Celluloid Days #9 - Thomas Edison: The Variety Stage & Oriental Dance

For several years I enjoyed, and sometimes contributed to, a fun podcast called Coffee With Jeff. Jeff has a new podcast where he focuses on movies and film history. It's called Celluloid Days, and I just had to stick my finger in that pie, too, and have become a regular contributor with my "natterings".

Since podcasts are audio only, and sometimes the things we talk about really call for imagery, I’ve decided to put my segments on my blog, with appropriate pictures. Here we go! This entry covers my segment for Episode 9: Thomas Edison, released on March 6, 2022.

You’ve probably deduced by this point that I like movies, or as we used to say back in the day, the “moving pictures”. One of my favorite genres is historicals or “costume dramas”. I’m also a sci-fi buff, and when you combine sci-fi with history you get another one of my very favorite genres: time travel stories. 

Not content to merely read or watch time travel stories, I wanted to experience it, so by the time I was into my teens I was into historical clothes and material culture. There was no internet back then, so I got my information from reading historical novels, straight history books, and historical film and television. I wanted to live in the past!

Later it would dawn on me that living in the past meant no antiseptics, anesthetics, or hot and cold running water, so I decided just visiting was the better option. In my college years I discovered the wacky world of historical reenacting. These are the people who study history by DOING it. Medievalists, neo-Victorians, and Civil War reenactors all fall into this category, and I’ve participated in just about all of it except Roman Legions. 

At one point in my life I ended up living in the Bay Area of California. I was heavily into American Civil War reenactment at the time, where I started out as a Confederate cavalry trooper, then a sailor, then switched sides to drive wagons and an ambulance for a Union Artillery unit (See photo, right, of me as a Union Hospital steward. Ferrotype by Wm. Dunniway). I met some amazing people, including my second husband, through this hobby. One of the people I met was my friend Elizabeth. She’s an architect who also loves historical clothing and cooking and everything else. She was also a big fan of traditional oriental dance. 

You might know “oriental dance” by its modern, westernized term: “belly dance”.

I can't remember the inciting incident, whether it was around the campfire one night after a day of robbing trains in the Santa Cruz Mountains, around the punch bowl at a Victorian ball, or at a potluck at somebody's house, but somehow we came up with the idea of doing old world, old style belly dance. We had no interest in modern belly dance, with its full orchestras, skimpy costumes, and sequins. We wanted to emulate the professional folk dancers of Egypt and North Africa. Characters like the infamous “Little Egypt”, who was in reality a number of different dancers using that name throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

There’s plenty of documentation for folk costumes of the world, but reading about dance isn’t a great way to reinvent it. Several books on the origins of belly dance reference footage shot by Edison, or more likely his associates, including one by Donna Carlton literally named “Looking for Little Egypt”…which is literally what we were doing. 

If you go to the Library of Congress web site and search the “Variety Stage” film collection, you’ll find a window into the history of ethnic dance in America. Unlike the Black Maria footage, Edison’s Variety Stage films were shot at places like the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY in 1901. 

Some of these very short documentary films, or “actualities” as they were called, are clearly of the dancers imported from Algeria and elsewhere, while other clips are most likely priceless documentation of burlesque performers who blended a few ethnic moves into their existing “hoochie koochie” style and called it “oriental”.

It all helped us add some authenticity to our existing folk dance vocabulary, and for several years we had fun performing as 19th century “oriental dancers” at reenactments, parties, and sometimes our local Moroccan restaurant. (See image, left, of my friend and me, Nabila, as "Little Upper and Lower Egypt". Ferrotype by Wm. Dunniway)

Edison may have been a cad, but time travelers like me are grateful his films have been preserved for the ages.