The Largest Exhibition of the Raqs Sharqi Museum

On the evening of Friday 29 May 2026, something that had been six years in the making finally stepped out of storage boxes and into the light. The Raqs Sharqi Museum has shown selections from its collection at festivals before — but this was different. The largest and most carefully curated exhibition to date, with the most rare items ever shown in public, each one accompanied by its own description, opening as part of the Leylet Raqs Heritage Festival at Shoonya Dance Centre in Ghent, Belgium. The first exhibition in this context dedicated entirely to the history of Raqs Sharqi, bringing together original photographs, engravings, postcards, stereoviews, movie brochures, vinyl records, personal objects, and documents spanning nearly three centuries of Egyptian dance history. See the gallery of the photos from the opening at the end of the article.

Before the doors opened, there was a moment I had been thinking about for a long time. I welcomed our guests with a short speech — and I showed them a photograph, nearly 150 years old. A silver print portrait of Shafiqa El Koptiya, one of the most extraordinary women in the history of Egyptian dance. Showing that unique photograph felt like the perfect start, not only for the opening of the exhibition, but also the whole festival.

Then Assel performed — a beautiful awalim set that filled the room with exactly the spirit the evening needed. And while guests held cups of mint and melissa tea, brewed from herbs from my own garden, we listened together to a 1935 vinyl record of Badia Masabni performing one of her famous monologues, played on a vintage record player. Her voice, crackled and warm and completely alive, drifted through the room. And then we walked into the exhibition.

Watch this gorgeous preview of the exhibition opening by JP Productions:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/1e0e05_5d59e2bd25834783ab6dc77e3b42eadc/720p/mp4/file.mp4

What the Exhibition Contained

The collection on display moved through three broad worlds.

The first was Egypt at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries — a society and a dance tradition in transformation. Original engravings, albumen photographs, cartes de visite, and postcards documented Egyptian performers at a time when the entertainment world of Cairo was reinventing itself: women who had danced at weddings now appearing on gaslit stages alongside singers, comedians, and orchestras. The World Expositions took centre stage here too — an original silver print and stereoview of the Café Égyptien at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, a portrait of Amina, one of the Egyptian dancers who performed at Chicago in 1893, and an original illustrated book documenting that fair — produced in 1893, nearly crumbling at its edges, handled with appropriate care. And from Paris 1900, an original print with the words danse du ventre written in pencil on the back in a contemporary hand — possibly from the collection of the photographer Ernesta Stern, though the attribution remains unconfirmed.

One of the most striking elements of this section was the opportunity to experience the stereoviews in something close to their original form: 3D anaglyph images — the classic blue and red — created from the exhibited stereoviews, with glasses available to try on the spot. For a moment, Egyptian dancers from the 1890s appeared in three dimensions, exactly as they might have seemed to a Victorian viewer pressing their eyes to a stereoscope in their living room. You can read more about the stereoviews and the 3D images here.

The second world was the Western fantasy — the Orientalist imagination that ran alongside Egyptian dance without ever truly understanding it. Tobacco cards, catalogue prints, magazine pages, and postcards documented the Salome craze, the Little Egypt phenomenon, the exotic dancers who performed fiction rather than tradition. A rare photograph of Sahary Djèli on a vast Central European stage, in a production whose scale still impresses; a Félix Potin trade card of Loïe Fuller photographed by Reutlinger; and the book written by the father of Mata Hari in 1906, while she was still alive — already myth-making, already constructing an identity that had very little to do with who Margaretha Zelle actually was. These objects tell us less about Egyptian dance than about the Western imagination — but that imagination shaped how Egyptian dance was seen and judged for a very long time, and it deserves to be looked at honestly.

The third world was the Golden Era — Raqs Sharqi from the 1920s through the 1970s, at its height and in full colour. Newspaper advertisements from Badia Masabni's Saala Badia, from Mary Mansour and Beba Ezz El-Din, announced performances with the confidence of institutions that knew their audience. Movie brochures — substantial, lushly produced booklets made to survive, closer in spirit to theatre programmes than to cinema handouts — documented films featuring Samia Gamal, Tahia Carioca, Naima Akef, Suheir Zaki, Naemat Mokhtar with her iconic hip movements, and Hagar Hamdi. Signed photographs. A film contract signed by Hagar Hamdi herself in 1949. A receipt signed by Nagwa Fouad for her work on Darbet Shams. Suheir Zaki's personal tiara, and a rare personal photograph of her alongside other dancers — exhibited here just weeks after her passing in May 2026, as a tribute to a woman who chose dance, every moment of it, for her entire life.

The vintage record player played throughout, filling the exhibition space with Golden Era music.

The exhibition continued through the weekend of the Leylet Raqs Heritage Festival, with sessions on Saturday and Sunday. These objects were brought together in a setting that recognised their significance for dance history — and it will not be the last time, I hope.

Hopefully, one day, Leylet Raqs Heritage will be back, with a focus on one of the famous Golden Era dancers, bringing back tactile history of one of our heroines.

The Raqs Sharqi Museum collection can be explored at www.badriyahbellydance.com/raqs-sharqi-museum. If you want to support the ongoing work of collecting, preserving, and sharing this history, find the museum on Patreon at www.patreon.com/raqssharqimuseum.