By Lachlan Carmichael - CAIRO
Ketty may be the envy of the Japanese, Brazilian, British, Australian, American, Russian and other non-Arab women who travelled to Egypt for a week's belly dance festival.
The statuesque brunette from France enthralled her audience at the festival's closing gala overnight Monday in the gilded ballroom of an oriental palace hotel opposite the floodlit pyramids.
Egyptians and foreigners alike cheered wildly as Ketty rolled her hips and twitched her abdominal muscles, her gyrations matching the changing tempo of the drums, oriental flutes, and ouds.
"Here they know what you're doing. To come here is like a challenge," she said earlier as she recalled breaking into the oriental dance scene here just over two years ago.
"The public chooses you. You can't choose the public," she said, her green-brown eyes sparkling with intensity.
With 5,000 dancers watched by visitors from other Arab countries and beyond, Cairo has perhaps the most competitive belly-dancing scene in the world. Ketty counts herself among the dozen who have made it.
The others include Egyptians Fifi Abdou and Dina, Asmahan the Argentine, and Nur the Russian.
At a table around the dance floor overnight Monday, two young Japanese women, among the 240 women who took courses here from top Egyptian teachers and dancers, said they would love to be in her place, at least for a while.
"Egypt is the center," said Yukiko Inoue, an avid Samba dancer from Osaka who in the last week has found a new passion for oriental dance.
"I'd like to be a dancer in Cairo and be the fourth wife of a rich Arab," she said giggling.
Oriental dance is increasingly popular in Tokyo and Osaka, said Takako Yosikawa, who does office temping in the Japanese capital but has pursued oriental dance as a passionate hobby for the last five years.
She started it as a way to ease tension.
"It's good for me and for him (her husband). I'm always happy. I still feel young," Takako said.
She said she believes that Japanese looking for the exotic gravitated toward Middle Eastern dance after first trying out the similarly sensual dances of Hawaii and Tahiti.
Ketty's own path includes modern and ballroom dancing, exotic and Mexican.
An eclectic dancer since the age of two, it was only 10 years ago as a young adult that she was smitten by oriental dance.
Her break came in a nightclub in the northern French city of Lille, where an Arab asked her to try belly dancing for the first time.
He put her through her paces, and realized she was a natural even though she had never seen even on a videotape of Arab dancing before.
"When I started to dance, I felt something inside - like it's from God - because I don't have any words to explain what it felt like," said Ketty, who is now married to an Egyptian.
For Ketty, it's not whether you're Arab that makes the difference.
"It's not in your blood. It's in your soul," Ketty said.
However, several Arab dancers and dance teachers said they believed that while European and other women had good technique, the Arabs generally could better feel the beat and understand its sensuality.
"They have more feeling," said Nawal Ben Abdallah, a Moroccan-born dancer who teaches in Paris. "You feel the need to cry or to laugh. The music makes you hurt."
While watching a Brazilian dancer perform on Saturday night, Ben Abdallah said she "was dynamic" but a little vulgar when she spread her legs in one move, insisting that oriental dance was sensual rather than openly sexual.
The important qualities of a dancer are technique, poise and expressiveness, she said.
Oriental dance is the perfect expression of femininity, according to Athmar Swallow, an Iraqi dancer who now lives with her British husband and teaches in the South African port city of Cape Town.
"It's part of every woman to move her body. There's something to stir you," Athmar said.
And she believes that Arab women, whether Muslim or Christian, as she is, are the best dancers.
"We know the music. Every beat, every rhythm has a meaning," she said.
"We don't dance because we have an audience. We dance because the music speaks to us," she said.
Athmar would also love to dance in Cairo. In Cape Town, she just teaches dance, as there aren't many restaurants or other venues to perform for a living.
"To make it, you need to be in Egypt. You're nobody outside," she said.
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