outside its native context. The American (or more broadly, Western) environment is different from the Eastern in many ways. Western dancers learn a dance that is based on Middle Eastern techniques but that takes shape in a Western culture and is performed for Western audiences with Western sensibilities. As a result, the Western art of belly dance sometimes departs rather broadly from the dance as conceived in its native lands, with different interpretations of music (or different music altogether), different types of showmanship, different fundamental body alignments, different approaches toward personal expression and emotion, and so on.

In its native context, the dance evolves with checks and balances from its culture, since the members of each culture share at least a broad understanding of what the dance should look like and express.[5] Likewise, the Western dance also evolves with checks and balances from Western culture – but not the same checks and balances as one would find in the East. Western dancers have to accommodate two distinct cultural attitudes. One is the Western idea of what dance – any dance – should look like: an idea formed by the longstanding influence of ballet and the more recent influence of popular dance styles. The other is the aura of Eastern exoticism that belly dancers are supposed to have: belly dancers are expected to be dark, mysterious, sensuous, and even “available.” In the light of these Western ideals, the dance in the West is subject to a different range of pressures than it is in its native context.

So some dances which are “consciously based on the dances of these areas” are in fact not very much like the actual dances of these areas, simply in that their aesthetics are different, sometimes profoundly so. Even a “traditional” American belly dancer, dancing to Middle Eastern music in a style that works for her American audiences, might seem alien to an audience from the Middle East. And other styles that are included in the scope of Western belly dance are not Middle Eastern at all. For example, anyone looking for a “belly-dancing gypsy tambourine dance” would have more luck examining Western theatrical tradition than the actual Middle East, as would anyone looking for the snaky archetypes of the Tribal-Fusion dancer.

But despite the fact that these dances may be very different from the dances performed in the East, they would never have come into existence in their current form if SIDTA had not evolved as it did in its cultural home. All the dances of belly dance’s “big tent” are ultimately illuminated by its ancient history in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

Technique(1): It is based on hip and torso articulation, the arms generally used in countermovement to frame the body, often with delicate hand movements.

Dancers often complain that the term “belly dance” does not describe this dance at all. “We dance with our whole bodies!” “The belly is such a small part of the dance!” This is all very true. In “belly dance,” the body’s unified wholeness is vital, and the arms and hands, used to frame and draw out movement, are often as much a focus of the dance as the hips.

All the same, in terms of technique, hip and torso articulation are central in this dance. The styles of SIDTA that stretch across its native geographical area all use hip and torso movement as a central element of the dance.

However important hip and torso articulation are to belly dance, they do not make a dance belly dance. Hip movement is a fairly common technique in the dances of people who live in warm climates, though it is not at all universal. (It also shows up in some colder climates – Turkey and northern Greece among them.) Polynesian and African dances often involve hip articulations. So do some far Eastern forms of dance, such as Balinese and Javanese.

In my observation, the complex of exact techniques of hip articulation found in belly dance as it exists today is not found elsewhere. We shouldn’t expect it to be. “Hip articulation” is a very broad category of movement, after all – as broad as, say, “leg movement.” Irish step dance, American tap dance, and Balkan folk dance all involve “movements of the legs with fairly stationary arms,” but no one thinks that “leg movement” is an adequate defining factor for these dances. Likewise, the kinds of detailed articulations and (usually) shimmies that are found in SIDTA throughout its modern range are distinct from other dances that involve hip articulation. (And even within SIDTA, you can see significant variations in the body alignments and most typical hip movements of local styles.)

The other key element of belly dance technique is in the use of the arms and hands to frame the body, and sometimes to carry the expressive sense of the dance – though no one thought of calling this the “arm dance” or the “hand dance.” Sometimes – in some parts of its range more than others – the hand and arm movements may even dominate expression. Together, the elements of hip and hand movements characterize the phenomenon of SIDTA.

Since many different areas with no historical relationship to belly dance also have hip articulation techniques, this in itself is not enough to define a dance as “belly dance.” Other dances also combine hip and hand movements – Hawaiian and other Polynesian dances, for example. But they are not belly dance. They have their own aesthetic, their own history, and their own set of historical circumstances that brought their art to its modern form.[6] In order to be considered belly dance, a dance has to involve some form of hip and torso articulation, with the characteristic use of arms and hands – and it has to be found in the target area.[7] Other similar techniques have their own history and aesthetics, and are interesting to study in comparison to belly dance – but they are not part of the same culture, with its own particular range of music, expression, and ways of making meaning.

Technique (2): It is solo-improvised, or it is a choreographed expression of a dance that exists primarily as a solo-improvised form.

“Solo-improvised” means that it is improvised by an individual dancing alone. If many people are dancing together, each is dancing according to his or her own pattern.

In the Middle East, a high value is put on improvisation as a creative act. Audiences appreciate and share a musician’s or dancer’s creative moment when s/he improvises, and improvisation, more than any other moment of performance, has the potential to create tarab, the feeling of enchantment that binds audience and performer together in the moment. This high value Middle Eastern tradition places on improvisation in performance also reverberates in the solo-improvised social dance.

Like hip articulation, solo-improvisation is found in many cultures – maybe even most. There are many other dances that are solo-improvised without involving hip articulation – Irish step-dance, traditional American tap dance, 19^th century French “naturalist quadrille,” Greek zeibekiko, and so on. You would find almost nothing but solo-improvisation on the dance floor of the average Western dance club. Even in traditional circle or line dances with set patterns, the leading dancer will often add improvised variations. You could even argue that solo-improvisation is the natural human setting for dance, and anything else represents an aberration (or development) from the norm. It is usually with court dance or sacred dance traditions (such as ballet or some forms of Indian dance) that “choreography” or traditional set pieces are common.

Although being solo-improvised clearly doesn’t make a dance belly dance, the ethos of solo-improvisation is key to the definition of belly dance. In the social dance, dancers seek the experience of being in a group of people all dancing together, each one expressing the spirit of celebration as it comes out of his body in traditional movement. In performance, the dancer and her audience seek the experience of sharing the fruits of improvisation, an emotional and expressive communion that relies on the creation of the dance and its music in the moment.

Today many dancers perform choreographies, from the first-year student at her first hafla to the stars of the Egyptian stage. But solo-improvisation remains fundamental to the practice of the dance. The Egyptian star who begins with a choreography still has an improvised taqsim at the heart of her show. The American dancer who uses choreographies in her stage performances improvises in her restaurant gigs. Improvisation, and the experience of the flow and eddies of movement in music, is the heart and soul of the dance.

The Belly Dance Complex

These three: geographical area, hip articulation, and solo-improvisation, are the key elements of the dance that have to be there for it to be considered belly dance. But there are other factors that are often, if not always, involved.

Perhaps, rather than being a single monolithic entity, belly dance is more of a complex, in which some, though not necessarily all, of the defining factors are present. Here’s a brief menu of some other defining factors:

· It is a social dance, or a performance style that is intimately related to a social dance.

· It has a particular aesthetic, which reflects the aesthetic of other arts of the Middle East and/or Islam.

· As a performance art, belly dance is performed by women, boys or unconventional men, more often than it is performed by conventional adult men. At times, this dance may be perceived as particularly feminine or suited to women.

· Professional performers of this dance are often marginalized, either ethnically or as members of a profession that is associated with sexual difference from the mainstream.

· It has a sensual, even sexual dimension.

· The performance of belly dance may be an element in (mostly) social rituals, in particular at weddings and other celebrations.

Social Dance: It is a social dance, or a performance style that is intimately related to a social dance.

One way of understanding the world’s many styles of dance based on the continuum of dance cultures between “court dance” and “social dance.”[8]

Court dances develop in a complex society to meet the needs of the ruling elite. Ballet is a case in point. It began from French social dances in the court of Louis XIV, but under royal patronage, the techniques became increasingly difficult and increasingly codified. The technique of ballet remains very conservative today, in that the technical training of modern ballet dancers is very similar that of a hundred years ago. And it is rigorous technical training. It is difficult to perform even the most basic techniques well, since they involve an unnatural turnout of the feet from the hips which can only be achieved through years of training beginning at a young age. As dancers progress, they may learn traditional choreographies, such as the dance of the cygnets from Swan Lake, that have been essentially unchanged for a hundred years. Other court dance traditions, such as some Javanese and Indian dance, also involve extremely difficult techniques, set dances or patterns of movement, and long periods of rigorous training available or suitable only to an elite few.[9]

On the other hand, a social dance is dance as done by the people of a region: “folk dance,” the dance of the folk. “Folk dance” can include many different kinds of dancing, from line dances on set patterns to solo-improvised dances. In the East, “belly dance,” – or perhaps we should call it SIDTA to shake loose the “harem girl” associations – is a social dance. It is practiced by men, women, and children, of all ages, at social occasions. The people who dance it at wedding celebrations and other festive occasions have not learned to dance through taking lessons, much less undergoing rigorous training. They learned through watching and imitating others over the course of their lives. They don’t have to think about whether a particular movement or dance is appropriate in this context or that – they have absorbed this knowledge as members of their culture. They don’t have to think about what good dancing is – they know it because they always knew it (though of course different individuals may have different preferences, as is always the case).

Since belly dance – SIDTA – is a social dance, its fundamental techniques are within reach of everyone. Some people, of course, are much better dancers than others. Different dancers develop their own special means of expression, their own moves, their own ways of interpreting music. Anyone who becomes a good dancer in a social dance tradition does so through individual creativity and embodiment of the aesthetics of the dance as defined by her culture.

In many societies (though not all), social dances also have performance modes. That is, there are times when it is appropriate for someone to perform a dance for the community, rather than for the whole community to dance together. Sometimes the performer is someone from the community who has a particular call to perform at an occasion: for example, the young unmarried relatives of the bride who may perform in the kaf al ‘Arab[10] at a wedding, or the bride’s mother and mother-in-law may dance at a women’s gathering on the evening before a wedding, and so on.[11] But at times professional performers are called on to perform, and these performers do the equivalent of the social dance or a variation of it.

As everyone in the belly dance world knows, the position of dancers in the Middle East is problematic, since “working with the body” in public is shameful for women. One factor in the shame equation is that “everyone already knows how to dance” – therefore the woman who does so in public for pay is exhibiting not a particular skill, but a particular shamelessness.[12] Although many professional dancers spend years developing and refining their techniques, the social-dance ethos of the culture tends to lump their dance (and dance ability) in with the dances (and dance ability) of ordinary women, rather than acknowledging the professional training that went into it. So do many of the dancers themselves. Many dancers look back to their social dancing at weddings as children as the time their desire to follow the difficult path of professional dance first emerged. Many also speak of themselves as the prime and only source of their abilities in dance: Lucy, for example, a dominant dance star of Egypt in the 1980’s and 90’s, insists that she has never taken a lesson and that all of her dance comes from within; Mona Said comments that her shimmying ability is a gift from God.[13] These are the attitudes of a culture whose dance performance style is based on a social dance tradition. The individual, her own creations, and her own expressions, are the sole merit of her dance.

How widespread SIDTA is as a social dance depends on the individual culture. In some parts of the world, such as Iran, SIDTA is primarily an urban phenomenon. Elsewhere, as in Egypt, it is the central or even only form of social dance practiced by everyone.[14] In rural Egypt, both social dance and professional performance forms of raqs sharqi have been a traditional element of weddings and other festive occasions, reflecting its position as the most common folk dance of the area. In Greece, on the other hand, the SIDTA form of tchiftetelli is not appropriate for weddings, since it is understood as foreign and sexual.[15] Greeks still dance tchiftetelli at appropriate occasions: people still “know how to do” social dances even if they are not favorite or respected dances. They are still part of received cultural knowledge.

The role of modern belly dance as a social dance in its native cultures eases two giant pressures in constructing its history.

The first is that we do not have to look for any “origin” of the dance. Origin stories that insist that belly dance “began” as a birth ritual or a dance of harem slaves are already problematic, for several reasons. (One is that they interpret hip movement as inherently sexual and feminine. It isn’t.[16] Another is that they assume that the development of this dance was linear, from a single simple origin. One thing history tells us is that nothing is ever that simple!) But if you acknowledge that belly dance as we know it is the performance mode of a widespread folk dance form, there is no “origin” to be explained. A folk dance form as widespread as this must have developed across a wide area over time, as the product of a whole culture (and many interacting cultures), not the secret ritual or secret vice of any small part of it.

The other is that the “burden of proof” is less pressing, because what we are looking for is a much broader phenomenon than “belly dance” as it exists today. Folk traditions are capable of rapid change, but something as fundamental as the role of solo-improvisation or hip articulation is likely to change only sluggishly. (See the sidebar “How Conservative Are Folk Traditions?”). If we find a particular form of folk dance over a wide geographical range in the present, then chances are it did not spring up suddenly a few hundred years ago. Chances are it has existed there or in a similar geographical range for a long time. We can’t be absolutely sure of this – it is possible that dance styles could change quickly and radically with new populations, major economic changes, or other reasons. But given the weight of tradition, the burden of proof rests on anyone who wants to prove that there wasn’t SIDTA in at least some part of its current area for a long period of time.

On the other hand, the range of SIDTA today, and its many different manifestations, leave us with a very general phenomenon that may not satisfy our desire to find the dance we do now in the ancient past. We can’t be sure exactly what any given manifestation of this folk dance was like. Was the SIDTA of 8^th century BCE Palestine like that of modern Palestine? We don’t know. We can reasonably guess that some form of SIDTA was practiced, but we can’t get much more specific than that.

If we have to accept uncertainties about the specifics of ancient folk dances, we can be even less sure about the performance modes of ancient SIDTA. For example, we can reasonably expect that the people of Egypt in the 5^th century CE would do some from of SIDTA, even if it is not exactly like any given manifestation of the folk dance today. But when we try to determine what the professional performers were doing, we may expect more variation. When professionals develop specialized performance techniques, they may vary from folk practice in many different ways. For example, we might find some differences between social dance in Egypt now and a hundred years ago, but if we compared a modern Cairo nightclub performance with a nightclub performance from Cairo’s Old Eldorado in 1910, we would see something very different. Performance styles may change more rapidly than social dance styles, and may be more different from one another than social dance styles are. We should expect to find a similar range of variation in antiquity. So our reasonable assumption that some form of SIDTA existed in pharaonic Egypt, for example, may not give us much information about the kinds of dancing that were done at any given Pharaoh’s banquets.

All the same, the identity of SIDTA as a social dance grounds it in the experience of the ordinary person, and gives us a dance that is a widespread cultural phenomenon rather than the sensualized performance of seductresses. SIDTA, we can be sure – even if we call it “belly dance” – is entitled to a place with the world’s other major dance traditions.

Aesthetics: It has a particular aesthetic, which reflects the aesthetic of other arts of the Middle East and/or Islam.

In her important 1976 article, “Dance as an Expression of Islamic Culture,” Lois Ibsen al Faruqi detailed an aesthetic of the dances of the Middle East, focusing on their alignment with the other arts of the culture. Her discussion was meant to describe all dance arts in Islamic culture, rather than only raqs sharqi. She observed that Dance is an abstract art, “non-narrative and non-programmatic,” following an artistic tradition which concentrated “not on naturalistic portrayal, but on the production of intricate . . . arabesques.” In other words, Islamic dance does not tell as story, it expresses abstract form. It is improvised, in that “performers are ‘free’ (within culturally determined limits) to invent and combine the steps as they perform.” In contrast with Western arts, it is inherently improvisational. It consists of small, intricate movement, with “attention to minute detail and intricacy of pattern,” rather than in the widespread, sweeping movements of Western theatrical dance. It has a serial structure, in that “[t]he dancer displays his or her skill with one type of movement for as long as is desired. . . the dance continues with a different mode of intricate rhythmic movements.” This gives it a sense

of play for the performer and audience, in that the dancer does what she does at her pleasure and until she is done. It also means that the dance is not as focused on grand statement and structured journeys. Also, the dance is “a series of mini-climaxes . . . which give an intuition of transcendent infinity; each unit which makes the dance performance has its own build-up of tension and subsequent release.” Flow and the transcendent involvement in that flow are key experiences in the dance.[17]

Western dancers add other observations that distinguish the Eastern aesthetic from Western norms. One common comment is that raqs sharqi is intimately related to music and that the dancer may be understood as a voice, an instrument, or a visible expression of the music. Western dancers have also commented that the dance is circular and built on an ebb and flow of energy; the mode of performance is not so much the dancer projecting herself out toward the audience but rather drawing the audience into a more intimate relationship.

These are the aesthetics of raqs as found in the East. The Western manifestation are often different. For example, when the American form of belly dance developed in the nightclubs of the 1950’s and ‘60’s in the West, a five-part “routine” of alternating fast and slow music with drum solo emerged. It incorporates the “mini-climaxes” al Faruqi describes, but also puts them into a single overriding structure, half-maintaining and half-undermining the aesthetic of the primary culture. When Western dancers perform, especially for largely Western audiences, they often adopt a “reach out and grab ‘em” performance style that works for Westerners but is not native to the dance. And while Eastern dancers – at least in the East – perform as members of their own cultures, Western performers take on the role of an exotic “other” for their audiences.

And of course, in the West, many dancers adopt very un-Eastern aesthetics that better align with their own artistic and cultural goals as Western women. Tribal belly dance, for example, could be described as embracing a focus on uniform movement to create a sense of unity and community, and the creation of a sense of the “tribe” as a starting point for challenging cultural assumptions. Other Tribal offshoots may want to create performances that are deliberately shocking or dissonant, creating excitement or confusion rather than pleasant involvement in the moment.

The automatic assumptions – or to put it differently, the gut-level feelings – modern Westerners have about the nature of SIDTA may be based on our own modern experiences of the dance. What are we really seeking when we pursues the history of “belly dance”? What do we want when we look for the aesthetics of ancient forms of SIDTA? If it is to find the transcendent moments of modern performances – the dynamic drum solos, the intimate taqsims with floods of delicate shimmies, or “tribal” exuberance and mystery – we may be disappointed. We may find that, before the particular historical circumstances that gave it its current form, SIDTA was danced with different feelings and different intents. Household dance troupes performing at elite festivities in dynastic Egypt, or expatriate Syrian women performing at inns outside of Rome, may not have done the dance we would instinctively recognize as “ours.”

Aesthetics, like the particular movements any given dancer might have performed, are very different to pry out of the historical record. Dances are rarely described in enough detail, and are often described by outsiders whose aesthetics are not those of the main culture. (For example, the many 19^th century Westerners who described the dance as “lewd” or “ugly” or “convulsive” are obviously not good sources for understanding the Eastern dance aesthetic.) We’ll stretch as far as we can in this direction, though, while admitting that most of what we can say about the aesthetics of SIDTA in the past is conjecture.

Dance and Gender: As a performance art, belly dance is performed by women, boys or unconventional men, more often than it is performed by conventional adult men. At times, this dance may be perceived as particularly feminine or suited to women.

In the modern West, belly dance is an almost exclusively feminine province. The vast majority of the people who take belly dance classes at local recreation centers and dance studios, or who flock to dance workshops and shows, are women. The vast majority of the dancers who make some or all of their living from the art are women. Throughout its history in the United States, belly dance has been understood as a woman’s dance. The practitioners of the danse du ventre at the Chicago Columbian Exhibition who created such a stir at the end of the 19^th century were women.[18] So were the exotically garbed “hoochie coochie” dancers of the dime museums and the scantily clad Salomes of vaudeville. The belly dancers who entertained at the Arabic nightclubs of the USA in the 1950’s and ‘60’s were women; their modern counterparts in the clubs of the 2000’s are women.

This situation persists in the Middle East as well. In Egypt, in Turkey, in Lebanon, the stars of the dance are women, and the dancers who appear in popular venues are overwhelmingly women. The few men who make a splash as performers in the East are the exception rather than the rule.

Women in the West typically define this dance as a women’s art, seeing its techniques and aesthetics as inherently feminine. This sense that the dance is particularly feminine, or of special value to women, is also sometimes expressed by Eastern women, both ordinary women and performers.

In modern times, the face of this dance is feminine throughout the world. So when we look for its roots in history, should we be looking for a women’s dance?

Perhaps, but perhaps not. Although in the West the dance is clearly a woman’s art, the situation in the Middle East is far more complex.

As we’ve seen, raqs sharqi, the performance style, arises from a folk dance form of SIDTA that is practiced throughout the target geographical area by both men and women. This folk dance style is very similar if not identical for men and women.[19] Men therefore do “belly dance,” and there’s nothing about the movement that seems wrong on a male body, or inappropriate for a man’s expression.

It is true that today, all of the professional dancers at the highest level are women. But the historical record is full of professional male dancers, and even today, there are some men who perform in the Middle East. They range from the shopkeeper and family man Osman Balata, performing Saidi dances in Luxor, to the showmanlike and openly gay Mousbah Baalbeki of Lebanon, to the female impersonators who dance in Morocco’s Jemaa el Fna.[20] Middle Eastern men are often teachers and choreographers of belly dance, in both the East and the West. Eastern male dancers may find their outlet as performers on Western stages, even thought they are largely absent in Eastern nightclubs.[21] Anthony Shay comments on the historical identity of the male belly dancer: [QUOTE].

Obviously, when we look into the historical record of belly dance, we would expect to find men doing the social dance, and appearing as professional performers. Although in some manifestations we may find that female performers of the dance are more common than males, we should be wary of interpreting this as a dance that pertains only to women, or even primarily to women.

This goes counter to the instincts of many women today, who see the dance as essentially feminine. And despite the presence of men at every level of belly dance in both East and West, from the social dance to the stars of performance, there remains a powerful feeling among the overwhelming majority of women involved in the dance that this is indeed a feminine art. This feeling cannot be overlooked, as it too sheds light on the potential roles of this dance in history.

One root of this feeling in the modern West, and to some extent, the urbanized East, is a deeply ingrained belief that dance – all dance – is intrinsically feminine. Of all the students enrolled in dancing schools today in the West, only a small proportion are boys. Boys who want to study any kind of dance or perform it professionally have to face assumptions about their sexual orientation or masculinity. Dance is a “girl thing.” Expectations enforce realities, to the extent that men are actively discouraged from studying dance in any formal situation, and from performing it.

But many of the world’s populations, especially those who still live by foraging or with other primitive means of production, do not share these ideas about dance. In these societies, dance is done by everyone, and is not considered inherently feminine. When we look into the past, we should be very careful not to assume that dance in general, and this dance in particular, are automatically more the province of women than of men.

Another aspect of the feminine face of belly dance in today’s world, is that we perceive aspects of belly dance in particular that align it with feminine experience. It is expressive and emotional, and we believe women are more emotional than men. The dancer embodies feeling and ideas, and may see herself as a vessel or a conduit for the music or ideas she embodies. “Embodiment” and serving as a “vessel” are also feminine roles. The dance is soft, curved, circular, intricate: these are feminine qualities, while we expect men to be linear and direct. The dancer is emotionally vulnerable, a position women are more able to fill. Her relationship with her audience is cooperative, not forceful: she brings them in, rather than trying to pierce them with her art. She seeks surrender to the music, not mastery over it. She seeks a flow of experience, not the power to direct the experience. All of these things are right and natural for women, and represent essential feminine experience – at least, as our culture defines it.

The dance as we know it also speaks to women’s issues. Most women suffer anxiety about their bodies, and belly dance builds confidence about the beauty of all body types. Women in the modern world often lack the supportive women’s environment that permeates more traditional societies, and belly dance provides a community of women. By emphasizing women’s self-expression, belly dance provides validation of women’s experience and value in a world that often denies it. Belly dance also allows women to engage in the feminine art of adornment: costumes, jewelry, henna, sparkling fabrics, elaborate beading, rows of coins with their evocative foreignness. The dance is validating, beautifying, supporting. It is emotional, embodying, curved, intricate, nurturing, cooperative, surrendering, sensual: and these are characteristics of women – at least, as our culture as a whole defines women and feminine experience.

All of these are positive values. To be emotionally open, expressive, and embodying are good things, and if we see them as characteristic of women, then that shows an idea of women as healthy, vital, valuable, and masterful voices through this dance. But the “dark side” of the feminine nature of belly dance cannot be ignored.

This dance is also perceived as a women’s dance because it involves the display of a sensual object for masculine consumption.

The assumption that her dance is display for men is a thorn in the side of most belly dancers today – at least in what they say, if not in what they do. Most of the dancers I have spoken to or heard speak across my thirty years’ involvement in the art – dancers both Eastern and Western – say that they dance primarily for the women. I know that this was always my own preference and my own strategy, in my restaurant dancing days. Women, as the Egyptian dancer Lucy observed, are able to understand the whole of the dance, not just its display. [QUOTE]

But that doesn’t stop the culture as a whole from interpreting this dance as erotic display whose primary consumers are men. That is certainly how the first Eastern dancers to make a pop-culture splash in America, the dancers of the Chicago Columbian Exhibition, were perceived. For all the complimentary descriptions of their elegant performances, what the public latched onto was their uncorsetted, body-shaking, exotic eroticism. The first American belly dancers in the 1950’s and ‘60’s wore outfits not far different from those worn by strippers and the exotic dancers of burlesque. Though modern belly dancers are in general more covered, they still project models of femininity that are defined by patriarchal expectations: jewels, chiffon, makeup, flirtation, smoldering glances, or for that matter piercings and black leather: all are established patterns of feminine appeal within modern patriarchy. A dancer may teach classes in a University recreation program, receive arts grants, and dress conservatively on stage, but in the West she will inevitably be interpreted, at least sometimes, in the light of sexual and orientalist stereotypes. If her venue is the restaurant and birthday party rather than the stage, she will be faced with some aspect of this patriarchal expectation every time she dances.

In the East, the situation is generally worse for the performing dancer. Dance is understood as a shameful profession, and women who dance professionally “use their sexual bodies in public space to make a living,”[22] and are therefore not much different from prostitutes. You could argue, as the male dancer Tarik Sultan does, that professional belly dance became an overwhelmingly feminine profession for the same reasons that prostitution is: most men want to whet or to satisfy their sexual appetites with women.[23]

There is profound tension in belly dance between these two polarities of feminine experience. On the one hand, belly dance is nurturing to the feminine soul, something that arises naturally from women’s experience, and finds expression in a community of women. On the other hand, the dance is feminine because it is the sort of sensual display patriarchal culture requires of at least some of its women. This tension is played out daily in the lives of modern belly dancers, Eastern and Western.

Is this tension a permanent feature of belly dance? Should we expect to find it in the historical record?

That depends on many different elements. In the earliest times – the days of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists – we might expect to find different ideas about gender, so perhaps we would not find these tensions. But unfortunately, our prehistoric evidence is not really specific enough to give us the details we would like to have. In the historical societies of the ancient Middle East and Roman Empire, where written records help our research, we are in the realm of patriarchy. We might well find the same sorts of tension surrounding female (and male) dancers that we find now. (These tensions might also surround any form of dance, not necessarily SIDTA.)

But the fundamental point of all this talk about gender is this: We should not assume that SIDTA will always manifest as a feminine art, especially since our modern evidence identifies it as a folk art that is shared between men and women. We should not assume that ancient women felt it as liberating and emotional in the same way that modern Western women, or urban Arab women, might. Knowing that there are complex gender issues in the performance of belly dance today, we should be alert for similar issues in the past, knowing that they underlie complex cultural responses to the professional aspects of this dance, if not its role as a folk dance. The past can perhaps provide us with some interesting evidence to compare with the present.

Status of Performers: Professional performers of this dance are often marginalized, either ethnically or as members of a profession that is associated with sexual difference from the mainstream.

This, I know, is controversial. It is controversial in part because of the tiresome syllogism many dancers, East and West, have to face today: “If prostitutes might be dancers, then dancers might be prostitutes.” It is also controversial because dancers in the West are so uniformly middle-class, and don’t like being lumped with prostitutes, strippers, or anyone else on the sexual margins. It is particularly controversial because many women involved in this dance have worked very hard to replace the “This is the dance of the prostitute and the harem slave” origin myth with something more amenable. To counter the low status of dancers in today’s world, and the negative repercussions of the associations of belly dance with stripping and prostitution in the public eye, belly dancers both East and West have longed for evidence in the past of higher status for dancers: couldn’t they be priestesses or respected performers, rather than part- or full-time whores?

Since SIDTA was and is a social dance, the vast majority of the women who do it are not strippers or whores, but ordinary women, fully engaged in traditional women’s roles in their own society, who do not perform except perhaps on certain specific occasions. Though it is a learned art in the West, it is also performed there by ordinary women. But the professional performer of dance – any dance – in many complex societies, is in a marginalized position. Different societies have developed different ways to explain this marginalized role, and anthropologists studying the phenomena have their own ideas. Is it because of the power dance has to affect the senses, or because of its use in liminal ritual roles, or because entertainers may travel rather than remain established members and landowners in a single community? Many answers offer themselves, and no two cultures are exactly alike, either in the status the ascribe to performers or in the reasons by which they explain it.

Status of performers is an endlessly fascinating topic, and where we can find traces of it in history, I will bring it up. It’s seldom as simple as “high status” or “low status”: there are many issues involved in defining a dancer’s position within her society. Also, we should expect to find differences in different societies, over time – though the issue of marginalization from the mainstream will recur again and again in somewhat different forms.

Sexuality: It has a sensual, even sexual dimension.

This is another controversial area among dancers in both the East and the West today.

In the West, the technique of hip articulation is seen as inherently sexual. When Elvis Presley gyrated his hips in the 1950’s, teenagers swooned and parents expressed horror at what they perceived as overt sexuality. Today, in the fusion dance style of most music videos, there seems to be a thin line between hip movement and sexualized humping. In the West, hip articulation is sexual, and hip-focused dancing easily crosses the line between what is simply dance technique, and what is a direct and obvious imitation of sexual motion.

From the time of the ancient Greeks, the hip movement of SIDTA has been interpreted as sexual and obscene in the West. Most Western dances were not based on hip-focused techniques, and generally speaking, those that were, were deliberately transgressive or obscene. In the minds of most Westerners, the simple fact that this dance involves hip articulation identifies it as somehow “about” sex or seduction. The specific history of the popular introduction of belly dance to the West magnified this longstanding cultural prejudice. From the scandalous “danse du ventre” to the “naughty hula,” the Chicago Columbian Exhibition of 1893 advertised hip-focused dances in a way that fostered the impression that hip articulation and sexual motion were one and the same. Even in the 1960’s, the first mass marketing of the dance to ordinary women, Sonny Lester’s “How to Belly Dance for Your Husband,” cast this new dance form as seduction.

Most Western dancers say that they find this dance sensual as opposed to sexual. What exactly does this mean? In this scheme, “sexual” implies a display that is meant to arouse, in which the woman accepts a role as a sex object, and dances primarily in order to excite the men in her audience. Sexual dance may be seen as insincere, or as a ploy to be powerful over men by appealing to their baser instincts. “Sensual,” on the other hand, is taken to imply a delight in the senses. The dancer dances for her own pleasure, or for the women in her audience. She enjoys the dance, including the elements of it that involve the movement of the sexual parts of her body. She is the author of the dance. If she arouses her audience, it is to fulfillment of their own relationships, not to disempowered longing for her as a sex object. I have heard several different dancers suggest that a “sexual” dance performance is directed at making a man want to have sex with you, whereas in a “sensual” performance, the couple who see you want to go home together and consummate their own relationship. Sensuality, in this definition, may inspire sexual thoughts, but it is not inherently manipulative, nor is it about power.

In the West, the issue is this dance. Belly dance, specifically, is seen as sexual, while other forms are not: ballet, for example, is not seen as inherently sexual, despite the ballerina’s skimpy costume and crotch-revealing poses. Today belly dance has a reputation for sexuality that supersedes its fairly tame motions. Suhaila Salimpour tells about[24] a production of the TV show Fame in which she was performing a brief belly dance as well as participating in a jazz number. The director urged her to tone down her already subtle belly dance movement, which she performed in a costume that did not reveal her midriff. Yet he repeatedly directed the jazz dancers to push their pelvises harder forward, as they stood in a spread-legged stance. Clearly, there is a double standard about when pelvic movement is overtly sexual and when it is not, and belly dance has a reputation for sexual danger that goes well beyond the movement.

In the Middle East, the question is not the pelvic movement of SIDTA, but dance per se. Anti-dance fundamentalists want to ban all dance, not just dance with hip articulation. In the Middle East, the technique of SIDTA is not necessarily seen as suggestive or sexual – though all non-sacred dance, according to some interpreters, has disruptive potential, if only because it is frivolous. As is clear by now, SIDTA is performed widely in the Middle East by men and women, old and young. A five-year-old girl or a seventy-year-old grandfather – to mention a few examples – are not performing hip motion in order to make themselves more sexually attractive. Throughout the Middle East, the common understanding of SIDTA is that it produces happiness, not sexual feeling, and that it expresses joy, not desire.

This does not mean that it can’t produce sexual desire or seduction. Plainly, the dance can be done in order to inspire sexual feeling. Metin And reports[25] that in the 17^th century, dancing boys inspired such passion that there were many murders over them, and there is a well-documented association of dance with prostitutes who dance to entertain and presumably arouse their customers. Seduction may have a legitimate, family aspect, as in an Egyptian film from the 1970’s which shows a demurely gowned Nagwa Fouad dancing to entice her screen husband. Clearly, this dance has a sexual dimension.

But that does not mean that hip articulation is by nature sexual. Among the world’s people, many different forms of dance have developed, and many different sorts of movement can work to similar effects in different cultures. Sexual attractiveness and intent can be displayed in dances that involve high leaps, simple shuffling steps, kicks and running steps, intricate turns and patterns, kneeling while performing hand movements, and, of course, hip articulation. In 19^th century Paris, the can-can involved no hip articulation, but it was as sexually evocative as belly dance was assumed to be. Any type of movement can have a sexual element, and one’s culture determines what is sexually desirable. (In fact, in the 19^th century West, it appears that while hip articulation of Eastern dancers was assumed to be sexual movement, it was not actually considered arousing or attractive: another culture-specific determination.)

In the Middle East, while hip articulation is not a factor that makes belly dance necessarily sexual, the gender of the performer is. Karin van Niewkerk has described[26] how the key objection to belly dance as it is performed today, in Middle Eastern culture, is that women’s bodies are seen as inherently sexual in a way that men’s bodies are not. A man and a woman can do the same movement, and a woman’s body will have a potential to arouse that men’s bodies do not. Much as we may disagree with this idea in the West, it is a key complicating factor in belly dance’s disruptive potential in the East.

So the sexual dimension of the dance is different in the Eastern and Western arenas. In the West, dancers wrestle with a cultural perception that identifies hip articulation as sexual, which is complicated by a history of seeing belly dance, as a product of the Orient, as a particularly sexualized form of hip articulation. Western dancers who encounter the dance as adults most likely do interpret the dance as somehow sexual, since they are culturally primed to do so. But they tend to interpret the dance’s inherent sexuality as primarily a sensual appreciation of self that is empowering, and friendly to women as fellow dancers and members of an audience, in contrast to the objectified sexuality the culture often ascribes to the dance.

In the East, the chief tension is between a social dance that allows a woman freedom of expression and enjoyment of her body – and is therefore sensual – and a performance art that centers on an inherently sexualized female body and a perspective that identifies women who exhibit their bodies as shamed. The tension is between the social dance and the performed dance. In the social circumstances where it is acceptable for women to dance openly, whether this is an all-female party or a wedding, the line between sensual and sexual is not apparently a site of cultural discontinuity – which is one way to say, not something people worry about.

In the historical manifestations of this dance, we should be particularly sensitive to the readings of hip articulation and sexuality that different cultures place on SIDTA.

The Ritual and Sacred Aspect: The performance of belly dance may be an element in (mostly social) rituals, in particular at weddings and other celebrations.

When belly dance emerged as an international phenomenon in the 1950’s and onward, the people who were asked to explain it frequently brought the word “ritual” into it. That is still the case today. Without any evidence to support these claims, the origin of belly dance has been attributed to birth rituals, ancient Phoenician fertility rituals, orgiastic African rituals, ritual dances to Hathor and Bes, and so on.[27]

Where did all these “rituals” come from?

In some cases, the tendency to ritualize the past of belly dance reflects orientalism: the view of the “mysterious East” created by Westerners to validate both their own culture and their political domination of the area. In the orientalist view, the East is degenerate and ancient, luxurious and perverse – a place where things that are kept neatly separated in the West, such as sex and religion, might blend messily together. “Fertility rituals” emphasize religion devoted to worldly processes (thought of as Eastern) rather than transcendent experience (though of as Western), and imply a sexual dimension to ancient Eastern religion that is denied in the West. A “fertility ritual” is as orientalist an explanation of belly dance as they come.

It isn’t only Westerners[28] who use the fertility ritual as a catch-all explanation, though. The Lebanese dancer Nadia Gamal referred to ancient Phoenician fertility rituals; the Turkish dancer Princess Nyeela looked to ancient African rituals, while the Egyptian dancer Hannan and choreographer Mohammed Khalil looked to ancient Egyptian rituals of Bes and Hathor. It is possible for “Antiquity” to take the place of “the East” as the home to chaotic intermingling of opposites.

“Antiquity” may also be seen as a beautiful golden age, when women’s dance and women’s lore were more honored and better respected – a vision which has appeal both to Eastern and Western lovers of the dance. Modern Christian and Islamic beliefs and practices are at odds with the idea of sacred dance, and in some interpretations, even hostile to dance altogether. Perhaps because of this, the idea of belly dance as ancient ritual has also been a comforting and elevating one for both Eastern and Western dancers. If belly dance originated in ancient rituals, that proves that at one point – in contrast to its current disregard – belly dance was considered close to the divine. It was a part of sacred practice. It was an accepted part of the mainstream – even privileged – rather than something disreputable and low.

The idea that belly dance can express spiritual feeling is a common one among Western dancers, and may occur sometimes in the East. While for some belly dance is no more than a way of making a living or having fun, for others, on both sides of the divide, the dance has the potential to bring the dancer and her audience closer to god. Many Egyptian dancers[29] refer to their talents as god-given, and some elite dancers, at least, sometimes speak of their dance as bringing them closer to the divine. Throughout the West, there are workshops and whole studios focusing on “spiritual belly dance” and countless dancers who have felt closer to the divine through some aspect of their dancing.

Many dancers long to see this spiritual connection actually acknowledged, and since the past is the only place far enough away to hold all their dreams and wishes, it becomes the place of ancient rituals in dance. In the imaginative histories so common in the belly dance literature, the past is full of belly dancing high priestesses, or populations whose belly dances honor the Goddess or a specific goddess.

What about the real past, though? What does it show about the intersection between SIDTA and religion?

There are actually two main issues here. One is the role of SIDTA in social ritual, and the other is the role of dance in general, and SIDTA in particular, in formal religious ritual.[30]

Social rituals are acts performed in social circumstances to define a relationship, or to create an experience that defines an act or relationship or transition. A handshake is a simple social ritual, while a graduation ceremony, complete with throwing caps into the air, is more complex one. While a wedding is often a religious ritual, many aspects of it – such as the dance of the bride with her father, or the throwing of the garter – are social rituals. While our culture makes a clear distinction between the two (for example, the wedding ceremony is religion, the father’s dance with the bride is social custom), many of the world’s cultures now and in history would be surprised at a division like this between what is sacred and what is “only” social.

Obviously, belly dance is important in some social rituals in the modern Middle East. Dance is often an element of weddings in the area of SIDTA, though who does it may vary, and the dances may not be “belly dance” as the culture would understand it.[31] There are many occasions when it is appropriate for people to dance, and sometimes – as in Iran, where now (in 2006) dancing is banned – people feel so strongly that dance is a necessity that they are prepared to risk severe punishment to do it.[32]

In Egypt, as well as in other parts of the Arab world, the performance of a professional dancer and her troupe is an important part of the wedding celebration, as the dancer, often wearing a candelabra on her head, leads the bride and groom in procession into the reception room, then dances for the party. In a circumstance like this, it is easy to see the dancer’s role in terms of ritual. She is auspicious, a bringer of good luck. Her dance is sensuous and opens the way for the joys of the wedding night (though it doesn’t exactly teach the bride and groom what they need to do to consummate the marriage, as some early origin myths claimed). Perhaps most important, her performance sparks a celebration of joy that brings people together and sanctions the marriage for both the bride and groom and everyone in their families and community.

Belly dancers used to be a common fixture at many other occasions where celebration was appropriate: circumcision parties, birthdays, or moulids (saint’s day celebrations, which also included many other kinds of performers). Today dancers appear in the same sorts of venues, and in others such as made-for-TV New Year’s Eve shows and awards ceremonies. As fosterers of a celebratory atmosphere, dancers are often a part of the social rituals that undergird communal experience and celebration.

On the other hand, you can look far and wide for any modern evidence of belly dance as a religious ritual, and still come up empty. The female-centered rituals that belly dancers gravitate toward and learn theatrical versions of in the West – zar and guedra – are not even considered dance in their native context, and generally involve no hip articulation.[33] In any case, they are not exactly mainstream religion in the Islamic world. In fact, leaders of both Islam and Christianity have, from time to time, waged war against any sort of dance, regarding it as improper, sinful, or simply too frivolous for a reasonable person to pursue. Fundamentalist condemnation of belly dance has contributed to the near-demise of the Cairo nightclub scene. Christian moral values were a factor in Westerners’ early condemnation of belly dance as lewd and seductive. In this century at least, belly dance is not a sacred dance, except in the individual and shared practice of belly dancers who personally experience it as sacred.

That doesn’t mean that it wasn't sacred in the past, or that it didn’t figure in religious rituals. But neither should we automatically assume that it did – or that if it did, it did so in ways we can easily imagine.

Belly dance is by definition a solo-improvised art. As such, it does not necessarily fit in with the kinds of rituals we have the best ancient records of: the established, highly “choreographed” rituals of state religions. “Belly dancing high priestesses,” who figure in some imaginative histories, are not the best model for the sacred role of belly dance in the past.

This is not to say that belly dance never had a role in ritual or a sacred purpose. There is some definite evidence of belly dance at an ancient Egyptian religious festival, for example. But is that really a sacred use of belly dance, or simply celebration at the equivalent of a big public party? On the other hand, there may be times when a woman dancing alone, or women dancing together, accomplished a religious ritual, or where dancers, male or female, formed a key element of a sacred celebration. We will look at this evidence as it occurs.

What many belly dancers, both Eastern and Western, seek in the past is a validation of their own practices: a confirmation that the sacred feeling and sacred status they want from dance were foreshadowed in the past, and that ancient women experienced the same sorts of feeling. This kind of validation is not really possible from the kinds of evidence we have. The past has left us very little to go on about the feelings of ancient dancers, sacred or otherwise.

Like many dancers, I too have had the feeling that while dancing, I experience a connectedness with the world that seems to transcend time. When dancing, lost in the music, and aware of the universe turning around you, it is possible to feel that you are performing an ancient ritual, and that women must have danced like this for thousands of years unchanged, attuned to the same undeniable scent of the sacred.

But – obvious as it sounds to say it – the feelings of today’s dancers are not evidence for the events of the past. This sort of spiritual awareness arises from dance not because it is ancient – but because it is primal, something that touches on key aspects of an individual’s experience as a member of her culture. Feelings of connectedness do not mean that what we feel actually happened in history, but that this time-transcending awareness takes shape, for us, in the metaphor of the dance.

What history offers, as usual, is a complex of diverse experiences, which may emerge only unclearly from the sources. The use of belly dance in both sacred and social rituals is almost certainly among them, but evidence rather than feeling should be our leader in talk about the past.

Overview

I don’t know that this chapter has actually produced a definition of belly dance, but it has at least focused on the characteristics that define my search for the dance in history. First, the three essentials: location, hip articulation, and solo improvisation. Beyond that: belly dance is a social dance, learned by “osmosis” by all members of its cultures. Aesthetically, it is abstract, emotional, intricate, circular, intimate. It has a sexual, or at least sensual, dimension. Professional performers, most often women, boys, or unconventional men, hold a marginal role in their society. It has a place in social and possibly sacred rituals.

In the end, what I have defined here is the beginnings of a historical inquiry, not the art as it now exists. But it is at least a starting point, so we may as well start.

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[1] I am grateful to my colleagues in the French section at UNC-W, who are keeping an eye out for any earlier occurrences for me, but so far we have not found any, though one may yet turn up. I have heard that “danse du ventre” was only used of the dance of the Algerian Ouled Nail, while “danse orientale” was used of other forms of Eastern dance. I haven’t found this to be the case, though I may be wrong. As far as I have observed, which term was used depends on the user’s desire to portray the dance primarily as salacious, or primarily as an Eastern thing.

[2] Sol Bloom, who sponsored one of the Algerian performance companies at the Exhibition, comments that when people “found out” that “dance du ventre” meant belly dance, the receipts for the exhibition went up considerably. Bloom, who profited from the salacious curiosity, is sometimes attributed with inventing the term “belly dance,” but the meaning of “danse du ventre” would have been obvious to many of the Exhibition’s attendees.

[3] Today, the dance style … This fundamental observation is explained in detail by Anthony Shay, whose work has influenced this section immensely. Shay ____ .

[4] In Egypt, for example, SIDTA … See Shay on the differences in styles ____ .

[5] the members of each culture share … This is a broad statement, and if you look closely at cultural expectations, you would certainly find differences between individuals that express such factors as their age, sex, social class, specific location in the Arab world, and so on. But these different individual perspectives still add up to a cultural machine that sets out the range of variation in the performance of dance within that culture, and more broadly, within the SIDTA area.

[6] Other forms of dance … I won’t say that these forms of dance are irrelevant to the history of belly dance, since there is possibly some interchange of techniques and aesthetics in the West in the modern period. I only emphasize this point to insist on the uniqueness of the phenomenon of belly dance and that it is not just interchangeable with other hip-focused dances of the world.

[7] In order to be considered belly dance … The dancer/researcher Morocco points out that there are some dances in the Middle East, for example the hagallah performed by young woman soloists before a line of clapping men at weddings, that involve hip articulation yet are not really “belly dance.” At least, they would not be understood by those who do them as raqs sharqi, which would involve a particular intent and a particular relationship with the music. The definition of SIDTA is therefore broader than the definition of raqs sharqi today.

[8] As the dancer/researcher Helene Eriksen has pointed out, this is a continuum rather than a strict “either/or” proposition: court dance traditions may affect popular dance and vice versa, and there are other scales for measuring dance such as “codified” or not. Her observations influenced the structure of this section; any errors of course are my own. Personal communication, date.

[9] In some traditions, such as the dances of Bali, there is a substantial overlap between the elite court experience and the dance as performed in the villages. Often village children were apprenticed to elite dancers, and village dancing resembled the dances of the court, with many children undergoing a similar training to develop similar techniques. Kealiinohomoku 1979: 48-55.

[10] See Saleh, 488, for an explanation of this custom.

[11] the young unmarried relatives … On the hagallah, see Saleh (----); on the dance of the bride’s mother and mother-in-law, see Young 118: 38-40.

[12] everyone already knows how to dance . . . William C. Young quotes an informant: “But everyone knows how to do it! It doesn’t take any special training: we learn from our mothers.” He summarizes his informants’ attitudes: “Since dancing was such an easily acquired and universal skill it should not be paid for. In other words, a woman who dances for money is not a professional but only a social failure; rather than selling her performance, she is selling her honor” (1998: 37). Van Niewkirk comments that in the Egyptian world view, “All women have the power to seduce men by their sexual bodies. Female performers mainly differ from ‘decent’ women because they publicly employ their potential to seduce” (1998: 30).

[13] Lucy: ________ Mona Said: _________

[14]In some parts of the world … Shay 1999: 19; 2002: 141.

[15]In Greece …. Cowan 95. Stavros Stavrou Kara?? observes that tchiftetelli has been distanced and rejected by the mainstream culture as part of a social/political agenda of allying Greece with the West.

[16] This is a hard point for most Westerners to accept, since we come essentially from traditions whose dance styles are based on leg movement, so we do interpret hip movement as intrinsically sexual. But the 80-year-old grandmother or the three-year-old toddler who belly dance at a wedding party aren’t doing a sexually evocative dance. Hip movement, like any dance move that shows the human body to advantage, has the potential to exhibit sexuality, but it isn’t intrinsically sexual.

[17] Lois Ibsen al Faruqi detailed an aesthetic… Al Faruqi 7-12. For a more detailed discussion of the aesthetics of this form of dance, see Shay 21-30?.

[18] The practitioners of the danse du ventre …There was actually a man with the Egyptian dancers, one Mohammad, who eventually settled in America, as well as an Iranian male dancer who performed sometimes at the “Parade of Beauties” exhibition (on Mohammad: Carleton p. _______. On the Persian: Dream City. Men or boys were described as doing a “shoulder dance” at the Street in Cairo exhibit at the Chicago Columbian Exhibition. But few popular accounts mention them, and focus instead on the “dancing girls,” who were a notorious attraction at several of the Exposition’s concessions. For a detailed account of the exhibition, see Chapter _______ .

[19] There are a very few moves that tend to be done by one sex or the other: for example, men may throw in some steps from the tahtib in Egypt, and women might incorporate flirtatious gestures that would be odd on a man. (Morocco and Miriam Robinson Gould, personal communications).

[20] Osman Balata, see Tarik Sultan, “Oriental Dance …”; Mousbah Baalbeki,; on Mousbah Baalbeki: Deeter and Senges; Jemaa al Fna: Miriam Robinson Gould, personal communication, March 2006.

[21] For example, Ibrahim Akef, brother of dance great Naima Akef, was immensely influential in the early days of raqs sharqi on film and continued his influence as Dina’s choreographer in the 1980’s and onward; Mohammad Khalil provided groundbreaking choreographies for Nagwa Fouad. In the 2000’s there are a number of Eastern men who have found their dance outlet in the West; for example, Momo Khadous in Germany, Yousry Sharif in New York, Mayodi in Paris, Amir Thaleb in Argentina, and many others.

[22] van Niewkirk

[23] Tarik Sultan, “Oriental Dance …” together with later elaborations on an Internet discussion group, med-dance.world std. com, in March and April 2006.

[24] Personal communication, 1992.

[25] And _______ . On dancers and prostitutes: three sexually available dancers are described by Gustave Flaubert in his accounts of his travel in Egypt in 1851: Aziza, Hassan Beilbassi, and the famed prostitute Kuchuk Hanem. Flaubert _______ .

[26] Van Niewkirk, Trade, _______________ .

[27] Without any evidence … This is not to deny that belly dance or something like it may have been used in ritual contexts in the past. There is evidence, for example, for the use of belly dance in childbirth, since the dancer/researcher Morocco (Carolina Varga-Dinicu) observed a Moroccan village in 1967 (Morocco, Dancing the Baby …”., and this use of the dance may have continued in unbroken use for millennia, evidence or not. That doesn’t mean its ultimate origins were in childbirth rituals – even though Morocco’s original Moroccan informant, whom she met in the United States in 1963, believed that the dance did originate in birth rituals. Folk traditions are as likely to reflect current values as ancient events.

[28] Nadia Gamal: ARAAMCO World article; Nyeelah: p ________; Hanan and Mohammed Khalil: Shareen el Safy, personal communication.

[29] Talents from god: Tahia Carioca (Said _____); Mona el Said (el Safy date _______). In a personal communication to Shareen el Safy, Nagwa Fouad described her drum solo as “between me and my god” (conveyed to me by Shareen on 2/7/05 .)

[30] There are actually two main issues … There are really a lot more, because the intersections of religion, society, and religious ritual are many and diverse, and vary from society to society, and are often perceived differently by societies than we perceive them from the outside – for example, some people are puzzled by our desire to separate the secular from the sacred.

[31] the dances may not be “belly dance” … Most of the dances outside of the Persian Gulf region would at least be SIDTA, but the participants might deny that they were raqs sharqi, which is understood as a performance style.

[32] Shay, Iran & judicial. Follow up with email.

[33] You could regard them as solo-improvised, in that the people who do them are dancing what comes out of their own body, but their movements are not part of the ethos of improvisation in Middle Eastern art.