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The social value of the Orientalist Belly Dance style is high. The dominant social narrative of authenticity of the Orientalist Belly Dance style is related to the reassuring notion of a distant romantic Arabian Night past. It is one in which the heterosexual normative is continuously upheld through imagery of an active-yet-submissive, sensual Middle Eastern woman and her male Sheikh captor. This is a pervasive narrative found in Belly Dance classes throughout England and in other countries. Dox (2006, 52) explains that this narrative of a harem fantasy in the American Belly Dance classroom and in performance allows for an exotic and erotic fantasy of the self when dancing, one which indicates more about the sexual frustrations and fantasy of the Western participant than it does an Eastern other. The same is true of an Egyptian Belly Dancer. Shay and Sellers-Young (2003, 27) illustrate the self-exoticism of Egyptian Belly Dancers and the social reasons for the adoption of a more Orientalist version of the dance:

We suggest that this desire to “clean up,” sanitise, and make respectable a dance form with undeniably sexual and sensual content compels native and western choreographers to create staging that make the dance acceptable to the new middle-class elite, both in the Middle East and in the west.

In both East and West, the Orientalist Belly Dance style therefore has meaning. Shay and Sellers-Young attribute it to the Western educational system kept in place after the Middle Eastern independence from colonial rule and the rising Middle-classes. I think there is also a strong mythical basis to the Orientalist style, one which resides in the mythic content or what Barthes describes as the “mythical speech” which is a “material which has already been worked

on so as to make it suitable for communication” (2000, 110), a point reiterated by Said’s introduction to his text:

The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. (1978, 1)

As Said (along with Shay and Sellers-Young) notes, even within Egypt the Orientalist imagery and styling of the dance is present within the naming of the dance: in either Arabic as Raqs el Sharqi (literal translation Dance of the East) or in English as Oriental dance. From a

semiological point of view the construction of the Oriental myth is so pervasive in each culture due to the pre-loading of meaning, expectation and reception, even before any dance content is offered for an audience’s consideration.

4.4.2 Educational value

There remain a substantial number of texts and resources which detail an Orientalist style of Belly Dance. One of the consistently referenced texts is Buonaventura’s The Serpent of the Nile (1989). Hanna used Buonaventura’s text as an authority on the dance (1988, 51-52, 57, 60, 62), when in fact the text is a collection of travel writing, opinion and Orientalist imagery. The text itself can be seen as a form of research-documentation to be read alongside the evolving experimentation and “bricolage” of Buonaventura’s dance theatre work. In the English Belly Dance tradition, dance research and performance have been inextricably linked since the beginning. Today, the majority of English practitioners travel to Egypt to learn and conduct personal research.

4.4.3 Cultural value

The cultural value of the Orientalist Belly Dance style is high; this has been well documented, critiqued and analysed by several Belly Dance historians and scholars (Dox 2006, Shay &

Sellers-Young 2003, Charlton, 1994, Shohat, 2000 and Monty 1996). The imagined history and world of the Belly Dance is a well documented reality, one that Bacon (2003) studied in a Northampton community in England. The value of the form resides in the Oriental mythos and attributing harem fantasy associated with the Western fascination and fetishisation of the Middle East and especially the women of the Middle East. Buonaventura’s dance theatre show Dancing Girls sourced the texts of Orientalist writers and travellers and their fantastical impressions of

dancers. The whole show and her text The Serpent of the Nile that accompanies the show illustrate the Middle East with western imagery and text. Dox (2006) points out the ubiquitous use of the veil in Orientalist Belly Dance style dancing found in America. She highlights the simulation and constructed characteristics of the Belly Dance rendition, one that reveals more about a Western woman than it does an Eastern woman. In response to attempting to define a non-Orientalist version of Belly Dance practitioners note that there follows difficulties in selling tickets and convincing audiences that what they were witnessing resembles a more contemporary Egypt. Hilal changed the name of her dance once her audience numbers were secured to Hilal Dance in order to align herself with “contemporary” dance and distance herself from what she considered “the Orientalist fetishisation of my art” (2008). The origin of the Orientalist Belly Dance style resides in the West and dates from the emergence of the Hoochie Koochie dancers (Charlton, 1994) from the travelling dance groups of the late nineteenth century, a period of time in which national borders expanded and the rise of the middle-classes placed a new emphasis on establishing who represented civilisation and respectability (Foucault 1972, 1986).

4.4.4 Economic value

The economic value of the Orientalist style of Belly Dance is high too. All values of the Orientalist style of Belly Dance are high, which leads us to the conclusion this is why scholars

approach the subject of Belly Dance from this perspective. The Orientalist style taps into the substantial imagery and “speech” found through historical records, literature, film and television imagery (Keft-Kennedy 2005 and Bernstein & Studlar 1997). According to Said (1978) the widespread reference and use of Orientalism as a concept and theory of “otherness” pervades our everyday lives. It is part of what Bourdieu would term our “habitus” and for Barthes’s myth equation it is the undergirding principle that maintains a high economic value for this specific style. By contrast the American style, English style and even the Egyptian style have to borrow from this comprehensive image, speech and habitus in order to attract audiences and to present within performance a common speech, one in which both the form and the meaning is

understood through the “Orientalist” style Belly Dance and the signification of a Belly Dance then takes place. As an example of the use of this “concept” of Orientalism in Belly Dance practice, an original poster for my Belly Dance classes took the form of a hand drawn character from the Arabian Nights: there was no two piece costume; no harem fantasy attached; just a female character from the Arabian Nights (which has its Orientalist latent meaning). The classes were average in size and regularity, but when I changed the image to a female face covered with only the eyes showing the population of my classes grew four-fold within a week of displaying the posters.