Look for posts in this tribe about Jamila Salimpour and Bobby Farrah. It's a good place to start with AMerican belly dance.

Artemis Mourat also has written an extensive article about the evolution of Turkish oriental in the US. www.serpentine.org

It might be worthwhile taking a look at Wendy Buonaventura's book "Serpent of the Nile" - details on her site at

www.buonaventura.com/serpent.htm

Older than most sources, I wrote a work on sources for dance in the 600-1600 AD range:

raqsstorm.org/apostate/

raqsstorm.org/apostate/

I hope it's of service. :)

Talk to Shareen el Safy and Sahra Kent if you're interested in how modern Egyptian bellydance grew out of the social dance/folkloric forms.

(Shareen was a student of Jamila's way back when.)

I'd take every page of Serpent and the Nile with a HUGE grain of salt. Wendy has a very obvious axe to grind, and it shows in this book.

Darling, the best place to look is your heart! Not everything done by our pioneering dancers comforts everyone's taste, and I find that through watching videos of everyone I possibly can from the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's I develop and grow certain ideas of my own and understand how the story unfolds in a feeling way. The stories that our sisters have told has been written about enough, and still the best place to learn is visually!!! Through the expressions in these women's faces, a million stories are told that you'll never find explained in books. The truest emotions of the lives they lived and their dreams and aspirations are all there!

I would go directly to the source. If you subscribe to DISH network, then subscribe to the Arabic channels. One can learn much about Egyptian dance and culture just by watching Egyptian movies....ALL of them, not just necessarily the ones that feature dance. About two-thirds of these movies are all subtitled in English. The Egyptian movies are our first teachers.

-Sausan

An excellent book to read is A Trade Like Any Other by Karin van Nieuwkerk. (which I have probably misspelled). It's not easy to read - it's her PhD dissertation and is written in rather academic language. But it's a superb resource for learning how our dance form evolved from its roots as a social dance into a performing art.

Another good resource is Looking for Little Egypt, by Donna Carlton. That one provides insights into how the general U.S. public became aware of "belly dance" at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century.

The DVD Legends of Belly Dance provides a good introduction to what the famous dancers of Egypt were like in the 1940's and later.

I know someone else on this thread suggested Serpent of the Nile by Wendy Buonaventura. I actually don't recommend that one, because it contains a lot of "wishtory" and is very weak when it comes to identifying its sources.

Someone else suggested The Belly Dance Book - and I agree that its history section is excellent.

I hope this helps!