The Creation of Bedlah:
Representations of Order and Desire[1]
[MARTA SCHILL[2]]When
I began belly dancing in the mid-1970’s, bedlah – the two-piece
bra and belt costume – had the illusion of antiquity behind it. In its revelation of the birth center, and its
coined or beaded enveloping of the sexual
centers, it had an archetypal force,
[>VENUS OF WILLENDORF[3]],
much like the ancient carved images of goddesses left to us by our paleolithic
ancestors. The picture [>COMPLEAT BELLY
DANCER COVER[4]] on the
front of The Compleat Belly Dancer, the 1973 best-seller that was my introduction
the the dance, seemed to encompass its archetypal
power: the bare midriff, the focus on the
belly as the center of life, the blurring of edges as the dancer fades out of
the particular and into the universal, evoking
the power of feminine fertility that
ultimately drives the world. Surely, I
thought – even in the days before underwire – belly dancers must always have
dressed this way!
[>PRISSE D’AVENNES[5]] But of course, they didn’t. And, as many in the field area ware, the two-piece
costume is a hybrid, a mixture of East and West. Trhis talk focuses on some elements of the
cultural exhanges from the 1890’s to the 1910’s that led to the development
of this type of costuming. Along the way, I will raise some deeper
questions: [>CARIOCA/ ALLAN[6]] What did the two-piece
costume say to Western audiences about the East, about women, about dance,
about themselves? What did it mean to
the Eastern dancers who adopted it, or to the
Eastern urban elite who enjoyed it? What
does it show about how Eastern dancers
and entrepreneurs oversaw the transition of
their craft from a colonial display, to a sophisticated
if still maligned art?
The Eastern Aspect of
Bedlah
[>GHAZIYA[7]] Since there is little description
of dance or its costuming from the Islamic world, we must learn what we can
from accounts by Western travelers, the bulk of them in the 19th and
early 20th centuries. These
travelers import their own prejudices
and expectations, but interestingly, from the
start, there is a schism between how writers and visual artists describe the
dance. Writers tend to portray
it as lascivious and perverse, or describe it
in terms of the grotesque, performed by fat,
twitching, convulsive, even greasy dancers.
On the other hand, visual artists tend to create more appealing
portraits, often evoking the timeless mystery
and luxurious sensuality that feature so prominently
in orientalism.
To what extent can we use these
writers and visual artists as sources for the study of Eastern dance and
costume?
[>ETHNOPORN[8]]
Some we have to reject altogether: the photographers
who produced what might be alled “ethnoporn.” No, these are not real dance costumes. [>INGRES[9]]
Some painters of the East never actually visited
it. [>GEROME[10]] Others, though they might have visited the Orient,
clearly adapted it to their own ideas of
sensual display. [>ROBERTS[11]] On the other hand, some artists as well as
some writers adopted a largely documentary
stance. But none of these sources is
without its misunderstandings, misrepresentations,
and prejudices.
Illustrations of professional
dancers up to the 1850’s or so create
something of a consensus on dancers’ costuming. The voluminous pantaloons,
the gauzy shirt that hangs to the knees, [>GHAZIYA[12]] the form-fitting overcoat, either
knee-length or waist-length, [>GHAZIYA[13]] the scarf tied around the hips,
and the hanging, elaborately dressed hair, [>GHAZIYA[14]] appear
to be fairly consistent elements.
[D’AVENNES ODALISQUE[15]] This costume resembles Ottoman dress, and it seems
likely that this was a version of the clothing worn by elite women.
The “ghawazee costume,” while it
fully covers the dancer’s body, obviously did not involve corsets, and did
involve a show of cleavage, [>1870’s DRESSES[16]] neither of which was an element of polite
Western dress at the time. All the same,
the dancer is portrayed as an attractive woman
whose dress, while foreign and in some aspects
risque, gives her much the same feminine line as the Western woman.
If there is something approaching
a consensus on Egyptian costume in the early
to mid-19th century, there is also a standard costume of the late 19th
and early 20th century, and it is rather different. [>AIOUSCH[17]] The hit of the 1889 Paris Exposition
was the Egyptian dancer Aiousch. Here she is portrayed
in an elegantly patterned matching dark vest
and skirt, and though her sleeved arm blocks her midsection, there is a clear
indication of jewelry hanging from her neck and looping
low, beneath the line of her vest. Her
cleavage is emphasized, and the light shirt
she wears is drawn as skin-tight. The
richness of the brocade trim on her vest gives the impression
of elaborate jeweling. The motion of her
dance is emphasized by the swing of the long
strips of fabric that hang from her hips. The artist who illustrated Aiousche’s dance portrayed
her with a restraint that emphasized her personal
beauty and elegance, and minimized the “shock” value of her lightly-clad
midsection.
[>CCE DANCERS[18]] Dancers from the Street in Cairo
exhibition at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair wear a similar costume, but the photograph
reveals a somewhat different aesthetic from the drawing of Aiousch. The short vest, with its tightly held and pushed-together
breasts, replaces the emphasis
on cleavage shown in the earlier costumes, and gives a line that separates
bust from belly much more pointedly. [>OLD ELDORADO[19]] Dancers in Egypt’s
Old Eldorado nightclub show a similar costume, a similar horizontally divided
line. It is hard to avoid the conclusion
that in urban Egypt
at the turn of the 20th century, this or something like it was a
standard costume for the dance.
[>COSTUMED DANCERS[20]] Now,
in contrast to the unified body presentation
of the earlier ghawazee, the body is now cut into zones. The usually white-clad belly dominates the
viewer’s attention. The lower body is covered
with an A-line skirt rather than in voluminous pantaloons,
with hanging fabric strips to reflect the
movement of the hips, as the narrow skirt most
likely would not. [FDC COSTUME[21]] For the upper
body, ther is a short vest, which may be a shortened version of the
waist-length coat we sometimes see earlier.
Jewelry hangs over the vest, looping
below it.
It is difficult to judge how widespread
this costuming style was. It appears
to be common in Egypt,
and if Sarah Graham-Brown is right and this picture was shot in Beirut,
[>>>BEIRUT[22]]
it might have been adopted in the Levant
as well.
Now – the most obvious aspect
of this costume is that it is, in essence, a two-part
costume. It has the line we associate
with bedlah. How did the bifurcation –
or rather, tri-furcation, of the body into chest, belly and hip
zones, come about?
One p[ossibility
is that the early 19th century costume never was as uniform as it
might appear. After all [GEROME AGAIN], Gerome’s Dance of
the Almeh shoes an abbreviated vest, as does this watercolor by Alexandre
Bida. It has been suggested that these
were “fantasy costumes,” the result of the artist’s desire to sexualize the
dance scene. But it is equally possible
that the fuller costume dominates early illustration because the artists who depict
it chose to show more covered dancewear that would be less shocking to their
European audiences.
There were many different types
of women dancing professionally in Egypt,
from the most respected almeh to the seediest prostitute. It seems likely that different costumes were
appropriate
for different dances, different times, different audiences, different dancers.
One popular
explanation for the costume change is
thatWestern tourists demanded less-dressed dancers, effectively stripping
them over time. But despite
such incidents as Gustave Flaubert’s insistence that Kuchuk Hanim dance naked
for him, the dancerts of Egypt
were not simply collectively discarding items
of clothing. They were changing
things. And there are many social forces
behind these changes. One of the many
influences is European, but it’s more
about dressing Middle Eastern women thatn undressing them.
[FDC COSTUME[23]] Egypt
was undergoing immense changes in this period:
increasing urbanization, the necessity of forging a relationship
with Europeans, the diminished influence of
the Ottoman Empire,
changing roles of women, Westernization of the upper
classes. Egyptians
were not passive recipients
of this change; sometimes they were instigators. For the developments
in the dance costume, we should also credit the savvy of Cairo
performers and entrepreneurs
who both played to the newly urban Cairenes
and exploited the Western tourist, ultimately
developing a flourishing
“tourist industry.”
Urban dancers and those who
traveled overseas had new audiences to satisfy, and their own ideas about how
to do this. One tried and true strategy
was to claim an association with the elite by following its fashions, in some
respects at least. Elite women
in Egypt
were conscious of international fashions, and I think this is an element in the
abandonment of the earlier ghawazee costume. [>FIANCEE[24]] By the late 19th century,
fashion-conscious elite women in Egypt
had turned away from Ottoman fashions, and now looked toward Paris
for their clothing. The coat and pantaloons
disappeared
from their dress. The close-fitting
bodices and A-line skirts of the Edwardian era were adopted.
[FDC COSTUME][25]By
the 1890’s it appears
that dancers too favored the new Western look in several aspects. In contrast to the shirt cut loose in the traditional
Egyptian fashion, they now opted
for tighter-fitting shirts on a Western line.
They wore A-line skirts. Some of
the designs on skirt fabrics, to the extent that it is possible
to make them out, appear
to be European, perhaps
reflecting the increasingly available and cheap
machine-woven cotton fabrics from the West.
These dancers were not simply dressing
to please Western tourists, who would probably
have been just as happy
with the exoticism of pantaloons. And in fact, some quite consistent elements
of this costume are the opposite
of Western orientalist motifs. [HIP SCARF][26]
For example, Western dancers portraying
the East often adopted a hip
scarf tied in front, a la ghaziyah, well into the 20th century, but
actual Egyptian dancers abandoned it in favor
of the narrow belt with hanging strips of
fabric, which never caught on in the West. [FDC COSTUME][27] Dancers aligned themselves with Western
styles to signify a connection with the elite, driving their point
home with with clear markers of socioeconomic class, such as the heeled shoes
and stockings that completed their ensembles. As performers
of a dance whose style was surely known by them to be different from the dances
of the West, they may even have felt that the new costume better showcased the
hip and torso articulation that was a central
element of their dance.
50 years before, the ghawazee – or perhaps,
awalim – had dressed like elite women. But turn of the century dancers had developed
a very specific, costume-like costume. The new look reflected the changing venues and
meanings of the dance. [FDC COSTUME[28]] Dancewear was no longer streetwear, and this
may reflect a kind of professionalism among
dancers, despite the shame that attached to
their profession. By the early years of the 20th
century, with the specifically “costume-like”
costumes of the professional urban dancer, it
is possible that dancers had begun to seek a place
in Cairo’s rapidly
changing re-inscription of entertainment and the
arts. The costume may have been, at
least in some small measure, a statement about the new directions possible
for Egyptian dance.
On the other hand, Western
Edwardian audiences were not alert to the elements of the costume that in the
East signaled an urban, even stylish line.
They would have immediately been struck by the fact that the costume
divided the body into three zones, each of which, taken alone, was probelmatic. The emphasis
on the breasts diverted their matronly purpose
to a sensual one. The lightly-clad
abdomen brought attention to the belly, the center of gluttonous urges. The low-slung hip
line drew the eyes toward the illicit nether regions. In the eyes of the West, the divided body of
this new costuming style was an affront and a confirmation of the supposed
seductive meaning of the dance.
Perhaps
for these reasons, the uniformity of urban Egypt
dissolves into multiplicity in the West. [>FATIMA[29]] Eastern dancers had appeared
at Western exhibitions at the end of the 19th century, and some
stayed behind for relatively lucrative careers in circus, dime museum, and
exhibition performances; there were also
imitators, for better or worse, of their technique, performing
in all sorts of venues. The costumes we
have records of show some variety: from Fatima’s Coney
Island midway costume, to [>LITTLE EGYPT SF[30]] this
“Little Egypt” performing
in San Francisco in 1890, [>LITTLE
EGYPT 2[31]]
to this apparently
different “Little Egypt” performing
on the East coast in 1894, to [>CIRCUS PERFORMER[32]] this performer
of unknown provenance.
And with that, we leave the East
with its own version of the two-part costume firmly in place, and turn to the
West, where new developments cement the creation of bedlah.
[>DEVIDASI[33]] Paris,
1840: a group of devidasi, or Indian temple
dancers, come to Paris to perform. Shortly thereafter, in the ballet La Peri, [LA PERI 1[34]] the
title character, a Persian fairy, [>LA PERI 2[35]] was
costumed in a tutu whose top is a vest of the
sort worn by the devidasi. The Orient
was the Orient, in Western eyes, whether India
or Persia was
at issue. And an audience who believed
that the costume of Eastern dance was bipartite
would have such confirmations as the paintings
of Gerome.
La Peri excepted,
though, there is not much evidence of the two-part
costume in Western theater until near the end of the century. [>BERNHARDT< RECLINING CLEO[36]] But in 1891, the diva of the European
stage, Sarah Bernhardt, played Cleopatra
in Paris. [>BERNHARDT< CLEO 2[37]] The costumes for her Cleopatra
clearly reflected the costuming styles of the East. [>BERNHARDT< CLEO 3[38]]
Note one element of Berhnardt’s
costume that would make a great impact on the creation of bedlah: the addition of strategically placed circular
ornaments.
[>OULED NAIL[39]]
Such ornaments are a feature of Eastern jewelry – here they are worn by a woman
of the Ouled Nail. But the Western positioning of them stirs up a whole storm
of new associations that reaches fruition in the dances of Salome in the early
20th century.
While Bernhardt was playing
Cleopatra, [>WILDE[40]] Oscar Wilde was writing his play
Salome, in which he created the “Dance of the Seven Veils.” [>BEARDSLEY SALOME[41]] Salome, whose dance before King Herod
resulted in the death of John the Baptist, was
one of those figures in whom cultural tensions were readily expressed. She was portrayed
as an evil harpy, an innocent young girl, a
love-crazed virgin, a maiden used against her will, an amoral symbol of the
modern age, and so on. Wilde’s desire-driven
Salome was a slightly more shocking addition to the mix. The play
languished, but then the composer Richard
Strauss adapted it to be the libretto of his 1905
opera Salome.
[>SALOME SCENE[42]] It was with the costuming of these operatic
Salomes that the bra, belt and skirt costume now so universally associated with
belly dance was born.
[>FRAU WITTICH[43]] In the debut of the opera
in Dresden in 1905, Marie Wittich portrayed
Salome in this costume. Vaguely Middle
Eastern circular motifs [>WITTICH CLOSEUP[44]] mark her breasts, and similar ornaments ride
low on her belly, just about at ovary level, while a hanging loincloth thingy
creates the sense of separation of the legs
despite the skirt that covers them.
This costume was both daring and –
shall we say – pointed. In a world without cleavage, this placement
of the circular motifs over the breasts – the nipples,
even – served to draw attention to an erotic area that was seldom even acknowledged. The sexual significance of this would have
created a ripple
of disturbance in the Edwardian audience – just as the opera
did itself, with its perverse sexual excess. Other costumes followed, [>SALOME[45]]
many of them making use of the circular motif, and all of them adopting,
at least for the dance, a two-part costume
that evoked the costuming of the East.
[>SALOME[46]] One reason to adorn the breasts and pubis
is, of course, to draw attention to them.
The sexual complexities of Salome, already so resonant to the Edwardian
audience, are made more evocative by this simple mechanism.
[SALOME[47]] At
the same time, the circular motifs create a flattened
line very different from that of the natural breast. In a sense, they reduce the breast to a
symbolic plane. We are still some years away from the idea of
the mandala as articulated by Carl Jung, but we are also in an era of pronounced
mysticism. The cyclical and the abstract
could have a spiritual importance
that raised the scary possibility of a world
whose values were very different from the linear, authoritative, four-square
world of the forward-looking West. The
Islamic arabesque evoked some of this sense of alterity; so would these
breast-bourne mandalas.
[>SALOME[48]] Salome
was a femme fatale, or “deadly women,” whose
sexual voracity and destructive use of it reflects anxiety about contemporary
changes in women’s roles. In the Salome
manifestations, the circular motifs at breast and pubis
both encompassed woman’s threat and at the
same time restrained her. They reduced
woman to her sexual parts, and stamped
on her a seal of her unavoidable femininity, something applied
to her clothing like the mark of Cain to identify her sexuality as potetially
destructive.
At the same time, though, the
circular motif had a more benevolent manifestation in burlesque, where
sexuality was aligned with the positive pleasures
of masculine desire. In this sex-positive
environment, the encircled breast might lose its threatening aspect,
and become the wheel that whirled down the road to sensual delight.
The earliest rendition of this motif I’ve found is on La
Belle Otero of the Folies Bergeres who wore this costume [>OTERO[49]]
for her 1901 season. Then there is La
Belle Zerka, [ZERKA 1[50]]. This postcard
was sent in 1906, which means that she was performing
in this costume shortly after Strauss’s Salome opened,
and very possibly before. This dancer, apparently
of North African origin, is using authentic jewelry in a very unconventional
way. It is possible
that we are looking at the immediate impetus
for Strauss’s bejeweled breast right here.
Strauss’s opera
gave birth to a proliferation of
Salome’s. [>MAUDE ALLAN 1[51]] But perhaps
most famous and most influential was Maud Allan. In the costume for her wildly popular
“The Vision of Salome,” she kept the circular
motifs, but left off the pesky fabric underlay,
creating a provoking bejeweled nakedness for
the stage. Bejeweled nakedness was
another common orientalist trope, [>MOREAU SALOME[52]] and
appears in this
unlikely jeweled corset and hip covering in
Gustave Moreau’s influential Salome series of the 1870’s.
By dropping
the excess drapery of the operatic
Salomes, Allan had catapulted the Salome story
specifically, and the dance of the East more
generally, into the the discourse of feminine expression
versus conventional propriety
already so vigorously fought by dancers such as Isadora Duncan. [DUNCAN[53]] Duncan,
who often performed in “Greek” costumes, had been battling critics and censors about
the purity and propriety
of her costumes for a decade. In 1906,
[>RADHA[54]] Ruth St. Denis’s Indian costume in her performance
of Radha had raised the same juxtaposition of
sensual undress and artistic, even spiritual purity. [>ALLAN 2[55]] Ironically, when Allan stripped
off several layers of fabric, she evoked this already powerful
discourse of purity and the feminine
body.
Allan’s costume was more bare than those
of Duncan or St. Denis. It was also less
founded on any actual model of ethnic or historical dress. Her relative nudity was one in which the
sexual characteristics of “woman” were both honored with jewels and imprisoned
in chains. The costume, with its
hanging ropes of pearls,
evoked not only luxury but also bondage.
It liberated flesh but imprisoned the
sexual parts, like a very pretty
chastity belt. This combination of exposure
and bondage was fascinating to her turn-of-the-century audiences.
While the Egyptian
dancer’s tripartite division into bust, belly
and below seemed to consolidate the sexual implications
of all three, Allan’s may have evoked other meanings of the zoned body. The “body, spirit,
mind” division so prominent in the West took
material form in Allan’s costume. The
Salome costume evoked in its Edwardian audience a sense of the schism between
the sensual, the feeling, and the spiritual. It also showcased their intermingling, which
was defined by the story as perverse and
destructive. In the narrative of
Salome’s dance of death, the world order was challenged, even struck down, only
to be reaffirmed in the end. Salome’s split
costume furthered this process.
[>VAUDEVILLE SALOME[56]] The Salome costume, like the Salome dance, spread
like wildfire. Vaudeville, the variety
theater of the day, provided an ideal milieu
for the Salome dance, whose disturbing nature was mitigated by the presence
of, for example, Irish comedians, blackface
step dancers, and trick dogs, on the same playbill. [>VAUDEVILLE SALOME[57]] As dancers went on the road, even the
cow-towns of middle America were exposed
to the writhings, veil-flingings, head-kissings, and other theatrics of the
Salome dancers.
[>VAUDEVILLE SALOME[58]] The look of the costume was established, and
while there were some variations, it soon became the standard in both Europe
and America,
from high opera to burlesque.
By the 1910’s, there was apparently
an audience expectation that Eastern dances
would be performed in something like the
Salome costume. [>BARA/CAYLUS[59]] It appears
in the early days of film, worn by Theda Bara in a 1918 Hollywood Salome and by
Lucie Caylus in a 1920 French production of
the Salome story; [ALBANI[60]] here
it is worn by Marcella Albani in 1932 in a German silent film. It continues [>HOLLYWOOD[61]]
into the glamor years of Hollywood
following World War Two. [OPERA SALOMES[62]] It also had an aferlife in high-culture in
revivals of Strauss’s opera. [PINUPS[63]] Pinups
on a Middle Eastern theme showed a commitment to the two-piece
costume, testifying to the ubiquity of this way of framing Middle Eastern
art.
But there might be an up side for
belly dance in all this. Perhaps the
persistence of this attractive, sexy image of the Orient is responsible for
chasing away the rhetoric of the 19th century travellers who
described belly dance as contorted, twitching, vulgar and ugly. The visual reception of the dance, always
more favorable than the written descriptions, evolved in the early 20th
century West to give the dance – for better or worse – an aura not of vulgarity
that fails to please, but of erotic display that had every chance of success.
[VAUDEVILLE SALOME[64]] As
I said, by 1908 or so, the Salome costume had come to be understood as the appropriate
costume for oriental dance. But what was
oriental dance? The term
simultaneously meant two very different things: first, the authentic dance of
the Middle East, and second, interpretive
dances about the East by Western women.
Western audiences often lacked clarity about the difference. Yet Salome dances were performed
for audiences of both men and women spanning
all levels of the socio-economic scale. On
the other hand, “belly dance,” as it was now coming to be known, was often
confined to venues with largely male audiences. Even where its dancers reached
a broader public, it was in dime museums,
circuses and fairs, where they were by definition an oddity, even a token of
the East’s cultural degeneracy.
In general, we are very seldom in a
position to know the dance techniques used by
any given dancer in this period. Photographs
are some help:for example,
it’s pretty clear that Allan, with her angled
arms, wasn’t exactly doing raqs beledi.
But with one dancer, we do have evidence, and that is [>>>RAJAH
FILM[65]] Princess Rajah, who was filmed by Edison
in St. Louis in 1904. Though she was American, she was perforimg
a creditable imitation of Eastern dance, even playing
zils. In 1904, her costume was
essentially Western, though modified by a shiny belt and chest-level fringe. [>>>RAJAH 1908[66]] But by 1908, she was performing
in a version of the Salome costume. It
was probably no coincidence that that is when
she made her big break from ten shows a day in dime museums to fame as a
Vaudeville headliner. Was she now performing
her more or less “Eastern” moves in this more revealing costume?
There also exist photographs
of several dancers of apparently
Eastern ethnicity who were performing in the
West. We can suppose
that their dances had some elements of authentic technique, however adapted
to Western tastes. [>ZERKA 2[67]] La Belle Zerka, as we’ve seen, also adopted
the bra-and-belt costume, and incidentally, her costumes appear
sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of actual belly dancing. [ZERKA 3[68]] Zerka also performed
some numbers in a white, loose-fitting though abbreviated robe, calling up
visions of North African clothes. She
seems to have been adept at packaging
her own exoticism, a kind of North African Josephine
Baker.
Zerka’s costumes, so effective in
the West, would have been mysifying to a Middle Eastern audience. On the other hand, this unknown dancer [>UNKNOWN[69]] probably performing
in the 1910’s, wears a costume that could well be an adaptation
of the Western Salome costume to the Eastern aesthetic. It is not far different from some of the
costumes we see on Egyptian dancers in the 1920’s
and ‘30’s. She raises the possibility
that Eastern dancers who performed in the West
for part of their careers, may have been significant
factor in the evolution of bedlah in the Middle East as
early as the 1910’s.
By the 1880’s, Egyptian
dancers had already evolved – or created – an urban costuming and performance
style. By the 1910’s, there were changes
in the artistic climate of Egypt
that further encouraged these developments. In Egyptian
theater, which had evolved into a vibrant artistic and social phenomenon,
women were now permitted to perform
on stage. Variety acts were brought in
from Europe to
entertain both tourists and the Egyptian
elite. And in this atmosphere,
the elegance of the jeweled costumes already worn by Eastern dancers in the
West, may well have entered the popular
consciousness of the Egyptian public. [BADIA MASABNI[70]] Egyptian dancers
and entrepreneurs in the 1910’s and ‘20’s were
eager to take advantage of the renaissance of theater and dance. Now their performances
could be redefined, as in the long-past world
of the elegant almee, as sophisticated and
enchanting, on a par with the performance
arts of the West. When Badia Masabni opened
her Casino Opera in the late 1920’s, the
groundwork for the elegant, bejeweled costume – and the individual,
star-focused performance style – had already
been laid.
[FINIS[71]] Thank you.