Q: What are the origins of the bellydance costume?"

M: Western fantasy. Absolute western fantasy. The British had seen bare midriff with the choli and the sari in India, in the Raj. And in the Victorian era - we need to put this into its era - women wore corsets, corset covers, crinolines, slips on top of that, and it was hours before you got to the dress. Men wore more than what they wear now. It was a culture that obsessed with closing.

I think it was Lady Montagu, a wonderful curious British woman who really got into the culture in Turkey, and she got into the Grand Seraglio, the Grand Harem of the Turkish Sultan, in which she was shocked: not that the women there were naked, they weren't....The women in the Grand Harem first of all were slaves, second of all, they competed in the richness and the variety of their clothing. They wore several layers, they were not running around starkers like in Hollywood harem-scarem movies, they were extremely elaborately dressed in several layers. Nut this Lady was shocked: they did not wear corsets.

So, you see, a bit of midriff in a sari with a choli in an extremely conservative era...So they wanted to see bare midriff. And the split skirt came from the American burlesque,some of it could have come from Hollywood fantasy. You don't find postcards with those kind of pictures before the 1920s.

Then there was Maud Adams who did her "Salome" number. She was gorgeous, and quite the con lady, had nothing to do with real Middle Eastern dance in any way, shape or form, but a very clever cookie -- she had that wonderful Salome costume that people imitated. The beaded bra and belt; fleshings (nude-colored fabric). From a distance you had an impression she was starkers, which she wasn't because she would have been arrested. And it was in the era when if you showed your legs in stockings, it was enough to get arrested. The costume was Western fantasy.

Q: American?

M: American and European combo. The real dancers wore what we call in this country "a baladi dress." A long dress.

Q: Not the transparent variety?

M: No way Jose. First of all, in places where it hits 13O degrees in the shade, you don't wear anything transparent, or you'll be real quick crispy critter.

Q: Coins?

M: Same thing: if you are in a place where it hits 13O degrees in the shade, no way you are going to put coins next to bare flesh.

Q: What about Ghawazee costume?

M: There are more than one type of Ghawazee , and Ghawazee are Sinte, they are not Roma. Two ethnogroups originally from India: one is Roma, we speak Romnes, and the other is Sinte, and they speak Sinte, it's a different linguistic base. And different regions in Egypt have different Ghawazee groups doing different dances, costume depending on what is sold in that region and what they came up with. What we know as real Ghawazee came from the banat Mazin. Youssef Mazin's wife gave him five wonderful daughters, and in the 50s and 60s the 3 older daughters, Suad, Atuha and Firiyah danced together.

Q: Which are the dancers in your video?

M: Those are the two youngest, Khairiyyah and Raja. What you see in Roberts and Gerome [Orientalist] paintings are what dancers wore in that era, and it was not Ghawazee per se, but it was what the upper-middle class Ottoman woman wore at home. She didn't go out in the street without covering it all up, but performers wore that, and just tied the scarves around their hips, and tried to get the glitziest fabric, something that would show off their moves, but this was everyday clothing. Banat Mazin , the older sisters, invented their own kind of an extremely elaborate costume. First when they were wearing it the skirts were to here [ankle-length?].

Then, in the late 60s they got shorter and shorter, because miniskirts were around. When I first started hanging out with the older sisters (before they got married, when I first started going to Egypt), they were wearing [long?] skirts; by the time it was Khariiyah and Raja dancing, they were wearing shorter skirts. Now I have photographs of the World's Fair of 1893 (which was actually supposed to open in 1892, that's why it was called the "Columbian Trade Fair and Exposition" - it was a year late), you see the dancers with long skirts, just rolled down to the hip, and just a belt with wide ribbons handing and little tassels on the ends, that's what they wore then, to accentuate the hips. But the banat Mazin put that on over, and it was always as long as the skirt.

Q: what about covering the bellybutton?

M: That was the Hays code in Hollywood. It was after the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. After his career was ruined, the Hays code came in where you have these ridiculous rules. Even if a man and a woman were married in a movie, and you show their bedroom, you couldn't be in bed, and they couldn't be on a bed together unless somebody's foot was on the floor, and you couldn't show the navel, because there is that hollow there, and if someone saw that hollow, you might think of a hollow somewhere else. Hello! Lie Hays had nothing better to do. It's like [....didn't' ge the name] with blue laws in Boston: he stuck his nose i n people's mail, and when he died they found a roomfull of pornography hidden behind his bedstead. Same thing with the Hays code: you couldn't show the navel! S

o they found all sorts of strange things to cover it up with. In the generic Middle East, my dear, in the middle of the desert, they do not have double-sided tape or glue, and they are not sticking diamonds or anything else in their "belly buttons." No. But, after the revolution of 1952 in Egypt, when Gamal abdul Nasser and his buddies overthrew the last of the Ottoman kings, King Farouk (he couldn't even sign his name properly in Arabic when he abdicated), one of his ministers outlawed the danceform. That didn't last very long. Raks Sharki came back, but you had to cover your torso, you couldn't do floorwork, if someone was taking a picture, you had to stand stark still, and that's why a few years ago famous dancers were taking a whole piece of music to walk around the audience and pose, that's why you see all these posed pictures with Nagwa Fuad and Soheir Zaki -- they will go around, and pose for pictures. And they couldn't do the quiver. So you would see a dancer looking around to see if there was someone from the arts police, and do a quiver. You couldn't do floorwork: a hundred pound fine if you do floorwork. And the body covering just got more and more transparent. And now they are wearing dresses like evening gowns with strategic cutouts, but there was an era i the late 80s-early 90s, where they were cracking down, they didn't want to see thigh, so, in defiance some of the dancers took to wearing spandex bike shorts. It's a fashion thing. We tend to say, though, "That's the only way to do it!" I happen to like bedlah. I like glitz, glamour, I like running around in 40 pounds of beads and 30 yards of material. Where else you can dress like a princess, and stick a tiara on your head, and get away with it, and to be the Queen of England? It's fun! And I like baladi dress also. But al this is very much the 20th century Western fantasy that was taken by the East and done better.