Trust me, a Belly Dancer will happily dress just as skimpy and flashy – and will dance with just as many wiggles and undulations – for an all-female audience, as they will for an audience that includes men. In fact, most of the dancers I know would rather dance for the all-female audience any day.

Carmencita (1894)

Princess Ali (1895)

Crissie Sheridan (1897)

Amy Muller (1896)

Spanish dancers at the Pan-American Exposition (1901)

A nymph of the waves (1903)

Princess Rajah dance (1904 – remember, ladies. the men love strong teeth…)

Ella Lola, a la Trilby (1908)

“The dance, from what I see, is at the moment rapidly fading in the background, whereas before, it was right up front,” she says.

“It’s very serious and I’m part of what’s going on. I’m part of the big decline that’s going on in the dance.”

“What you are seeing nowadays is just shaking, which is very Turkish,” she says.

“Egyptian dancing has many more brilliant movements, which is why there must be an academy to teach it, where I could lend my expertise.”

Japanese researchers said they had turned a humanoid industrial machine into a master of Japanese traditional dance in a bid to use a robot as a guardian of cultural heritage.

they’re using motion-capture and robots to preserve dance forms – so, is this really preserving the form, or is it just “going through the motions”?