Beautiful Fatmas - Middle Eastern and North African Dancers in Europe 1865-1895

Have you ever wondered how bellydance first spread from the lands of its birth to reach a global audience? Have you ever imagined women from North Africa hurrying through the gas-lit streets and fogs of Victorian London on the way to the theatre, or flipping their skirts in the mad, high-kicking frolics of Parisian nightlife? Did you know Toulouse-Lautrec painted bellydancers, or that they were performing in Westminster whilst Jack the Ripper was committing his murders in Whitechapel? During the last decades of the 19th century, Western Europe fell in love with Middle Eastern and North African dancing women, in literature, on the stage, and, most extravagantly, in art. Today, Orientalist plays, novels, and famous paintings are still widely admired, but the real women – who once worked in travelling fairs, circuses, and vaudeville shows, inspiring a generation with their beauty, their talent, and the joy of their extraordinary dancing – have been almost entirely erased from the collective memory. This, then, is the lost history of the first bellydancers in Europe and how their traditional and artistic dances, which once dazzled Belle Époque audiences at the Folies Bergère, and the Moulin Rouge, helped to pay for the great Expositions.Told for the first time, here is the story of the illustrious Tunisian Concert and of Rachel bent Eny, known as Belle Fatma, the first international bellydance star and, once upon a time, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Hers is only one of many once-famous names belonging to bold and daring young women from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and France at the forefront of a very feminine artistic revolution taking place on the Western stage.This forgotten love affair between East and West, played out on the fairground and in the theatre, is a tale full of high Victoriana in which greasepaint, khedives, fairy tales, picture postcards, lion tamers, impresarios, lotteries, pantomimes, acrobats, corsetry, roller-coasters, police chases, the cancan, Loie Fuller, enchanted gardens, red windmills, and all the weird and wonderful denizens of the late 19th century stage have their rightful place. The early history of bellydance is far stranger than you might think. The Paris World Fair of 1889 could not have taken place without it. And then there was a coronavirus pandemic and the police and politicians went to war against the bellydance…A must read for bellydance students, for lovers of burlesque history, and for fans of the glory days of Victorian circus and vaudeville theatre: illustrated with hundreds of pictures from the author’s personal collection. Read more