Labour of love

You’re writing a book that’s niche, and tells an extraordinary true-life story.What’s the process, and what are the choices you make? Storyteller and dance historian Jo Hirons McAvoy describes uncovering the lost history of marginalised dancers from a byg

Once upon a time, in a long-forgotten period of history, roughly between the cobbled streets of the Whitechapel Murders and the brazen brouhaha of the Chicago World’s Fair, a small band of beautiful young women, possessed of warm complexions, dark eyes, long hair, and attractive figures, captivated Western audiences with their intoxicating dances. For a few brief years, before disaster inevitably struck, they were among the most talked-about women on the planet; social-influencers whose glamorous, international reputations, and undoubted earning power, persuaded other young women to break down accepted barriers and take to the stage. What is perhaps most surprising is that these misremembered dancers were not Europeans, or even Americans. They came from North Africa. And the dance they did was the bellydance.

I have spent the last four years searching through books, newspapers, and magazines more than a century old to tell their story. First, however, I should briefly tell mine so you can understand the source of my passion, and how I thought I might just have the skillset to unravel the tangled threads of these lost performances.

I have been involved in the UK bellydance scene for more than 20 years. I have been a student, a performer, a teacher; I have danced with bands performing at cultural fairs and festivals; and I have been a director of Funoon, the UK’s only touring company dedicated to the performing arts of North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. Unfortunately, at the same time as I was discovering my love for the folkloric dances of Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere, I was also discovering that I suffered from an incurable auto-immune disease that would, slowly and surely, take away my ability to dance.

Of course, when you hear such news you always presume and pray that the worst will never happen; but, if you are sensible, like me, you will also pack in a lifetime of experiences whilst you can, and look about for some other fulfilling way to remain a valued part of your performing community. In time, I became an event organiser, a bellydance journalist, and a dance show compère; I also learned how to be a successful stage photographer, working in the shadows, just outside

the glare of the spotlight, striving to capture all the glorious movement and colour in a single frame. Alas, even these joys could not last forever, and the days came when I could no longer rely on being well enough to make future plans. This is when you sit yourself down, and wonder how you can serve your community with nothing more than your voice and your laptop.

For a dance that is often claimed to be the world’s oldest, the ‘bellydance bookshelf’ is a remarkably short one, particularly if you remove all the ‘how to’ volumes, cookery books, lifestyle blogs, and fitness guides. I proposed to myself that I would try to add something worthwhile to the shelf, something that would explain some of the mysteries that had puzzled me as a student dancer, and, moreover, appeared to equally puzzle every teacher I had ever studied with. Who were the first dancers to leave the lands of the dance to perform on Western stages? When did that first happen and what did their new audiences think of them? What did bellydance look like in the past, what was it called, and when did it make the transition from simple folkdance to bravura solo performance art?

Over the years I had received several unsatisfactory answers: The 1970s, when rich Arabs came to party in London clubs. The 1950s, when exotica was fashionable and bellydancers appeared in Hollywood films. The 1930s and ‘40s, when Egyptian movies dominated the Arab world. The 1920s, when Josephine Baker ruled the rarefied Paris stage. Even, the 1890s, as a short-lived craze begun by the American World Fairs. It is a curious thing to realise you have decided to write a history, but have no idea where to start!

Rewriting the past

The past is an exacting discipline. There is always a beguiling temptation to become sidetracked by how the imagined ‘then’ makes you feel as a modern human. If you are not careful, facing up to its injustices, its colonial oppressions, and its monstrous regulation of the freedoms we take for granted can lead you far away from the facts. You might also be tempted to dust off your rosetinted looking-glass and tell only those things which flatter the prejudices of your present peers, concealing awkward details which might be frowned upon, particularly when so many enjoy your shared art purely for its fluff and fantasy.

So, the only thing for me to do was to set aside a decade-and-a-half of reading and learning, and start from scratch, without prejudice, as far as possible, travelling back to the past in the only

How I found Fatma

Bellydance is not a modern phenomenon.

There were professional dancers in Egypt when

Napoleon Bonaparte invaded in 1798; there were similarly professional dancers in Algeria and

Tunisia when the French began their invasion of North Africa in 1830. As the 19th century progressed, and as France, and French culture, began to dominate both the newly-conquered coastal cities and a newly independent Egypt, tales of marvellously beautiful women, their gorgeously-jewelled costumes, and their romantic dalliances with tourists and princes increasingly came back to Europe, filling whole chapters of freshly-printed colonial guides and travel adventures with lengthy accounts of their alluring dances. It would not be long before enterprising theatre directors considered putting these “Oriental dancers” on Western stages. Of course, the first rows of lavishly-bedecked chorus girls were glorious fakes, but soon dancers, musicians, and other performing artists genuinely from North Africa would cross the Mediterranean. By the mid 1840s, there were regular steamship crossings from Algerian cities to Marseille, and by 1856 it was possible for the first time to board a train and travel direct to Paris. The entire journey would take about a week, making it both possible and economically viable, particularly for North African Jewish and Christian performers who did not face the same travel restrictions as their Muslim counterparts. Arab and pseudo-Arab entertainments began to be a feature of French fairs and circuses as these intrepid performers joined the travelling circuit, sometimes as far north as Belgium and Great Britain.

In 1878, Paris held an Exposition Universelle, or grand world trade fair, which, among its many delights, showcased the popular and folkloric music of several different lands. One of the musicians invited to take part was Jewish Algerian band leader Joseph Eny, who came with his extended family, all musicians and dancers. For several years the Enys were just one more anonymous Algerian family trying to make a living on the roads and boards, indistinguishable from the many real and feigned Arabian acrobats, magicians, and jugglers becoming a familiar sight in the circuses and fairgrounds of Western Europe. And then, in 1886, their destiny found them. The Tunisian Concert and Rachel Eny, now an 18 year-old beauty going by the stage-name Belle Fatma, were invited to perform at another Parisian trade fair, the outstanding success of which catapulted her to the front page of the newspapers and shortly thereafter to international stardom. That new-found celebrity would see her crowned the world’s most beautiful woman in the first ever international beauty competition; it would see her on stage in the greatest theatres of Paris, London, Madrid, Moscow, and St Petersburg; and it would see countless other Beautiful Fatmas attempt to follow in her dancing footsteps. They were rumoured to be making even more money than Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.

way I could, via the collected online print and photographic archives of Europe and America. I read the daily and weekly newspapers of numerous towns and cities in search of dancers, and I used my own performance experience to predict when and where I might find them. In doing so, I found an extraordinary series of tangled stories: the lost history of the spectacular rise and dramatic fall of the first bellydancers in Europe.

Stories lead to stories

As I turned the pages of digital newspapers, translating accounts never before put into English, I discovered among these dancing newcomers the teenaged Belle Baya, Fatma’s titian-haired cousin, who broke many hearts, including her own; the aloof Belle Féridjée, the first European-born star; and bold Belle Zerrada who ran away from a domineering husband. To these I added Choke, Zeinab, and Ayouché, grand stars of the Cairo stage; Torkya, the little Kabyle sword-dancer with a tattooed cheek; precocious cousins Zora and Zelika, who danced inside a giant blue elephant at the Moulin Rouge; hostess Fathma, the postcard queen of Algiers; and Baya’s redoubtable mother, Orida, who took on the often thankless task of keeping them all in work. I discovered racehorses, greyhounds, spaniels, and even prize-winning orchids named after these acclaimed goddesses of the stage, and an attendant host of besotted fans, from would-be lovers to laundry-maids, from louche artists’ models to the lesbian demimondaines of Paris, and from celebrated authoresses to champions of female emancipation. They were dressed by the finest fashion houses and their portraits were taken not only by society photographers but also by the likes of Benjamin-Constant and Toulouse-Lautrec.

And yet, open any book of Belle Époque entertainments and you will find the well-known names of singers, actresses and cancaneuses, but you will find almost no trace of the young women who brought the danse du ventre – the dance of the stomach, the modern bellydance, named after a scandalous painting by Jean Léon Gérôme – to Paris, and thence to the rest of Europe. They were household names; they shared the stage with Paulus, with Loie Fuller, and other icons of the age; their extraordinary ability to draw paying audiences funded much of the gigantic Paris Exposition of 1889; even the Eiffel Tower, built for that exposition, was once jokingly called the “Belle Fatma of towers…” And yet, today, they are unknown: their memory all but erased.

The process of writing a lost history

When you find yourself hot on the trail of a detective story, you are supposed to fill your spare bedroom with red string, drawing pins, countless newspaper cuttings, and strange, obsessive scribblings. However, for anyone else attempting to crack a 130 year-old whodunit, let me assure you that all you really need are a few strategic Post-it notes, a series of colour-coordinated lever arch files, and a bloody big spreadsheet. From these, you can construct timelines, allocating marriages, concert performances, world events, pregnancies, and theatre bookings until you can just about design the tour t-shirt for every missing year. But then, just when you think you have restored the lost history of a number of beloved performance artists, you discover that you also have to add in a corrupt police department and a police chief on the make. To these must be added power-hungry politicians plotting to bring in authoritarian regimes by encouraging censorship of the arts, and rebellious artists defying the authorities by removing their clothes. Then there are the social reformers seeking to close down the fairgrounds and dance halls, and perhaps make a bit of money on the side from property developers; the romantic intellectuals determined to live in the imagined world of the Arabian Nights; the garden designers bringing storybooks to life; and the venal showmen falsely representing North African tribes in a series of lurid, but lucrative arena spectaculars. Into the mix must also go the anti-Semitic fearmongers, and the doom-laden medical professionals uniting with Christian moralists in their profound conviction that the End of Days is just around the corner.

I began to write my stories before all the pieces of the puzzle were set firmly in place, but nevertheless confident that by immersing myself in ‘the Fatmasphere’ the way ahead would eventually clear. As I progressed, I found myself increasingly wrapped in a sense of love, not only for my dance community for whom I had resolved to write their missing pedigree, but also for the dancers of this emerging past, women whose faces now stared out at me from previously anonymous prints and postcards. Like a priestess honouring long-dead Egyptian pharaohs, I had spoken their names and given them back their lives. I began to see them, gossiping in birdsongaccented French, bumping along badly-lit theatre corridors, costumes slung over their shoulders, about to plump in front of the dressing-room

mirror, about to apply their make-up. Not so very long ago, I had been as they were, then. Many of my friends still are: pulling a bottle of chardonnay from a nearby valise, puffing on a crafty fag, throwing a packet of pins halfway across the room, massaging tired muscles, and patting their best curves back into place.

Why self publishing made perfect sense

Of course, when I had put everything back where it belonged and provided proof of all my findings, the end result was not a slim manuscript. How could it be? Eradicated lives cannot be restored in a handful of pages. This left me with the problem of publishing. I had previously flirted with releasing information online, but swiftly found my words and pictures appearing elsewhere as the honest handiwork of others. My deteriorating health meant that I needed some financial return for the outlays of the past four years: auto-immune diseases do not fit neatly into tick-box government support. I tried various publishers but received all the expected answers: complete silence, no new authors, no non-fiction, no academic works, no non-academic works, no works over 150 pages, no projected series, no history, not now, or anytime soon. The best replies were of the ‘you pay us £15,000 to publish’ persuasion, swiftly followed by ‘and £30,000 if you want us to advertise it.’ I looked at the smiling dancers framed on my bookshelf, my sisters from history. I did not have time to wait until some as yet unknown publisher took pity on me. The clock of my borrowed time was ticking particularly loudly that day.

I therefore decided to selfpublish, plundering my savings for a refurbished computer and a copy of Affinity Publisher. I learned the basics from YouTube and ploughed ahead. It took six months between my parttime day-job, and recurring bouts of illness to format the text and add all the footnotes, with a further three months to scan, repair, and insert an enormous collection of vintage images. After this came an index – great fun – and making a cover. How I laughed at myself, remembering a small child hiding behind the diningroom curtains, making books out of folded paper, and a somewhat older child rejoicing in the precious gift of a long-arm stapler to make a proper book. Now, all these years later, I was finally making my first very real book, and nothing quite prepares you for that piece of magic.

It has been hard. There have been days when the words won’t come because my brain is clouded, and days when the words want to pour out, but my hands are cramped, or I cannot sit down. Stories, however, are powerful things. I might not, at present, be able to walk to the shops, but I can soar like a bird over 130 years to sit in a box at the Folies Bergère, or breathe in the circus smells of sand and sawdust, greasepaint and gas-lamps.

In the end, though, I am irrelevant. I am just the mechanism that gives the story life.

The days of the Beautiful Fatmas blazed brightly across the theatrical firmament, and just as swiftly crashed to earth. And yet, because they danced, for a few short years, dark beauty was celebrated, women flirted with soft fabrics and daring makeup, long hair brushed bare shoulders, and, for one brief, too soon moment, women’s bodies were freed from the constraints of tight-laced boots, from cage-like bustles, and crushing, restrictive corsets. Moreover, because Beautiful Fatmas danced, white women followed them to the stage: without them, there would have been no Loie Fuller, no Ruth St Denis, no Maud Allan, no Isadora Duncan, and no Ruby Ginner. Little Egypt would not have had her day in court, and Mata Hari would not have been shot in 1917. When campaigning women cried out for the vote, many found the courage to do so because a woman could stand alone on a theatrical stage. When white counterfeits outrageously claimed to be Oriental dancers, still-infatuated newspapermen flocked to hear their stories, permitting these new stars to speak to the press, and to describe just what it means to be a woman who dances. With these impassioned words began the perilous quest for female autonomy in the performing arts, a worldwide upheaval whose beginning was only made possible because a little 10 year-old Algerian girl got up to dance the bellydance in a long-forgotten story.

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

by Jo Hirons McAvoy will be available through Amazon Print-on-Demand from May 2023. Hardcover,

540 pages, and with over 100 illustrations, it seeks to tell the neverbefore-told story of a dance craze that helped to shape the modern world.