BELLY DANCE for EVERYBODY

Steven Wagner - Stevan Vagner, Podrum COLLEGIUM MELODIUM , World music museum in BELGRADE , Fabulous Aleksandra Gruden, * NEDJMA * and Nenad Nikolic with * ORASI * present Belly dancing , believed to have had a long history in the Middle East, but reliable evidence about its origins is scarce, and accounts of its history are often highly speculative. Several Greek and Roman sources including Juvenal and Martial describe dancers from Asia Minor and Spain using undulating movements, playing castanets, and sinking to the floor with 'quivering thighs', descriptions that are certainly suggestive of the movements that we today associate with belly dance. Later, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, European travellers in the Middle East such as Edward Lane and Flaubert wrote extensively of the dancers they saw there, including the Awalim and Ghawazee of Egypt In the Ottoman Empire belly dancers used to perform for the harem in the Topkapı Palace