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Ibtisam performs in a traditional costume at a nightclub in Cairo. Though many Egyptians seem to feel there is something tawdry about belly dancing, some performers can make $2,000 for a short show at a society wedding. | ||||
January 20, 2004
Symphony in Motion? Ancient Tradition? Or Just Tacky?
AIRO, Jan. 19 — Madame Rakia Hassan adopts a look of extreme indignity when asked why women from as far afield as the United States and Australia flock to her belly-dancing studio for lessons despite her utter lack of formal training.
"I am Egyptian!" she exclaims. "Oriental dancing is something inside every Egyptian. Before, when I was a classical dancer, nothing emerged. But as soon as I started to teach, all the moves came out."
It has long been a conceit among Egyptians that they, in fact, invented Oriental dance, or belly dancing, as it is more commonly known, and remain its only true practitioners.
But what had been mere tradition became law on Jan. 1: Foreigners are now barred from working as the headline dancers in the cabarets of Cairo and tourist resorts.
[On Tuesday, a Cairo court rejected an appeal by Russian and Australian belly dancers against the ban], Reuters reported.]
The announced reason for the ban is that foreigners were stealing jobs from Egyptian women. Officials will not come right out and admit it, but many in the dance world also say the government suspected that women from Russia and elsewhere were claiming to be dancers while plying an older profession.
Yet Egypt's attitude toward its dancers has always been tinged with ambivalence. In the abstract, there is pride in the dance, but no respectable family wants its daughter to pursue the profession.
"The Egyptians don't want it to die out, but they don't want to nurture it either because of the stigma," says Jane Bolinowsky, an Australian flutist studying Oriental dance. "It's a minefield. There is a powerful female sexuality here, but there is also a deep mistrust in it."
The origins of belly dancing remain obscure, but Egyptians claim it because Pharaonic friezes show scantily clad girls with bands of men playing drums and tambourines.
Although Cairo remains the center for women seeking to learn the dance, the profession has suffered a certain slump at home, with far fewer upscale hotels featuring dancers. Given the conservative religious times, not to mention the general economic malaise, spending up to $50 a person to watch scantily clad women wiggle across the stage has lost some appeal.
No one is sure how many women the new law has affected, but promoters calculate that of 100 regular dancers in Cairo, maybe one-third were foreigners. Dancers and their fans describe the main difference as a question of soul.
"The Russians are very disciplined; they put in hours and hours perfecting their motor skills," noted Ms. Bolinowsky. "There is a softness about the Egyptian physique, though, a fluidity to their movement."
Madame Rakia added, "They feel the melody."
But foreigners had virtually taken over high-end spots like Maxim, a floating cabaret outside the Cairo Marriott that slips quietly along the Nile for several hours each night.
Sami Saad, the director of operations, makes no secret of his preference for foreigners. "The foreigners were creative, looking at old Egyptian movies to come up with new routines," he said. "They are not like the Egyptians, who think they just know how to dance and because they are Egyptian, everyone will love them automatically."
The seamier side of belly dancing unrolls in what passes for fleshpots in Cairo's old downtown. Ear-splitting music bursts forth around midnight, and the dancing improves as the night drifts toward dawn. During one recent evening at the Palmyra Club, where the dusty red décor seems unchanged since the 1960's, the first hefty dancers resembled the Michelin man poured into a slightly different mold. They did not so much gyrate as jiggle.
The patrons, slumped over small tables, nursing beers and hookah pipes, did not seem to mind, lurching on stage periodically to shower the performers with five-pound notes (worth 75 cents) and to attempt the occasional grope.
Such clubs are evidently not the prime dancers' lifeblood. Few upper-class Egyptian weddings are complete without a performance, and the prestige factor weighs heavily. A top dancer can command $2,000 for a 45-minute performance.
The most celebrated is Dina, who presents herself as a dancer of a different caliber, emphasizing her master's degree in philosophy.
But her performances really sealed her notoriety. Regulations require that a dancer's midriff be covered with fine netting at a minimum, and that her dress cover her legs when not in motion. Dina performed in costumes as skimpy as bikinis, with pelvic thrusts and other moves outside the repertory.
It all came crashing down last year, after the police raided a home of Hossam Aboul Fotouh, the country's BMW agent, and seized a videotape showing him, portly and married, with the shapely dancer in flagrante delicto. The tape soon leaked onto the Internet.
Dina stopped dancing for a time but has now resumed, in relatively prudish dress.
This constant hint of the unsavory leaves many Egyptians of two minds about Oriental dance.
"It is like striptease in your country," said Mohammed al-Qadi, a 28-year-old engineer celebrating his marriage with dinner at Maxim with a few friends. His bride, Farida Said, a veiled, 22-year-old pharmacist, chimed in: "I don't like it. It is something you should only do at home, not in front of strangers."
Yet other women on board, also veiled, suggested there was nothing quite like watching an accomplished dancer to make them feel happy.
Such timeless scenes have elicited excitement and shock from visitors for centuries. Auguste Flaubert wrote a rapt description of a striptease performed for him by a dancer whose musicians were blindfolded. Edward Lane, another 19th-century traveler, called Cairo's dancers both the "most abandoned courtesans" and the "finest women in Egypt."
Madame Rakia disapproves of the new law banning foreigners, seeing in it the demise of yet another aspect of Egypt's cosmopolitan past. There have long been foreigners here — Greeks, Armenians and others — who added richness to the dance without unseating the reigning Egyptian queens, she notes.
"If this dance was from any other country, you might find better dancers than there are in Egypt," she said. "You don't. It's impossible."
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