"Bellydance" is a name often given to many different styles of dance, often with very different origins.
Middle Eastern performing dance: Born in the colonial mixture of Western tourists and colonizers, this dance was performed in public by women from the Middle East. A woman performing in public for money was considered scandalous, not only in the Middle East but in the West as well. Visitors to Egypt and North Africa often saw public dancers. Some of these were members of tribes or cultures which accepted public performances by women and girls. These included the Ghawazee of Egypt, an offshoot of the larger Romany culture, and the Almee or Ouled Nail. Images of these dancing women fired the imaginations of Western artists, creating a school of art called "Orientalist".
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, traveling Middle Eastern performers inspired Western dancers and female entertainers to imitate them. Among these were Ruth St. Denis, Saharet, Carolina Otero, Theda Bara, Mata Hari and La Meri. Veil dancing was popularized and possibly invented by the American Loie Fuller, who danced in skin colored tights, with yards of silk illuminated by colored lights to the scandalized delight of Parisian cabaret audiences.
Popular burlesque performers and strippers copied the Middle Eastern dancers, adopting the veils and shimmy with particular enthusiasm. An eclectic dance of popular entertainers outside respectable society in Egypt became an inspiration for the exoticism that captivated Western notions of the "Other", in this case, the Middle East.
In Egypt Badia Masabni created her Casino Opera, a night club catering to the Westernized Egyptians in Cairo, while bringing in the colonials. She took local dancers and taught them to use a stage, to use props like the veil; to work as a chorus line, to elevate and articulate their arms. The stars of the Casino Opera, Tahia Carioca and Samia Gamal, in turn became stars in their own rights.
Egyptian rulers in the colonial period tolerated and occasionally banned the dancers.Following the raucus rule of King Farouk of Egypt, the dancers were exiled, during the early years of Nasser's rule.
In the period between World War I and the end of World War II, the "exotic" dances of the non-Western world fascinated impresarios and performers in America and Europe. The Romany dancer Roman "Bert" Balladine became a cross-over figure. Trained as a dancer in the West, he lived and performed in Cairo. He made his life in California, bringing "bellydance" to America in the 1970s, creating a huge popular movement.
Ibrahim "Bobby" Farrah took the Lebanese dance of his family and brought it to the large stage in New York, and later, the Middle East. He also edited and wrote in "Arabesque Magazine", the first publication which published academic articles on the origins, performers and music of "bellydance", or Raks Orientale.
Jamila Salimpour created a fantasy troupe in Berkeley in 1968, so that she and her friends and daughter could perform in the Renaissance Faire. The rules of the Faire dictated that all performers were recreating figures active during the Renaissance. Jamila decided to invent a "tribe", the troupe Bal Anat, based on her understanding of nineteenth century dance performers from the Middle East, such as the Ouled Nail and the Ghawazee. The costumes were fantasies based on images of these "tribal" dancers, with creative license, fueled in part by the hippie craze for pre-modern "authenticity". The result seemed to the nascent "bellydance" movement to offer an antidote to the slick and nearly naked night club "bellydancer". Thus, a new style, American Tribal, was born.
The period from the Seventies to the present saw a tremendous world-wide interest in all variations of "bellydance", also known as Middle Eastern dance, Raks Orientale and Danse Orientale. Afficianados searched for the "roots" of bellydance, for the "authentic" bellydance. Dancer/ethnologists travelled to the Middle East, lived with various tribal cultures and brought back music. They also created various "schools" of bellydance, rival factions and orthodoxies.Bellydance arose from the same roots as Spanish dance, which both trace their origins to travelling Romany (so-called "gypsies"). This has in turn given rise to a Hispanic or Gypsy Fusion.
The most recent development in "bellydance" is the Tribal Fusion movement. Tracing its origin in part to Jamila Salimpour, and later, her daughter, Suhaila Salimpour, Tribal Fusion and bellydance in general were given a global stage by the rock impresario, Miles Copeland. He fell in love with the dance form and featured it on the 2005 Lollapalooza tour. Conceived as a sort of side stage attraction, the touring dancers were immensely popular, becoming the Bellydance Superstars. On one leg of their tour, in Bali, the Superstars were seen by an audience of two billion viewers.
Bellydance has become a world dance form, transcending its myriad origins to reach a global audience.