Q: What are the origins of the bellydance movement vocabulary?

M: We always look to find easy terms, to find boxes to put things in. It's not just "Middle East" -- there is Near East, Middle East, Central Asia, the Turkic regions, the Farsi-speaking regions. There is North Africa, or "the Maghreb. " You have Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, Sudan and Egypt. The Maghreb is Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and sometimes Libya gets there.

And then you have the Gulf, and all the Gulf countries. It's more than just the Middle East. One thing I find that crosses not all but most of these cultures if what in Arabic is called "Raqs Sharqi," and i Turkish is called "Oryantal Tanzi", meaning the "Oriental Dance," what Sol Bloom misnamed "belly dance." We find this in most places with different variations.

When Kamal Ataturk and the young Turks had their revolution, he considered it "Arabic," and didn't want to consider it Turkish "folk." He also outlawed the whirling dervish, because he was afraid the power of dervishes. And in Egypt people who ar my age and older, who remember the times of King Farouk, refer to it sometimes as "RaksTur'us," or just "Tur'us" - "Turkish dance." And what it is, it's kind of like - not a good simile, but it's the only one I can think of where you can see this so clearly! -- the English called syphilis "the French pox," and the French called it "the English disease." So Kemal Ataturk said it was "Arabic," and the older Egyptians believe it is "Turkish." However Raqs Sharqi - translates "Oriental dance" or "Eastern dance." "Oriyantal Tanzi" translates as "Oriental dance." Now the Persians call it Raksa Arabi, but they have a lot of different dances that use muscle articulation, even lip quiver (considered very sexy because it's the way a woman's lower lip quivers just before she starts to cry!)

Q: Can you trace the origins of the moves in the "Oriental dance"?

M: The hip articulations - you find them in many African dances. And you find them in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, Sudan and Egypt. And these were and are great civilizations that were travelling and trading with the entire rest of the world. They were not sitting their and waiting for Marco Polo who had to get out of Italy because he was in deep doodoo over there to "discover " China! It was THERE for thousands of years. It had a high flourishing civilization and the Turkic regions...we forget about them because they were behind the dotted line on the map for 70 years -- in the Soviet Union. We forget about them. How many Americans know about them? Azerbaidjan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Armenia, Georgia, Tukmenistan,a nd others? As well as Turkey. And Kurds travelling between what is now Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Borders are lines in the sand. They don't stop borders from going over them.

Q: What about the speculation about the fertility ritual origin, childbirth training origin of the bellydance moves?

M: Fertility origin? Hello! Anyone who isn't a virgin, knows it's "not how you do it!" There are fertility dances. I have nothing against fertility dances. I've seen some great ones...I've done some great ones (bad girl!) But they are different. This is not a fertility dance. If it were a fertility dance, it wouldn't be done by women, for women and with women, by men, for men, and with men. Hello!

Q: And the childbirth aspect?

M: Okay. Two specific abdominal movements are imitations of labor and childbirth. And there are many folk dances where they imitate life movements. The belly roll and the flutter. In Lamaz they call it "pelvic rocking" and "pelvic breathing." I had met some American women of sephardic background who were going to take a Lamaz natural childbirth course. And they almost fell over laughing when they saw what the basic movements were. They said: "Are we supposed to learn this? We already know this! We learned this from granny, it is dancing. We are paying you money to teach us our dance?" "This isn't dance, this is serious medical exercise!" My kid sister wouldn't believe me. She went ahead and paid for Lamaz course. Ha! And before that I had met a Saudi woman, actually half-Saudi, half Italian, the family was from Bahrain. She had learned from her grandmother this dance, and that particular moves were not just for fun within the dance, but also to train her muscles for childbirth. And sure enough, she was 4'10" and her oldest sun is 6'2" -- that had to be some final push! - She was doing just fine because of the dancing.

And then I met a Tunisian woman who told me the same thing, but I didn't believe them until I read a book by Armen Ohanian called "The Dancer of Shamakha. " Armen was an Armenian woman who was very popular as a performer in Paris at the same time as Mata Hari and La Belle Otero. Armen was also called "the dancer of Shamakha." She wrote a very flowery book, but if you read it and eliminate the floweriness, you see a very interesting and tragic life. She was in Egypt at one point, and saw the dance being degraded, "put on the platter" for the edification of the British colonials, which was happening a lot: you cater to whoever is paying. And if you were what we call a "full service professional" - someone is paying big money, so you are dressings up and doing whatever. Armen said that she saw "the sacred dance degraded," that she saw lascivious smiles even on the faces of the "Orientals." She says: degraded was "the dance of motherhood which we watch with reverence, because it is from that sacred cup that life issues." So for her this dance was religious. Or rather secular, where religious aspects have become covert that is overt.