The Egyptian belly dancers fascinated Westerners. People such as Suriya Helal used the term Raqs Sharqui and appreciated the wonderful and highly advanced and sophisticated state of the dance on so many levels, spiritually and in entertainment terms. They did not care much for the direction the dance was taking in the West, starting with the entertainment laid on at the World Trade Fairs and then carrying on in Burlesque. 

So the intention was to try and create a "Theatre Art" for the dance, and these people directed all their efforts in this direction. By creating a credible Stage Act that could captivate an audience on merits other than what these people saw as "sleazy" was the way to get general public acceptance that this dance is in fact the oldest and has the potential to be the most advanced and sophisticated dance form in existence. 

The dance took off on the "amateur" level with numerous haflas, shows and events that are well attended, even though these events consist pretty well only of participants and students of belly dance. In America the amateur scene really became huge with more web sites on belly dance than any other forms of dance put together. Huge gatherings, seminas and countless belly dance holidays. In terms of mainstream dance, belly dance is still a long way behind Asian and African Dance with the very rare show here and there aimed at the general dance public. 

So far as the public is concerned, restaurant belly dancers exist in every town and they have not changed very much over the years. 

It is easy to see why many people found the dance appealing. Far more accepting of different body shapes, non ageist, the sheer quantity of cultural and spiritual content leaves anything else behind by a long way in my opinion. 

So let us look at the way the Theatre Form was evolved. 

As I said before it seems that the main source for the movement vocabulary are the Egyptian Belly Dancers. To a certain extent folk dances did feed some things but as far as I can determine, we can confidently say that the main sources are the Egyptian Belly Dancers. Even though in performance terms the dance did take place in various guises over the centuries it does not seem possible to extract what sort of movements were involved. Still pictures and verbal descriptions are few and far between and can only convey a rough idea. So unlike Ballet that had a continuous development from the 15th Century, Raqs Sharqui inspite of roots that go back to time immemorial, but regarding the actual movement vocabulary, that is relatively new. 

But this is only one argument and another argument may go along the lines that the Egyptian Belly Dancers used their inspirational sources as the informal dancing that took place everywhere in private situations, at every gathering and of course the Hareem settings. The dancing taking place in these setting does have a continuous and direct lineage to the past. So this argument could put foreward a convincing thesis that the current movement vocabulary in Raqs Sharqui is older than in any other dance form. 

Objectively it really can't be proved one way or the other so the conversation I had with this Raqs Sharqui expert where she said that the dancing was the Court Dance from whatever period she quoted from, you could not neither refute or agree with. 

The dance developed post war and from this emerged 2 strands, the Classical and the Baladi. The intention was that the Classical was more "upward" with arms held high and a great deal of veil work. The Baladi had a more "earthy" feel, performed with flat feet and arms often held in a lower position. But even these distinctions are hard to really define accurately, Hossam Ramsey for example extending the boundaries of Baladi far further than many other dancers would do so. 

In the end it came down to the study of each of the famous Egyptian Belly Dancers and extracting aspects of their styles and moves. Now this could go on for ever and ever. I don't really think that the Stage Art went any further than this. Effectively an emulation of the Egyptian Belly Dancers and depending on the teacher, honing in on one or more favorite dancers or aspects of their style or movements. 

These Dancers performed in Cabaret settings, not stage settings. In the Cabaret settings the audience were sitting around at tables and the dancer would circulate around amongst them. They would not usually be eating anything, at the most they may have drinks. The scale of everything was small, the distance between the dancer and the audience was no more than a couple of metres often. The entertainment programmes were flexible and would extend well into the night. Stage settings are completely different, there is a stage, the audience is sat usually in rows. The biggest difference is that the distance is far greater and that you have strong stage lighting. This changes things dramatically. You can't interact with your audience. Out of the over 2,000 performances I have done, only 2 have been on what may be termed as "proper" stage settings. One was at a showcase thing I did and here I did a choreographed 5 min piece and in the other we did a set at the Lowry Theatre in Manchester with the Urban Gypsies. In both cases I was blinded by strong theatre lights to the extent I could not see the audience at all. I am so used to Belly Dance being an interactive activity that I was well out of my depth in both cases and I did not enjoy either at all. 

The process of taking an interactive activity in the way that it was with the Egyptian dancers, their audiences and live musicians, and taking it to a totally different form which is effectively creating a "thing" that you do where the audience  is at a distance and treating it like a Ballet performance, in my view has not been successfully done as yet. For myself I can appreciate a stage performance of Raqs Sharqui very much, I can see and appreciate the skill and am fascinated by the moves. But would the General Public or at least the dance enthusiasts from the General Public? Until somebody does succeed, then Belly Dance will never enjoy the prestige of other dance forms.