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Belly dance is a term for traditional dance, especially raqs sharqi (Arabic: رقص شرقي). It is sometimes called Middle Eastern dance or Arabic dance in the West, or by the Greco-Turkish term çiftetelli (Greek: τσιφτετέλι). The term "Belly dance" is a misnomer as all parts of the body are involved in the dance; the most featured body part in raqs sharqi being the hips. Belly dance takes many different forms depending on country and region, both in costume and dance style;; and new styles have been invented in the West as its popularity has spread globally. Raqs sharqi (Arabic: رقص شرقي; literally "oriental dance") is the style more familiar to Westerners, performed in restaurants and cabarets around the world. It is more commonly performed by female dancers but is also sometimes danced by men. Raqs sharqi is a solo improvisational dance, although students often perform choreographed dances in a group. As with any dance of folkloric origin, the roots of belly dance are uncertain. The authenticity of even "traditional" or "classical" forms of belly dance is open to question and often hotly disputed. One theory is that belly dance was originally danced by women for women, to demonstrate or ease childbirth in Iran, India, and North Africa.This is the most popular and realistic theory.This theory is very popular in Western dance schools because it helps counteract negative sexual stereotyping, but there is no written evidence to support it. The book "Dancer of Shamahka" is widely cited, but it is in fact, a romanticized memoir written by a modern author, Armen Ohanian, published in 1918. In Middle Eastern society two specific belly dance movements have been used in childbirth for generations,[1], but this fact is insufficient to account for the history of a complex dance used primarily for public performance. While these theories may have some foundation, none of them can be proved to be the origin of belly dance. It is more likely that all these factors contributed to the development of belly dance as we know it today [2]. The first recorded Western encounter with belly dance is during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, when his troops encountered the gypsy dancers of the Ghawazee, and the more refined dancing of the Almeh. Belly dance was later popularized during the Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, when Orientalist artists depicted romanticized images of harem life in the Ottoman Empire. Around this time, dancers from Middle Eastern countries began to perform at various World Fairs, often drawing crowds in numbers that rivaled those for the science and technology exhibits. Several dancers, including the French author Colette, engaged in "oriental" dancing, sometimes passing off their own interpretations as authentic. There was also the pseudo-Javanese dancer Mata Hari, convicted in 1917 by the French for being a German spy.
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