II. MYTHS & MISCONCEPTIONS

One of the problems that Oriental dancers face today is that most of what people think they know
about the dance is wrong. To make matters worse, most of these opinions are insulting to
women in general. Here are some of the classic myths and misconceptions:

1. Belly Dance arrived in the United States with the appearance of Little Egypt at the
World's Fair Exposition of 1893 in New York.
There was no one "Little Egypt. The World's Fair featured authentic pavilions with the peoples
of Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and others. But there was no dancer named "Little Egypt"
at the fair. There were also no dancers wearing any version of a costume bra and belt. Fig. 1
shows what Egyptian dancers back in Cairo were really wearing. The costume featured a sheer
blouse, a tightly fitted, cropped vest, stiff skirt, and a belt with tasselled-strips dangling from it.

There is no doubting, though, that the appearance of these dancers had an immediate impact on
American vaudeville theater and Victorian culture. Donna Carlton, in Looking for Little Egypt,
explores what really happened at this historic event. The Victorian era moralists were profoundly
shocked by the foreign dancers, while the Victorian era public flocked in huge numbers to see the
spectacle and the dancers. The non-existent "Little Egypt" was credited by the fair board with
saving them financially. After the fair ended, this "oriental dance" was billed as the "hootchee
kootchee" at vaudeville shows and numerous "Little Egypt" dancers suddenly appeared in
vaudeville shows around the country.

To make matters worse, all of the Victorian era men, like Flaubert, who went to the middle east
to visit got the wrong idea about the women there. In the Middle East it is considered an insult
for one man to even ask another about his wife because it implies an improper familiarity.
These foreign male visitors would never have been allowed into a another man's home to see
respectable women - therefore, the only women they saw - and wrote about - were prostitutes.
Men like Flaubert would have never seen the family gatherings, the grandmothers dancing, or
the young girls dancing for their families.

Oriental dance influenced modern dance in the west when dance pioneers like Ruth St. Denis and
Loie Fuller looked at eastern dances and started developing movement and dance classes for a
new generation of young girls at the turn of the century. These proper Victorian girls took off
their corsets and imagined themselves free-spirited Greek maidens, and other fanciful characters.

There was a second wave of popularity for belly dance in the United States in the 1960's along
with other counter-culture fascinations of the "hippie" era. But this time around, authentic
teachers were brought from Egypt and elsewhere and this generation of American women learned
the dance from them.
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