[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]


MOROCCO: Then I stopped teaching individuals because of that [undercutting students], but a few years later there were some children that wanted to learn and I taught them for fun.

SELLERS-YOUNG: Is that at a studio?

MOROCCO: Yes, I would rent like a studio and just teach them, because you could easily rent a studio, and it would be like a once-a-week thing, and this was fun. But I didn't start teaching a regular class until Rosetta Le Noire (we had shared a dressing room together in "I Had a Ball," and became very good friends) dragged me, kicking and screaming, to teach a regular class when she started her school for her Amas (meaning "you love" in Latin) Repertory Theater project. That's when I started teaching a regular once-a-week one-hour-a-week class. I taught for her in three different locations for seven years. My class was actually the only one that produced a profit in the school.

Then when some of the voluntarily ignorant powers-that-be on the board of directors insisted that "belly" dancing was not a proper subject for a theater school that had children, she was forced to say, "I'm sorry, we can't continue the class." I had all these students, so I started teaching in my living room on West 75th Street. The rest, as they say, is history.

SELLERS-YOUNG: Now, how many students did you have in the initial classes at Amas?

MOROCCO: Never counted. I never counted. It started out with like maybe eight or ten at some points, and pretty soon it was up to like thirty. I would get twenty or thirty people in a small room where I was teaching.

In 1972, a wonderful man named Paul Monty invented something fabulous for this dance form: master seminars. Dr. Paul Monty, may he rest in peace. He had been one of the people who stuck their noses in the air at the mention of, quote, unquote, "belly dance," because of the misnomer coined by Sol Bloom in 1893 and the then mid-Victorian colonialist mindset attached to that word in the era that the expression was coined. It was the height of the Victorian era, when "arm" and "leg" were dirty words. You didn't say "arm" or "leg," you said "limb." You never mentioned a part of the body directly, to the point where if you sat down to eat a chicken dinner or a goose or a turkey, you didn't ask for breast meat or thigh meat, because if arm and leg were dirty words… Not only did you not say "breast" or "thigh," but even when it came to tables or chairs, you didn't say they had "legs," you said they had "limbs." You had long tablecloths or long doilies around, or ruffles, around the legs of your tables and chairs so you didn't see the limbs of the table or the chair and think about human limbs. Man, were these horny people.

So you didn't say, "Give me some breast meat," or, "Give me some thigh meat." You said "light meat" or "dark meat." You didn't even say "chicken leg"; you said "drumstick." You didn't even touch it with your fingers, you put a little panty around it, so you could pick it up by the panty. So panty was okay and leg wasn't? Okay.

All right. This kind of mind-set, to say belly--oh! So, of course, you're always going to find critters that cater to the lowest common denominator, thinking they're going to make a quick buck, especially when a racist and sexist myth is created that has nothing to do with the actuality of the dance. In a way, we're still running up against those kind of myths today, because there are a lot of people, who come to the dance for many different reasons. Some of them come for the fantasy reason. Some of them come for the lowest common denominator reason, because it's their particular problem.

Some come because they think it's more accessible or easier than it actually is, because a qualified professional doing something well, it looks easy, it looks graceful, it looks like fun. It is easy, it is graceful, it is fun. But some of the people who come find out that it's harder than they thought, and they either stay and dig in and learn, or they go on to something that is easier. Macrame. Who knows?

Some of the people who come for the fantasy, hey, it's great dress-up. Where else can you wear every color in the world and every sequin and bead you ever owned, and a tiara, and get away with it? You can dress up like a princess and get away with it. They stay either because the costumes are great and it's a fun game, or because they really get into it, and they really like it and they want to know more. This is good.

Some, there are whole subgroupings that cater to what I think is the lowest common denominator or find a fetishist and fantasist element that isn't what the dance is about - to those of us who are more into the reality of the situation. But that's their interpretation. They have their audience. They have their enclave. That's not what I'm about, but I'm not going to condemn anyone if that's what gets them through the night. It is not only not why I got into the field, which is a whole other tale, but it's also not why I stayed in the field.

I got into this--and this is something I forgot to mention before--I got into it by accident. It was supposed to be a temporary thing until the flamenco company went on the road again, but I heard the music, and I liked the atmosphere of the family clubs. I liked those grannies and those aunties, and the Garebads (an Armenian oud player I worked with) with "your feets together, feets on the ground." I felt like I came home. As deeply as Flamenco had called to me, as intense as the music made me feel, as much as I loved it, I found something I loved even more, that spoke to me on an even deeper level and satisfied my intellect and the artistic expression part of my soul in an even more varied and fuller way than Flamenco had, which was why I stayed.

Then what made me want to know more about the history, the technical aspects, the cultural aspects of it, was: A. I'm terribly curious. I always want to know where the feet grow from. But because also the big impetus was when I told non-Middle Easterners, even when I told Flamenco people, what I was doing, they'd get this look of, "You're doing what?" Because they had heard the misnomer and made totally incorrect assumptions about what the dance was and what I was supposed to be as a result.

Now, I am never going to get a migraine from having too tight a halo on my head, but neither was I what they were misinterpreting. I needed to be able to refute it and find a way that on their terms, in an academic way, in a provable, with written reference way, would be able to communicate this wonderful part of a warm and vibrant variety of communities that I was being allowed to partake of. That this was so totally other than the cliché and than the Western Orientalist fantasy and how to be able to explain it, when most people didn't want to hear it, or if they started to hear that it was a cultural phenomenon would then tell me things like, "Well, that's because it's your profession, you're trying to justify it."

Also because there were too many places where, quote, unquote, "belly dancing" at its lowest level met stripping or other burlesque endeavors, though it was a time when stripping was a heck of a lot more of an art than it has become.

SELLERS-YOUNG: So do you feel like that's one of the things that you bring to your teaching, is this other kind of viewpoint of the dance itself?

MOROCCO: I don't know if it's another viewpoint, but I feel--

SELLERS-YOUNG: What I mean is, the highest common denominator, instead of the lowest common denominator.

MOROCCO: Yes. Okay. I don't know if it's the highest common denominator, as much as the what the truth is, as versus the fantasy, because I have found in almost everything, when you make an offshoot or when you take a fantasy, that the truth of the matter is usually much more varied, complex, emotional, interesting, and has more room for the individual to express him/ herself than the fantasy ever did.

You can have a piece of music, any given piece of generic Middle Eastern music that is useable for Oriental dance. You can have, hopefully, a very, very big room with a thousand different people in it, male and female. Within the movement vocabulary that goes for this dance, a thousand different valid interpretations of that piece of music. This is a form where it is still left to the individual. It has not been codified to the point where if your eyebrow isn't raised in the exact direction and your eye looking in the exact direction and your hand just so or your foot just so, and after all that, can you find any individuality within it.