What’s in a Name?

This blog post written by Abigail Keyes is so important to our dance history that we wanted to preserve it here so it was easy to access for every FCBD®Style Dancer.

Sicilian/Greek-American dancer Jamila Salimpour is known for many innovations in belly dance (a dance form also referred to as oriental dance, raqs sharqi, raqs baladi, among others), but is probably best known for her cataloging and naming of belly dance steps between the 1940s and the 1970s. Many practitioners of the dance form use these step names today, whether or not they are referring to the original Jamila Salimpour step itself. Indeed, even the idea of cataloging and naming steps was revolutionary in belly dance in the mid-20th century, something that many dancers today likely take for granted if they don’t already resent it.

Over the course of three decades, Jamila—and starting in the 1970s, her daughter Suhaila— embarked on building a collection of basic and not-so-basic belly dance movement vocabulary-derived steps performed by dancers native to the Middle East, North Africa, Turkish, and Hellenic regions (MENATH). 

When Jamila first embarked on this effort, observing and notating each movement, she organized them into stepfamilies. Each family has a characteristic element that ties that group of steps together, whether that’s a technical element (such as hip twists), a foot pattern, or a sentiment or feeling.

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Abigail Keyes is an authorized and licensed instructor of the Salimpour Format. She's officially been with the Salimpour School since 2005, and has been studying the format since 2000. In 2016, she earned her MA in Dance Studies from Mills College and also has a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. She runs the Salimpour School Berkeley and directs the Berkeley Salimpour Collective. akeyesdance.com