In the middle ages, the concept of harems and seraglios was introduced to the West through the Ottoman Empire. European Orientalism, steeped in Victorian morality, imagined brothel-like institutions where the women’s sole purpose was the pleasure of men. Writings by explorers, in particular Richard Francis Burton (who also translated Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra), ignited the fantasies of romantic-era artists who portrayed harems as groups of nude women lying around pools and spas, covered in oil, waiting for the men. It was in these virtual constructs that European adventurers first fantasized about nude slave girls dancing, and early fantasies of Middle Eastern dance emerged in Western cultures.

In modern times, the American audience was introduced to what they believed was Middle Eastern dance at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The World’s Fair introduced many famous firsts and popular attractions in the dedicated amusement park on the Midway Plaisance, including “Street In Cairo”. The North African-themed attraction, along with the mile-long Midway Plaisance, was created by a young music promoter and theater manager named Sol Bloom. “Street In Cairo” was Sol Bloom’s version of “Algerian Village”, an attraction at the Paris World’s Fair of 1891 (Exposition Universelle) inspired by France’s Algerian “colony”. Sol created the attraction in which a tune he had improvised on the piano and a burlesque dancer hired for the occasion would present the dance of the “hootchy-kootchy”. With burlesque-inspired “shake and shimmy” and the tune later known as “the snake charmer music”, the Victorian-era audience was introduced to the “dance of the belly” or “belly dance”, a term designed to stoke the imagination and a misnomer widely exploited by Sol. The show, presented at the Egyptian Theatre, was entitled “The Algerian Dancers of Morocco”. The tune made up by Bloom uses a Western scale, not based on the quarter tone Arabic scale, and the harmony is completely foreign to Middle Eastern music. Hollywood soon followed and the suggestive, Western-fantasy of “hootchy-kootchy” would become a part of every production attempting to depict anything from the Middle East. Costumes, based on colonial fantasies of the sari and choli of India, were glamorized to further emphasize the suggestive and erotic nature of the dance (e.g. Salome). The “snake charmer music” would later become an Arabic riff; the musical phrase which is used to represent anything Middle Eastern (e.g., Harem Nights by Irving Berlin, Show Boat, Little Egypt, Dance of the Snake Charmer, Hoolah Hoolah, Istanbul, Cleopatra, Aladdin’s Lamp, Ali Baba, etc.).

The concocted image of a seductive and erotic dance, performed by women only, became the Western view of Middle Eastern dance.

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