Belly dance, also referred to as Arabic dance is an expressionist type of dance that originated in Egypt and that emphasizes complex movements of the torso.
It has evolved to take many different forms depending on the country and region, both in costume and dance style; with Egyptian style and its famous traditional rhymes being the most common worldwide having many schools around the globe practicing it.
“Belly dance” is a translation of the French term danse du ventre, which was coined in 1864 as a snide nickname for the Orientalist painting The Dance of the Almeh by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.
The painting depicts a woman dancing before an audience of seated soldiers in a fantasy Middle Eastern setting.
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The dancer’s costume, with its small vest and gauzy blouse, seems to have been inspired by contemporary Awalem (Egyptian slang for Dancers) women’s clothing.
Where the Awalem woman of the period would have worn an elbow-length blouse tucked in to her skirt at the waist, however, this dancer’s sheer blouse is open over her bare breasts and her nude abdomen is thrust toward the viewer of the painting.
Over time, danse du ventre came to be used in French for all solo, torso-articulated dances of Middle Eastern origin. The English translation “belly dance” seems to have made its first appearance in 1889 in reference to the Egyptian dancers who performed at the Exposition Universelle that was held in Paris that year.[9][10]
The informal, social form of the dance is known as Raqs Baladi (‘Dance of the Country’ or ‘Folk Dance’) in Egyptian Arabic and is considered an indigenous dance. Raqs Sharqi (‘Eastern Dance’) is a broad category of professional forms of the dance, including forms of belly dance as we know it today, such as Raqs Baladi, Sa’idi, Ghawazee and Awalim.
Belly dance is primarily a torso-driven dance, with an emphasis on articulations of the hips. Unlike many Western dance forms, the focus of the dance is on isolations of the torso muscles, rather than on movements of the limbs through space. Although some of these isolations appear similar to the isolations used in jazz ballet, they are sometimes driven differently and have a different feeling or emphasis.
In common with most folk dances, there is no universal naming scheme for belly dance movements. Some dancers and dance schools have developed their own naming schemes, but none of these is universally recognized. One of the most common naming schemes is that of the Salimpour Format, introduced by Suhaila and Jamila Salimpour. Jamila Salimpour was the first to coin many now-popular names of belly dance moves, including steps such as the Basic Egyptian, Choo Choo, Maya, and Turkish Drop. But these commonly-held terms are the exception, rather than the rule, in the belly dance world.
