5. What areas are considered the “Middle East”?
There is a wonderful response to this question provided by Hala of California.
Hala states:
I don't claim to have the answer but here are my thoughts:
I've used the term "Middle Eastern Dance" as a way to avoid saying "Belly Dance" because it has nothing to do with the belly (it's like calling Ballet the "Toe Dance"). I can't use "Oriental Dance" (as it's called in the Middle East) here in the US because people think of the Far East. After all, labels are very culture-dependent (for example, if you say "Asian" in the US, it refers to people from China, Japan, Korea,..etc. If you say "Asian" in sub-Saharan Africa, it refers to people from India) .
So if MED is merely a politically correct way to say belly dance, it becomes a much wider definition that can include fusion arts, circus acts that use the belly, bellygrams,...etc.
If MED is a new world way to say oriental dance, then it represents what people in the Middle East call "Oriental Dance" which would exclude folkloric arts, line dancing, all fusion genres,...etc and would only represent a solo dancer doing raks sharki (aka cabaret style in the USA)
If we take the term MED literally to mean dances of the geographical region called the Middle East, then it would include "Oriental" style dance, folkloric dances from all regions of the Middle East including minority communities, line dances from Greece, Lebanon, Armenia,...etc, but it would not include fusion arts or fantasy dances unless they have a history of being performed and appreciated in countries of the Middle East which generally speaking includes the whole Arab world from Morocco to the Arab Gulf countries.
Here's what the dictionary says for "Middle East" "n : the area around the eastern Mediterranean; from Turkey to northern Africa and eastward to Iran; the site of such ancient civilizations as Phoenicia and Babylon and Egypt and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity and Islam; had continuous economic and political turmoil in the 20th century; "the Middle East is the cradle of Western civilization"
so I guess MED would mean dances from any region that has continuous economic & political turmoil in the 20th century which would include the USA (juaaaaaaast kidding :-) next
