Middle Eastern Dance Essentials

What is refereed to as belly dance has many names: Oriental Dance, Raqs Sharqi (Arabic for Eastern Dance), Middle Eastern dance, American Tribal, Gypsy Fusion ... the list goes on. Belly dance includes everything from the Renaissance Fair Dancer to the American Tribal Style Dancer to the glittering cabaret dancer.

Oriental Dance is a universal form that is danced wherever Arab culture predominates. Oriental Dance is an art form because it has a language. It has an identity and integrity. Oriental dance is Eastern yoga. You have to think with the muscles inside your trunk.

The defining characteristics have to do with the music. The Oriental dancer makes the music visible, as if emanating from the body.

Here at World Dance Fitness we teach the foundations of Oriental Dance and enjoy exploring its natural and cultural evolutions.

Modern Egyptian Dance

This is a contemporary Egyptian nightclub style of belly dancing. It is accompanied by European orchestral music imported by fashionable Cairo nightclubs to satisfy Western tastes. Costumes are customarily very glitzy and elaborately beaded. Today's modern Egyptian belly dance incorporates sound mix, orchestra, and drum machine, seasoned with lively vocals.

Turkish Style Belly Dance

Turkish belly dance music is characterized by the sounds of the oboe, clarinet, oud, ney, kanoon, finger cymbals and hand drums. Turkish Dance costumes are among the more risque of the cabaret styles, baring plenty of leg and cleavage. They are usually beaded, but may use coins too. Turkish style dancers often play finger cymbals (aka zils). Tribal-Folkloric Introduced in the 1960s at California-style renaissance pleasure fairs, most notably by Jamila Salimpour and her troupe Bal Anat. Dancers typically balanced swords and other props, or did snake and folk line-dances. Their costuming was and still is distinctive with black and silver asuit fabric and facial drawings to simulate tribal tatoos. The distinctly tribal music came from a variety of hand drums, zornas, miz mar and saz.

American Tribal Style (ATS)

A later offshoot of Jamila’s style has become known as American Tribal Style and was spearheaded by Carolena Nericcio, founder of FatChanceBellyDance. It has a distinctive and colorful, costumed character of its own with choli tops, decorated turbans, Afghan jewelry and camel tassels. Carolena’s brand of Tribal belly dance innovated a unique cooperative method of spontaneous group choreography which has sparked a growing wave of interest in this collaborative form.

Folkloric Belly Dance

This style incorporates dance movements of the people. Popular ethnic folk dances such as the Fallahin (Egyptian farmers) and others are used as a framework for introducing the folkloric roots of eastern dance, from which belly dance emerged. Reed cane and stick dances are used by belly dancers in routines for a folkloric flair. Folkloric routines will be featured in belly dance stage shows in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Night Club Belly dance/Cabaret Style

In the U.S., the term “cabaret” meant an ethnic family restaurant and bar, largely and colorfully supported by ethnic clientele. Customers, both men and women, moved kerchiefs through the air as they danced folk dances: Lebanese debke, mizerloo, Greek sirto, or Zorbekiko between the floor-shows of the featured belly dance stars. Today these belly dancers usually perform a multi-faceted routine, sometimes on a raised stage (to afford the audience a better view) and most often to live musical accompaniment. The musical instruments might include oud, bazooki, keyboards, drums, violin, kanoon and vocals. Costumes are flashy and sparkling, with beads and sequins rather than the heavy, woven, embroidered, coined look of tribal costuming. Often the establishment sports a large dance floor for public participation in folk dancing and free style dancing to traditional ethnic music, or to Middle Eastern pop disco.

American Classic Style Belly Dance

This style describes the belly dance performed and cultivated by American women since about the early 1970s. It developed out of the rich collation of cultures in the American melting pot, especially in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. The American style of belly dance incorporated cultures from around the globe and added its own liberating trademarks. One of these trademarks was the steady development of the gymnastic use of the veil within the dance. Another was a wider stance and bolder use of space than in the Middle East. The American Classic style began spreading all over the world, even circling back to influence dance in the Middle East. Egyptian dance businesses flourished to meet the enjoyment of the western woman’s love of this dance.

Gothic Fantasy Belly Dance

This recently developed style of belly dance is distinguished by its urban tribal femme fatale look. Costuming involves dark fabrics, black, vinyl, leather, silver studs, piercing, pale skin, strong eye shadow, and vampire-like looks. It’s very popular among extremely artistic young people in America and Germany. It is currently evolving. Music might be fusion, techno, trance or ethnic.

Fusion Belly Dance

Many emerging troupes and popular dancers (Rachel Brice, Urban Tribal, Ultra Gypsy, etc.) are in this category. Taking inspiration from American Tribal or Cabaret style and blending it with any number of dance techniques: hip hop, salsa, Bollywood, Flamenco and costuming from many sources—this is style where many things work—or don’t! The result is often but not always a mix of choreography and improvisation and the music is often a global mix, showing how with the influence of the internet and technology, we are more often living in one world!

American Gypsy Style (not to be confused with Romany Gypsy Dances)

The American version of Gypsy style belly dance fuses many dance flavors together. The Spanish/Moorish influence manifests as “Zambra,” a form of flamenco employed by belly dancers, along with Indian Katak, Turkish Gypsy, folk dance, American spunk, vamp, and imagination. Typical costume characteristics include large, full, colorful skirts, fringe scarves on hips, flowing sleeves and Moorish art accents.