American Cabaret

(aka Vintage Orientale, Cabaret, often written AmCab for short)

Defining characteristics of the style

The classic,vintage American Cabaret performance is characterized by:

• Dancer enters wrapped in a veil (sometimes the dancer uses multiple veils or a cape, but the fabric draping is important)
• Veil is removed and danced with as a prop, to frame movements, to accent spins, to create silhouettes, or to partially veil the face or body.
• Finger cymbals are considered essential, often played with a high level of musicality, and might be worn for the entire show even when they're not being played.
• Floorwork to slow music (often chiftitelli rhythm). Might be done kneeling, side-lying, reclining on the elbows or fully reclining. Can include various figure 8s, undulations, armwork, shimmies and bellyrolls.
• High achievements in this style included fast spins, bellyrolls and flutters, Turkish drops, and a cappella zilling.
• Optional props (in addition to the required zills and veil) might include cape, sword, candles, candle tray or cane
• Music could be from anywhere: Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, Arab-American, Turkish, even Greek.
• Dancers strived for fluidity and control while going for a look that seemed wild, free and unrestrained. Exoticism and Orientalism were encouraged, and the Orientalist idea of the day was that women of the East are passionate, animalistic, primitive and wild beneath their demure veils.

Floorwork could be viewed as sexual by some audiences, but the dancers perceived their floorwork as spiritual, graceful and a showcase for their strength, flexibility and emotional range. The legendary Delilah epitomized the art of floorwork in American bellydance:

Costuming

• Many, if not most, dancers made their own costumes during this era
• Multilayered looks that conjured images of 'The Mysterious East' were popular
• It was the fashion to wear circular skirts that were split all the way to the hip in front, showing the full leg (some dancers wore harem pants underneath for modesty)
• Fringe was NOT optional!
• Veils were transparent, usually chiffon to match the skirt, or shiny lamé and often trimmed in sequins or beads. They could be much heavier than today's silk veils because they were used much differently.
• Lots of skin was common. Belts were often narrow and worn very low on the hip. Bra bands were frequently sewn in narrow pieces with the sides left open.

Here's the magnificent Elena Lentini showcasing the elements of American Cabaret-style bellydance and costuming:

Roots of the style

Imagine you are an American who is now living in Hong Kong. You spend your days eating unfamiliar foods, trying to communicate in a foreign language, and living in a culture not your own.

Now imagine there's a restaurant (let's call it Rick's Place) where other English speakers gather to eat hamburgers, fried chicken and mashed potatos and listen to rock and roll music. Those people might be Australian, British, Scottish or Canadian, but wouldn't you be drawn together by familiar food, music, and language?

This is what happens in Middle Eastern and Arab communities in US cities. Perhaps the closest thing to home is a Greek restaurant, or a Lebanese nightclub, or an Egyptian hookah bar. But people from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt might gather together to eat, play music, talk, and dance in ways that feel comfortingly familiar. It was in these melting pots of culture that American Cabaret-style bellydance was born in the mid-20th century.

Here's an amazing glimpse into that time — A mini-documentary about Serena, an early pioneer in American bellydance, narrated by her son.

In it's heyday, American Cabaret was simply called Bellydance. It had not yet separated into a variety of styles that needed more specific names.

The 60s & 70s: Seduce your Sultan

During the sexual and feminist revolutions, bellydance was perceived as an exotic, sensual activity that was perfect for the new, bold, free-to-be-sexy American woman. It's important to note that, although dancing to 'make your husband a sultan' may seem silly and even anti-feminist now, it was a massive and necessary step forward for women to be able to openly admit to wanting and enjoying their husbands' physical attention! The women who participated in this movement were very brave pioneers in their own way.

Classes sprung up at YMCAs and community colleges across the country. A vacuum of demand was created, and teachers of varying levels of experience rose up to fill the need. Some were quite knowledgeable; others not so much. In the absence of video, students didn't always know the difference, and there were teachers who made up answers to their questions and created clouds of misinformation about the origins of the dance, often tinged with signs of the time. Feminists wanted to give the dance a 'female bonding' edge, so they tied it to stories of goddess worshipping cults or childbirth rituals. Those peddling the dance as a road to sexual freedom touted origins in the harems of the sultan or women teaching brides how to move in their marriage bed.

But the best dancers and teachers rose to the top like cream and were invited to teach at festivals and workshops that were springing up to meet the demand for advanced serious instruction. By the 1970s, influential teachers were arising. Morocco (Aunt Rocky) became a major player in New York and the East Coast. Ibrahim "Bobby" Farrah taught workshops, and brought Nadia Gamal from Lebanon to teach (his followers call thelmselves Bobby Dolls and continue to influence the dance in North America). Jamila Salimpour in California (and later her daughter Suhaila) became a very influential teacher in California.

Here's some wonderful footage from Jamila Salimpour's classes. Note the importance of finger cymbals. (Note that Jamila's beliefs about the ritualistic history of the dance were widely held at that time, but are no longer accepted as factual by the larger dance community.) Jamila's classes definitely leaned toward dance as sisterhood rather than dance for seduction, and she did her best to connect the dance to its ethnic roots as well.

During this time bellydance lived on the edge of mainstream entertainment in America. Most people had heard of it and knew it as a dance of seduction from the exotic East. Bellydancers appeared in several James Bond films (here's a clip but I can't embed it on the page) and the Starship Enterprise rarely visited a "pleasure planet" that didnt' feature some bellydance-influenced entertainment:

You could also have seen bellydancing on TV series ranging from I Dream of Jeannie to Charlie's Angels.

Backlash

After the 1970s, feminism began to confuse women taking charge of their sexuality with women as objects of men's sexuality. Bellydance's brief surge in popularity waned and bellydancers would spend decades working to recover their now-tarnished image as part of the sex industry. It was a confusing time to be a woman, much less one who had fallen in love with bellydance!

Freed from its role as a tool in the sexual revolution, bellydance in the US began to move in two different artistic directions.

On the West Coast, Jamila Salimpour and her students were dressing in folkloric costumes so they would be welcome to perform at ethnic festivals. The hippie aesthetic lent itself to a more earthy, less sparkly presentation and more of a feeling of sisterhood among the dancers. From those movements, American Tribal Style and later Tribal Fusion evolved (more on those in future articles)

But the mixed Pan-Arabic and Turkish style continued to develop in the US. Now it needed a name to differentiate it from the developing Tribal styles. Since it was performed in nightclubs rather than ethnic festivals, it was called Cabaret style. Many dancers from this era, and many tribal-style dancers who aren't well educated in ethnic forms of bellydance, still mistakenly call ALL Arabic and Turkish bellydance forms 'Cabaret,' whether it's Egyptian, Turkish Oryental, Lebanese, Baladi or American Cabaret style. But the American Cabaret is its own unique style, separate from the others.

By the 1980s, technology was changing. It was beginning to be possible for people of 'average means' to travel overseas, and the new VCR tapes were bringing actual footage of dance from its native lands into students' living rooms. It was through travel and video that American bellydancers and their students began to discover Egyptian-style bellydance.

Shareen El Safy talks in her workshops about visiting Cairo for the first time and watching the great Egyptian dancers perform. She was unnerved to discover that the dance looked *nothing* like what she had been studying and performing for years in the United States! No veils, no finger cymbals, no swords, no floorwork. No wild energy, barely controlled. The inward-directed energy, subtle movement vocabulary and delicate interpretation of the music only barely resembled what students in the US were learning. Had we gotten it all wrong? Shareen and others began to bring Cairo-style Egyptian dance to America.

By the 1990s, Egyptian-style dance (or Raqs Sharqi) had taken the US by storm. Everyone was watching Golden Era clips, attending workshops with former members of the Reda troupe, and learning to interact with their music in this new, more subtle, more emotionally evocative and less flashy way. The dance community began to speak with disdain about American Cabaret, saying their style of bellydance was inaccurate, made-up, more Hollywood than Cairo. Confused bellydancers protested that they *knew* their dances were authentic, they had learned them from immigrant dancers and musicians!

Americans were still thinking of the 'Mysterious East' as a homogenous place and not acknowledging the vast regional differences. If you look at clips of Turkish dancers from the same era, it's almost impossible to distinguish from classic American Cabaret.

Here's the legendary Cory Zamora defending Cabaret style in an interview and showing us how it's done:

American Cabaret style today

At this writing (2012) we have been at war with various parts of the Arab world for over a decade. Since 9/11/2001, Arabs in the US are viewed with extreme mistrust, fear, even hatred. Bellydancers, who often interact closely with Arab restaurant owners, staff, customers and thier families, have become a strange sort of ambassador and champion for the Arab-American community when talkign to students and others who've never interacted with Arab people and hold all sorts of strange and biased beliefs.

For this reason, it has become important to remove a lot of the exoticism and orientalist elements from the dance. We no longer play at veiling our faces with scarves or putting sultan hats on men at parties. We no longer perpetuate stereotypes of the 'exotic East' that help to separate people into us and them.

American bellydance is a diverse and fragmented scene today. Tribal style has branched into Tribal Fusion, Gothic Bellydance, and other genres. Some dancers are pursuing perfect authenticity in a single genre: Egyptian Raqs Sharqi remains the most popular genre, but Turkish Orientale and Lebanese styles are also popular, with Iraqi Kawaliya, Turkish Romani, and others gaining popularity as well. Dancers representing a particular genre will always choose costuming and movements that are specific to that genre when choreographing or improvising.

But there is still a 'melting pot' style in the US. These dancers study a variety of styles but reach for whatever movement suits their performance goals when they're choreographing or improvising, no matter the source. Modern American Cabaret dancers may depart from the finger cymbals/veil/floorwork pattern, but they still blend the movements they've learned from Egyptian, Turkish, Lebanese, Tribal, and American Cabaret teachers with movements and aesthetics they've learned in mainstream American dance classes like ballet, jazz and modern dance.

In this performance by Ansuya (whose mother, Janaeni Rathor, was a classic American Cabaret dancer), you can see layered and homemade costuming elements from Egyptian and Lebanese costuming — with an Indian bindi plus Algerian facial tattoing? — with movement vocabulary from all of the above with zilling and floorwork! (pay NO attention to the opening credits that call this Egyptian Saidi!)

And Aziza, formerly of the US and now living in Canada, offers a melting pot of Western and Arab/Turkish elements in her bellydance. Her performance here begins with a reading from a 1960's 'how to bellydance' album insert!

To return to Styles menu, click here

copyright 2012 by Lauren Haas for www.bellydancestuff.com. If you want to share this article, please do so by providing a link to this page. You're more than welcome to print yourself a copy, but copying and distributing this article is prohibited.