Dance of the Seven Veils

At around the same time, Isadora Duncan was experimenting with Middle Eastern motifs as she created modern dance. Fond of swirling fabric, she frequently incorporated flowing dresses and scarves into her choreography.

All of this together linked "Middle Eastern dance" and "multiple veils" in the minds of European and North American theater-goers.

So Did Anyone Actually Dance With Veils in the Middle East?

In the Middle East, a "veil" was (and still is) a modesty garment which was worn to shield a respectable Muslim woman from the prying eyes of male strangers. It would be unthinkable to use a "veil" as a prop in a dance performance, and even more unthinkable for such a dance performance to incorporate removal of seven veils until the dancer stands on stage totally nude.

Before the 20th century, women in the Middle East performed Oriental dance fully clothed in normal, everyday garb. There was no such concept as a dance "costume". The dancers who performed at weddings, saints' day festivals, and other events simply wore the same type of clothing as everyone else.

Nightclubs arose in Egypt and Lebanon in the first part of the 20th century to satisfy the hunger that British, French, and other European visitors had to see the local dancers. Catering to their expectations to bring in their money, dancers began to adopt the type of costuming that Hollywood had invented: the bra/belt/skirt ensemble. But still the dancers did not do any kind of "veil" dancing.

According to research performed by the dancer Morocco, in the 1940's (nearly half a century after Oscar Wilde hatched his notion of the "dance of the seven veils"), Samia Gamal whisked on stage carrying a large piece of fabric. This was the first known occurrence of a "real" Oriental dance artist using a length of fabric as a dance prop. She did it because she was taking dance lessons from Ivanova (a famous Russian ballerina), and Ivanova had instructed her to use the fabric as a way of improving her arm carriage.

It's important to emphasize that neither Samia Gamal nor the Egyptian dancers who later followed her example have ever referred to their pieces of fabric as "veils", and they have never worn them as a garment to be removed. Instead, Egyptian dancers hold the fabric in their hands as they enter, swirl it around to the music, and quickly discard it before moving into the main content of their

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