Dancers today often don't use a formal set structure. For example, a dancer performing at a wedding in Cairo in 2024 might perform a solo to an entrance piece (Anywhere 4 and 20 minutes) and the rest of their performance would be dancing with the wedding guest all together on the dance floor. For a show in a 5 star hotel, on a boat, or in a night club, she might have a collection of songs and tableaus in any order the dancer curates for her (current Cairo laws do not license male bellydancers) audience.

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Men do and have always participated in raqs.

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This post will be short because I don't know much about either of these regions, but I don't want to leave them out. In the future, I am hoping to have this re-written by some one with more expertise in the areas covered.

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Many American dancers hold Egyptian style up as a standard as a result of shifts that happened during the 80s. Cheaper travel and the hard work of the Egyptian tourism board, plus tapes of Egyptian dancers from the golden era, Lebanon's civil war, and changes in Turkey shifted the focus of dancers in the US from Anatolian areas to Egypt. But while dancers in the US were idolizing Egypt's golden era, many changes were taking place within Egypt's dance scene, especially during the 1990s.

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​This post is about the style changes that happened in the US between the 90s and 2010s and how the situation dancers in the US found themselves in changed. During the 80s, dancing in the US was still basically the same styles as the previous decades, with more fringe on the costumes and more dancers starting to get into historical research, but several changes to the national context were starting.

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The story of fusion belly dance as we know it today can be traced back to Jamila Salimpour and her classes and performances on the West Coast of the USA starting in the 1950s and 60s.

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AKA late golden era, AKA retro Egyptian

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Interestingly, while Turkish dancers sometimes call the it raqs instead of oryantal dans, all the places bellydance is part of the vernacular party dance were once part of the Ottoman empire.

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Our next style goes by many names! Sometimes called "American Cabaret", or "Am Cab" for short, "Vintage American", "Vintage Oriental", "American Restaurant", "Vintage Restaurant", "classic American", and even "Anatolian Cabaret" by those wishing to emphasize the influence of Greek, Turkish, and Armenian immigrants and artists on the style.

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This post is to give students enough of an orientation to Lebanese style to get the lay of the land. You can probably tell by how much shorter than the others it is, but there is more to the story which you're better off learning from sources more focused on this style. ​