The Great Dancers: The “Golden Age”

According to her autobiography, Badia Masabni was born in Damascus in 1894 (originally as “Wadia”),⁴ in what is now Syria. When she was seven years old, a cafe owner raped her, which according to local custom, brought shame upon her entire family. Partially to escape the stigma, her family emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina; many Levantine families moved to South America at the turn of the 20th century. According to writer Jalilah, it was in Argentina that Badia discovered her love of music, singing, and dancing.⁵ Her family moved back to Syria when Badia was a teenager, in hopes of finding her a husband, but the stigma of having been raped prevented her from doing so. As a single young woman she had no means to support herself. First, Badia escaped to Beirut; on the train there, she met a woman who offered to help her, but Badia discovered this woman was the madam of a brothel. Badia wanted a means to support herself that did not involve sex work, so she convinced her mother to move with her to Cairo in 1912,⁶ the center of Arab entertainment, to pursue her love of singing and dancing.⁷

She originally found work playing small roles with the famous George Abiad Theater Ensemble. In 1914, she moved to Beirut once again, but this time to perform in the then well-known theater owned by Madame Jeanette, a French woman who only hired European artists to perform for the club’s mostly upper-class Lebanese clientele. She worked and performed throughout the Levant. While working in Damascus, her childhood tragedy continued to haunt her, as her brother, believing he was defending the family honor, attacked and nearly killed Badia. She recovered, and began working with Nagib El Righany, an Egyptian comedian, actor, playwright, and director, and his performance ensemble; she often expertly played male roles.⁸ When she returned with them to Cairo in 1921, she became the star of the company. The two eventually wed, but their marriage was troubled, and Badia left him in 1926.⁹

In the same year, 1926, she opened her own nightclub, the Casino Badia. Her club, called a “sala” rather than “cabaret”—in the Middle East, the word “cabaret” denotes a low-class and questionable establishment—featured a program of short acts by both European and Arab performers designed to appeal to European and upper-class Egyptian tastes. Badia even danced and sang several numbers and held a mantinee show in the afternoon for women only.¹⁰ It was at this time that the raqs baladi and movement vocabulary performed by the ‘awalim changed into the more contemporary raqs sharqi that we know today. In fact, according to dancer and writer Jalilah, the term raqs sharqi—meaning “dance of the East,” as opposed to raqs baladi which means, “dance of the country(side)”—emerged at this time, when much of the Middle East was under European political control and social influence and was meant to distinguish Middle Eastern dance from dances from European dance styles. Badia modeled the Casino Badia after European nightclubs, seeking to profit off of the increasing number of European tourists in Egypt in the late 1920s, as well as upper-class Egyptians seeking high-class entertainment. Also following European style, Badia hired western choreographers who integrated turns and traveling steps from ballet and ballroom dance into raqs baladi. The dance performances featured synchronized raqs sharqi ensembles, which had never appeared on a Middle Eastern stage before. The beaded two-piece bra and belt set, which are now inseparable from the image of the “belly dancer,” appeared at this time as well, influenced by Hollywood, which was at the time producing countless films set in a fantasy Orient. ¹¹

In 1937, she made a poor investment in a film project that failed, and she declared bankruptcy. After borrowing money, she opened the Casino Opera in 1940, a nightclub with a movie theater, restaurant, cafe, and an American-style bar. It was here that many famous Egyptian dancers and singers began their careers, such as Samia Gamal, Farid al-Atrash, Tahia Carioca, and Mohammed Abdel Wahab. In fact, many dance scenes in Egyptian films at the time were filmed in the Casino Opera. ¹²

The Casino Opera was a successful business for nearly two decades, but was not without difficulties. During the 1930s, as the Great Depression spread worldwide, police in the neighborhood of Badia’s nightclub briefly attempted to prevent belly dancing, claiming it was the performance of “scandalous acts in public.” In 1933, the police forbade belly dance outright. Badia, however, was a shrewd businesswoman. Her club’s bodyguard would signal to the dancers when a police car appeared outside, and dancers would change their movements to more acceptable “foreign” styles of dance. During the Egyptian revolution in 1952, supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as of Communists and the Wafd Party (a nationalist liberal political party), demonstrated against the rule of King Farouk, and set fire to several British and French cultural centers, as well as Badia’s former nightclub. ¹³

Badia’s Casino Opera thrived until she sold it to another woman sala owner when the Egyptian government demanded from her thousands of Egyptian pounds in back taxes, and Badia escaped to Lebanon where she spent the rest of her life until her death in 1975. 

Of all of the great women of Egyptian dance, contemporary belly dancers owe the most to Badia Masabni, for it was she who initiated the development of what we now know as raqs sharqi or “Oriental” or “cabaret” belly dance. Until the 1920’s, belly dancers mostly performed in small spaces, rarely on theater stages; Badia Masabni’s productions at the Casino Opera included large group choreographies, and Badia brought in choreographers from other dance forms to expand the then-narrow belly dance movement vocabulary. Additionally, at the Casino Opera, dancers such as Samia Gamal and Tahia Carioca, were able to achieve a celebrity status that dancers before them had never attained or were able to attain.¹⁴