Kerry: Can we begin with your name Shareen el Safy?

Shareen: The name was given to me by the Egyptian dancer Hala el Safy while I was working in Cairo. I had begun training with Hala in 1987 to become her substitute at the Nile Hilton during her pregnancy. The gig didn't actually go through, but during this time she called me up one day and said "You need a new name." It was difficult for the Egyptians to pronounce my married name, Sharon Iverson. So she gave me the name Shareen el Safy. I've since learned that Safy is an old Iraqi family name and also has Sufi roots. Safy means 'pure' - in the Middle East you can buy bottled water with 'safi' on it. Shareen means 'sweet' in both Persian and Arabic. I am not so sure that I can live up to my name!

Kerry: What first attracted you to Oriental dance?

Shareen: I saw my first dancer, Diane Webber, at The Renaissance Pleasure Faire in California in 1967. Diane was a film star living in Malibu and working in some of the ethnic clubs in Los Angeles. She was stunning to watch: beautiful in bright coloured silks, radiating self-confidence and earthy sensuality. There was a live Middle Eastern band playing traditional dance music-authentic and lively. I was blown away by the rich expressiveness of her dance. My first lesson was a week later!

I studied with her privately every month or two for about a year, travelling down from Big Sur. She also recommended a colleague, Jamila Salimpour in the San Francisco area, whom I would drive north 4-5 hours to study with every few months. I began taking from her just after her daughter, Suhaila, was born. She had huge classes with close to a hundred students revolving around her while dancing in the centre of the room. In class she was an impressive figure, wearing stage makeup with heavy eyeliner and facial tattoos, and dressed in exquisite assuit, a self-designed coin girdle and tribal jewellery. She had something of a cult following with an entourage of devoted protégées. We would learn by following her movements, and eventually she developed verbalization for her vocabulary.

I studied with her for five years, practicing several hours each day before I started to teach at her suggestion. I continued to study with her for many more years. I was the first belly dance teacher on the central coast of California during a wave of popular interest, teaching large classes in colleges, recreational centres, and health clubs in seven counties. I also performed in coffee houses, restaurants, dance concerts and nightclubs. I began to do more serious teaching and travelling throughout the U.S.A. and later internationally on five continents. The turning point for me, after dancing for 18 years in the American style, was my first trip to Egypt in 1985. What I experienced there was very different from what I considered to be authentic Middle Eastern style in the States.

Looking back on the development of the dance in the West, Americans had been exposed to the dance through the Middle Eastern nightclub performers from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria… who toured the large cities with immigrant populations. American performers like Ibrahim Farrah, Jamila Salimpour, Serena Wilson, Dahlena, Morocco, Diane Webber, and others were dancing in the same nightclubs, influenced by the music, movements and styles of the visiting Middle Eastern artists in the late 1950's and '60's. But there was a period of time between 1970 and 1980 when there'd been few Middle Eastern artists coming over because they weren't being issued green cards that permitted them to work in the U.S. There had been some problems with visa violations. Some dancers became American citizens, but we didn't have any of the great Egyptian names coming over at that time. We had some Lebanese influence. Bobby [Farrah] returned to his family roots in Lebanon, and his style was in fact much more Lebanese.

Without the direct influence of the Middle East during this period when dancers were not coming to the States, our American dancers began to incorporate vocabulary from their former colleagues, sometimes naming a movement after the dancer who used it such as Jamila's term, "Maya," for the back figure eight performed by the Egyptian dancer, Maya Medwar. Americans created routines which contained elements taken from various countries: floor-work, shimmies, taksim. It was an eclectic mix and something of a corruption of the original context.

The seven part routine which begins with a veil entrance, fast opening then a standing taksim and floor-work, followed by another fast section, a drum solo and 9/8 karsilama finale- all of that is an American invention. It's not traditional, and isn't found in any country in that combination. We may have been into the entertainment value of it, so we just made it really spectacular throwing everything into one dance. So when we finally did see what the Middle Eastern, especially Egyptian, dancers were doing with the advent of videotape in the early 1980's, it was something of a shock to see how the dance was being performed there in contrast to the direction that the dance had taken over here during those past ten years that the U.S. was in a cultural vacuum.

Kerry: You mentioned in our conversation yesterday that you were coming to a place where you wanted to "find the dance," that you got the point where you said to yourself there had to be more.

Shareen: Well, yes, I guess I was kind of burned out and thought there had to be more than this. But when I went to Egypt for the first time, I became very intrigued with what they were doing: the grand scale of the productions, the level of skill and virtuosity of the artists and the enormous financial investment. They had full orchestras, thirty or forty musicians, beautiful compositions, shows up to two hours long. The dance was on a whole different level there-original music composed for the dancers and choreographed by great masters, costumes created for each new dance…for example, as you probably read in my article for Habibi on Nagwa Fouad, she poured so much money into her shows, commissioning original compositions which form a great collection of music for dance-many standard pieces that we all use today like "Sit El Hosn," "Maharajan," "Al Mashal"…and a dozens others. She would spend something like US$35,000 every three or four months on a new piece. So, it was a time of high art and culture.

I hadn't seen Nagwa Fouad my first time in Cairo because she was out of town. It was only later, in 1986 when the Egyptian Film Festival came to the States, that I had a chance to meet her. I introduced myself during her dress rehearsal in San Francisco and asked a question about her famous trademark shimmy. She was very gracious, and from that point on I began hounding her for an interview which I never really got on that visit, although I tagged along for the next two weeks of her tour. It took me years and years…I don't think I ever actually got an interview from her where we sat down and she answered questions. When I've asked she's replied "but you know everything about me already." But I have asked her many questions along the way, and she's been very generous to me over the years. Nagwa gave me her phone number after her last show on the Festival tour, and said "when you're in Cairo, call me." I didn't plan to be back there for a while because I'd just returned, but my husband said, "why don't you go?" It was so supportive of him. At the time my son was thirteen and it was very hard for me to leave him, but I went for a month. Then my research really began in earnest.

It took me almost three years to get a licence to perform in Cairo because the Minister of Culture was not allowing foreign dancers to work in 5 star hotel nightclubs. Every summer I went back to dance during the high season at clubs where I'd been offered a job, but I couldn't get the necessary licence. And you can't work without a licence because they will not only put you in jail but they'll also close the nightclub where you are working illegally. It can be very strict, and the reason is mostly monetary. The foreign dancer is required to pay 48% of her income in taxes. It's a tedious process to become licensed, taking a couple of months, giving bribes along the way, dozens of papers to be officially stamped… It's endless bureaucracy: offices of the Secret Police, Vice Police, Ministers of Culture and Tourism, etc. In the end you receive a little pink card after they take your passport. You cannot leave the country without your passport, of course, and you have to get a letter from the nightclub owner saying that you have finished your contract and have paid your taxes. It takes ten days for that to be verified and the passport returned, so heaven help you if you have to get out of the country quickly.

There's a recent rumour that the Ministry of Culture has announced they're not going to licence any more foreigners or allow them to dance in Egypt. I don't know if it's a result of religious conservatism or if it's a confirmation that there's no work for dancers in the depressed economy anyway.

Kerry: Can you talk about what you saw in Egypt that was so different from what was in the U.S.?

Shareen: What struck me immediately was that the dancers were very, very confident. It seemed as if they had time to develop a rapport with the audience and to savour the moment. They really took time to be present, and the big difference I could see was that in the West we were so entertainment oriented that there was a lot of drama and not a lot of substance. I started watching how the dancers in Egypt were moving and how they were feeling the music. And you know, the number one criticism that we hear from the Arab world is that Western dancers don't have the "feeling." And of course, we don't understand the music and we don't understand the words, but as I watched many dancers and asked more questions I became convinced that they were dancing more from the feelings they get while moving, not just their particular orientation or perspective on what they're doing, not necessarily their philosophy or even the cultural context of what they were doing, but the power of the dance itself. They were pulling energy into the dance that made it a deeply intimate expression from their soul, a kind of integrated wholeness. They actually talked about it in those terms when I asked them, so I knew that it was something that was really happening. For example, I asked Sohair Zeki, "when you move, are you really paying attention to how you're moving and to what the steps are?" and she said yes, she felt that when she did this dance perfectly - and she said that term, "perfectly" - "when I do this perfectly, when I do this dance really well, everything in my life comes to me, my home, my family, my son, everything that's precious to me." So she felt it was almost a blessing thing that was happening on a spiritual level. And when you see her dance, you see that kind of concentration; it's not a stilted kind of inward focus, it's just that she's fully, wholly committed to each movement in complete accord with the music.

I asked Nagwa Fouad the same thing. She would go into a very long drum solo for five minutes (I once saw her do a ten minute drum solo) standing in one place doing a pelvic drop with a knee bounce shimmy, moving her arms. It was really quite dramatic, and to think that a dancer could do something for that long and still hold everybody's attention! I saw her perform this a number of times with deep feeling, so I asked her "What happens to you when you do that drum solo?" and she said, "I go into a kind of trance and what happens is between me and my God."

They really are extraordinary women, it takes a lot to get to the top over there. But beyond that, they were really plugged into what they were doing, and it wasn't just a way to make money, it wasn't just a way to dress up and be an entertainer. It was also a deeply spiritual,