The Dying Art of Egyptian Belly Dance
Egyptian belly dancers are an endangered species. On the road to extinction. That is, if there isn’t a belly dance renaissance in Egypt sometime soon. Even Dina fears as much. For the truth is, aside from Dina, Randa, Camelia, and more recently, Aziza, there has been a decline of good Egyptian belly dancers on the market. This is ironic, considering that most of us imagine Egypt to be “Planet Belly Dance,” and that Egypt is the home of belly dance legends Samia Gamal, Fifi Abdo, and Soheir Zaki. There’s also at least 40 million Egyptian women living here. You’d think that with those numbers, this music and dance oriented country could produce a few more belly dancers. Yet the reality is that an ugly combination of economic and socio-religious factors is robbing this country of one of its greatest artistic achievements.
I remember first moving to Cairo and being excited about all the belly dancers I thought I’d see. Expecting to discover hundreds of naturally talented women, I visited nearly every venue that featured belly dancing. But what I expected and what I discovered were two different things. To my dismay, the level of dancing here amongst most Egyptian belly dancers is not as high as it used to be just 30 years ago.
