[From an interview with Morocco conducted by Dr. Barbara Sellers-Young, PhD at the request of the Oral History Archives of the Dance Collection of the Lincoln Center Library of/for the Performing Arts in New York City]


BSY: How did your parents feel about you moving from doing Flamenco to doing belly dancing? Did they know about it?

M: They knew about it but they didn't even like my doing Flamenco. They had a whole herd of cows when I wanted to take Flamenco lessons. I had to have-one of my little boyfriends, come to the house and pick me up, as if we were going out on a date, and then he would drop me off at the subway. I'd go into Manhattan, take my Flamenco lesson, and come back. He'd be hanging out with his buddies. He'd bring me home. They would rather think I was out on a date with some little boy, playing kissy face, than that I was taking a dance lesson somewhere, because my father the cop was certain that I was going to become a whore, drunkard, and a dope addict and go to hell in a hand basket. So, it was traumatic enough that I became a Flamenco dancer. I had to leave home to become a performer. I had to get out of being in the same space with my parents, something that took a long time to reconcile. I'm glad that we all lived long enough so that we got to understand each other and become friends, but it was a very wrenching, literally and figuratively, time for me. So when I got into Oriental dance, my father thought, out of the frying pan into the fire. My entire family thought I was working in a whorehouse. The irony is that if I had been, I'd be a hell of a lot richer than I am now, that's for sure. The interesting thing is, because of the cabaret laws, you not only didn't drink or take drugs or deal with the customers, you didn't talk to them, let alone go any further.

So, there I was, fascinated with the music. On the seventh night maybe God rested, but I went to the other restaurants and clubs to see what the other dancers were doing and listen to more music. In 1962 a little coffee shop opened on 7th Avenue South in Greenwich Village called the "Feenjon," which was open until six in the morning. Those of us who were truly insane would go there after the Greek and Turkish and Arabic clubs closed, at four o'clock in the morning, and go to play more music and do more dancing, and boogie until seven or eight o'clock in the morning. We're talking committed insanity here.

BSY: So, when you initially-I mean, we're talking about trying on the costume and how did you go about-did you make your own costumes or did somebody make them? Did you have them made?

M: The owner of the club, her name was Marianthe Stevens. She was half Lebanese and half Greek. She lent me the money to go and have a couple of costumes made by this Armenian woman who lived on Lexington Avenue between 28th and 29th Street. She made me a couple of costumes. One had cloth fringe that was wrapped, I guess, with mylar so that it was like shiny silver, and the other was with bouillon fringe.

Then this wonderful Turkish lady showed me how to do some beadwork and I decided to make my own costume. However, I made the mistake of using only two threads and making a long, long, long, long thread of beads and then just catching up the loops, so that the first time I put that costume on and went twitch, twitch, the bugle beads broke the thread and I heard click, click, click, click, and I was standing in a circle of beads. All the beads from the fringe on my entire costume. The belt and the little skirt were still on, but the costumes then were much less elaborate, and much less heavy than the ones that we wore later on.

After that happened with the costume, this wonderful but totally crazy Turkish dancer named Kezban said to me,

"Well, come home with me. I show you make costumes they stay on you ass."

She showed me how to do strong beadwork and make great fringe! They were very special and wonderful, giving people I was working with. The musicians, most of them were in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and when they saw that I was really interested, that I really wanted to learn, and that I had a sense of rhythm, they turned themselves inside out to help me. It really was the best school in the world. They were giving me something that they loved intensely, with such love. Most of these people had day jobs, then they were up all night playing music. Some of them worked seven nights a week. They were crazy.

BSY: So, when I hear you talk about the dance, which I think is really wonderful and exciting and unique, is that, and it may be those cabaret laws of the period, or it may be your relationship with the [others], but it seems to have negotiated sort of what I call a general or cultural image of the dance. And it's not impacted on you in the way that, if I talk to some of the other Middle Eastern dancers, it has. It transcended what I would call the harem image of the dance. Can you elaborate or explain why you think that, in your experience, that you didn't take that on?

M: Because I didn't know it existed. I went in tabula rasa. I had never heard...I mean, until Marianthe Stevens said, "Not the ballette. Belly dance.", I had never heard the misnomer, and I never heard it referred to as that. And because I was in an environment where there was no such thing as a harem. The word harem in Arabic means "forbidden" or "sanctuary," "protected." So, when somebody would say harem, that would mean, "You can't..." "Don't go there." Or, "It's forbidden. That's wrong."

I didn't see women running around in diaphanous fabric, veiled, with some idiot in a turban, you know with hot and cold running harem girls. That was in Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movies or those desert epics with Maureen O'Hara or Yvonne DeCarlo getting up to supposedly dance, but not being able to, being almost spastic. I didn't associate one with the other because, to my eye, they were so totally different. I mean, one was Hollywood fantasy banana oil. I never connected it with these families that would come in dressed, I would say, more conservatively than your average New Yorker. Some of the women might have on head scarves. But I grew up in Crown Heights where Hassidim were just beginning to move in and there were women in head scarves. I had been within a Flamenco environment where women - especially married women - dressed very conservatively. In my own environment-I mean, I'm Roma, once you get married you put on a head scarf - the diklo - unless you're trying to pass for Gajo, which my parents were. So, my mother didn't wear it. One side of my family didn't because they were going to pass if it killed them. The other side didn't because they had pushed and attained such high class that they thought we were above that. So, I didn't see it in my family but I did see it other environments. I did see, like, Slavic immigrant women who had kerchiefs on their heads too. As a result, I didn't consider it anything specific.

You definitely didn't see men coming in trailed by women wearing the kind of costume I was wearing on stage. It was strictly for stage. It wasn't a part of the lifestyle. When I heard the dance referred to, it was referred to in the various languages of the people that were there. It was Raks Sharki in Arabic and the translation of that is Oriental Dance. It was Oryantal Tansi in Turkish, which also means Oriental Dance. In Greek it was Anatolitiko Horo, Anatolian Dance, which meant where the Turks were: the Anatolian peninsula. The Greeks who were from Asia Minor. That kind of thing. The Armenians did whole other kinds of dance, and some were Oriental. So, you never heard the misnomer.

It was only my fellow Flamenco dancers in the company, and one of my teachers, who was also one of my idols, as a Flamenco dancer, who said,

"Why would you want to do that? That's a whore's dance."

I said, "No it isn't. All these good family girls are up and doing it. Their parents wouldn't be sitting there letting them do it if it were a whore's dance. We wouldn't be doing it just women with women all day if it were a whore's dance. I think that is a misimpression."

I was also totally aware, at the time, that in Franco's Spain, they were trying to outlaw Flamenco -- that it was considered low class, something only thieves and "filthy Gypsies" did -- knowing about the racism against my people through the ages, I figured, Okay, just one more piece of bullshit. So, it didn't color my impression because the environment I was in, it was something that was part of them and that was not forbidden, not shameful.

It was actually a way of expressing joy. In fact, in Lebanese Arabic the Lebanese would refer to it more as Raks Farrah, meaning "Happiness Dance." But the Egyptians I was dealing with, they told me in Egyptian Arabic farrah is wedding, which is also a time of happiness, and it's supposed to be the time of greatest happiness in a person's life because that's when they begin to become adults. But that it was a happy time and a time when you were almost - it was compulsory to dance. You didn't have a choice, especially if you were the bride's mother or the groom's mother. If you did not dance, that would bring shame on the family and bad luck to the couple. You had to dance: there were all these occasions where you had to dance. That was how you expressed it. Which in a way was one of the truest things that was in the movie, "Zorba the Greek". There were a lot of true things there that were considered just dramatic. The horrendous misogyny and justifying the murder of the widow because the son was stupid enough to commit suicide, they blamed her, but Zorba expressing his joy through dance, expressing himself through dance, these were culture-

It seemed to me that, in general, in this culture we not only don't dance, we really take dance away from men. It's not manly to dance. I think that the Puritans have really screwed this culture over in so many ways. One of the first things we do when we go anywhere as colonizers or "advisers" is try to stop people from doing their own dances or we, in a very, very racist way, sexualize the women of the other culture - especially if they are less melanin-challenged.
But the good news was that I was dumped into this wonderful treasure trove that...seeing people that just enjoyed being together and were far more overtly expressive of their emotions--and this was something I really enjoyed with Flamenco-it wasn't just technique. There had to be more than just technique there or it wasn't Flamenco. It had to have duende; it had to have soul. That was more important than exactness of technique. This was much more direct emotion, expression, and because the people who were doing it did it without any sense, or demonstration of any kind of shame, or that there was anything wrong with it: it never occurred to me.

There were very real boundaries of behavior for women in public and in private within their cultures that I learned from watching them or hearing their stories, and one of the reasons they liked me and they took me home to their families, was that they saw, from watching me sitting up there on that stupid stage all night, that I didn't smoke, I didn't drink. I just sat there playing the drum, playing the finger cymbals, watching the dancing, bouncing in my seat. I mean, having the best time going.

I reminded them of their sisters or daughters, their grandchildren--this was a good thing--and they would tell me their stories and they would tell me why certain things were the way they were. They took this time with me. Whereas there were other dancers there that sometimes the women in the family would get up and go to the ladies' room, when those dancers were on, because they considered the way they danced too overt, too provocative, and I would watch to see what the difference was. There were some dancers who they would say couldn't hold a rhythm in a paper bag, and they were right, but that I could see because my rhythmic sense is one of my better senses. So that to me was a wonderful natural thing within this environment.
However, when I would tell civilians, non Middle Easterners, what I was doing, the reactions were amazing and extremely off-putting. The men would make totally erroneous assumptions about my morals - or lack thereof - that like, where the hell did you get that idea? That was when I found out how loaded the misnomer "belly" dance was, because that was something that wasn't used except to English speaking people, who didn't understand raks sharki, or oriental tansi or anatolitiko horo. In fact, amongst us, it was called Arabic or Turkish dance, depending on the style of the dancer.

I began to realize that there was this whole misimpression out there, and way too many performers, who were willing to cater to that lowest common denominator, especially in non-Mideastern clubs and environments, where there wasn't a clue as to what this dance was really about. Nor did they care to know/ learn, because they had their colonialist/ Hollywood erotic fantasies and nobody was going to confuse them with the truth.