HC: What are your feelings and thoughts when you are dancing?

G: I feel euphoria. Completion. I can't describe it. There is nothing like it. It is the most wonderful thing. There is no "inside" and "outside" -- it's all one. The closest thing I can describe is when you are in water, and you are not really exerting your body, but you move with the water. You are moving to music, you don't think, you are on auto-dancer.

My on stage "persona" is different from who I am when I am not on stage, but it's a real pure part of myself, I never put anything on. It's Gamila dancing. It was just pure joy. You let the music through you, you reflect the emotion of the music.

This is one thing seems to be missing now. I see few dancers that understand the emotion of the music. Most contemporary New York dancers that I have seen all are beautiful women, good dancers who move extremely well. I recognize the vocabulary but they are not doing the dance I know. It seems that they are dancing in front of the music instead of the music coming through them. The dancer and the music should be one to the audience. The dancer's body is a musical instrument, a visual interpretation of the audio experience.

In the day of Ibis and Darvish you had to be an incredibly good and well-trained dancer to perform. Perhaps nobody is asking for this anymore. Our job was to open ourselves up to the music, fill up with it and then give it back. We didn't make a move without the music telling us what to do. We were inside the music, our focus on what we were doing was different; we didn't think about individual steps of choreography because we were improv artists. We created the choreography on the spot moment by moment. If you came up to me after a show and said "I really liked what you did when..." I would have no idea what you were talking about.

The thing about this dance isn't only the execution, it's the transformation; it's the opening yourself up to the music. The music cycles through your body and comes out again. You go on "auto-dancer" and let your training come through.

In Egypt you have your own musicians who travel with you. In the 80s Egyptian dancers went from club to club and took the band with them. They performed choreographies which they rehearsed with the band. They usually had a male choreographer who would create their routines for them. Our situation was different, American dancers went from club to club, band to band. We never knew what we were going to get and you had to be ready and able to dance everything that was thrown at you. That was your craft. Once I and some of the musicians were hired to do an "after hours" show in a hotel. Some customers just wouldn't want to leave when the club had to close so they would hire the dancers and musicians to continue the night at their hotel. This was great pay too! The drummer didn't show up. So the nay player took a waste paper basket, turned it upside down and played that. It was one of the most fun shows I've ever had!

Nowadays I see dancers dancing to the music, following the beats, but I don't see anyone totally lost in the music. And if they are not experiencing what they should experience, aren't they being cheated? Dancers don't seem to find creative satisfaction within the music and the dance form, they have to go and add something outside of it to satisfy themselves.

HC: Perhaps it's because now we work mostly for American, not ethnic audiences?

G: I used to do an entirely different show for Americans than what I would do for Egyptians. It got to a point where I stopped dancing for American audiences because I couldn't do what I wanted. You had to take all the good stuff out. You do 4 steps, and Americans are happy: shoulder shimmies, chest lifts, hip drops, hip shimmies and that's it.

The whole commercial situation we have now is killing the traditional dance form.
There are many people now interested in "bellydancing," I've coined a new phrase, "entry-level bellydance." But there is so much more to the dance. And yet I don't see the demand for that knowledge anymore. When you come to me or to any a teacher from my generation we want to teach the entire scope of the art form, we stopped being "bellydancers" a very long time ago. There comes a point where you make a decision whether you are going to be another face and body in a gorgeous costume doing restaurants, or you are going to put your energy into really learning the dance.

There are trained dancers and there are "entertainment" dancers. As a "bellydancer" you stay at the entry level. Meanwhile, there isn't a single rhythm used in bellydance, or an Oriental Dance show, that isn't connected to a folkloric tradition. When I was introduced to the dance, that's what it was about. We were not in it to become bellydancers. We went to classes because it was something new, it was this great knowledge, a new way of using your body. We are talking 1973 -- this is when I took my first class. (If I write a memoir, the title would be: "How I Learned to Belly Dance in 32 Easy Years.")

A student of mine recently said, "There are no jobs, that's why the scene has changed and the skill is deteriorating." And I think: "Is our art dependent on the jobs?" You have to develop this craft because you love it! The business used to be secondary, but it isn't any more, things have turned around. People make a profession out of working in restaurants, but this is not what it's about. That's just where we ended up making a few bucks. Yet, I think there is a whole generation of dancers now for whom restaurants are the end all and be all.

We were so satisfied with the dance in the '70s-80's that we didn't need the "validation" of working at the restaurants.As a result, if you were a working dancer you did it with joy. Granted, in those days there were plenty of jobs -- but we were still competing. The competition was healthy and it just made all of us better dancers. There are a lot of fabulous dancers from that era who just refused to work in clubs. You met them in class and saw them in self-produced events.

Most clubs are barely holding it together, they bring in a dancer trying to increase the revenue. A club is an establishment that's got an incredible overhead. You can't just walk in saying "I want this much money" -- you need to develop a rapport with the club and work with them. In a restaurant the dancer is one step above the bus boy, and that's only if he is not related to the owner. You have to be aware of where you are working. If you want to be an "Artiste," a "Prima Ballerina," you move to venues outside the restaurants.

We are artists, we spend lot of money on our art, and it's always that you put into it more than you are going to get out. That's why you are doing this for the love of it, not for the jobs.

New York has been always a mecca for work in the past. Dancers from all over the world used to come here to study and work in New York nightclubs. But that's over. Nobody is moving here anymore to learn and to work. Or they come, see what's available and move on. So, if there is no work, does it mean that you sacrifice the art form? No. If you don't love the dance, you shouldn't be doing it.

Ibis was different because, along with work, it gave us an opportunity to learn. And Ibis made a reputation of only having high quality dancers. We didn't really know about Mahmoud Reda yet. We knew of his work, but the exposure to his technique was not what it is today. We knew Nahed Sabry, Nagwa Fuad, Nadia Hamdi, Suhair Zaki. These are not Reda-trained dancers. These are Cairene dancers who do Egyptian cabaret.

Here in New York we were all trained Turko-Arab, basic foundation. You go into the club and you watch the people. We learned by watching the videos of the stars, plus watching the audience, and we became "Egyptian" on our own. We were able to do that because of the foundations we got from Ibrahim Farrah, Serena, Anahid, Morocco. You first learned the basic Turko-Arab style, then you branched out.

I learned a lot from Bobby [Ibrahim Farrah]: he had an amazing way of teaching. I went to Bobby on weekends, but I was trained by teachers certified by him. My teachers went to his classes in Manhattan 5 days a week, and spend 5 nights a week in NJ, teaching us. We just kept doing certain things to certain music, and, during the show, if that melody, intonation or rhythm would come up, you were on auto-dancer. For instance, when you heard this particular strain, you knew: it's Saudi, and it means "Oh, listen to the music!" So you hold your arm overhead, the hand moves back and forth and comes down slowly past the ear.

Why are these people trained in the 70s and early 80s so good? And why doesn't it exist now? I really think that it's that perpetuation of sub standard teaching. I started learning in 1973, I came to Ibis in '78, I left Ibis in '88. I only started teaching in '87! I wasn't sure I was qualified. I went to Bobby who told me it was about time me I started teaching and told me to teach on Wednesday nights, so that I would be opposite him, and this way I wouldn't be stepping on anybody else's toes. Bobby helped me get my Wednesday night spot at Fazils, and he sent people to me.