This paper will compare two approaches to exoticism through dance: (1) a colonialist vision of the sauvage who, although tamed for a time, answers the call of the wild and returns to Nature; and (2) the tame housewife who, upon befriending some marginal cabaret performers, discovers her inner exotic.

The dancing girl is a stock character in exotic film, and the dance number a staple of various genres, from the so-called colonial film to the popular commercial films of Cairo and Bombay. Typical of the figure is Edmond Gréville's 1935 Princesse Tam Tam, a light comedy in which the doubly exotic dancer Josephine Baker plays a wild and uncivilized Tunisian girl, Aouina, who captures the attention of Max, an intellectually exhausted French author visiting Tunisia, bent upon finding inspiration and fleeing his socialite Parisian wife. When Max gets word of his wife's infidelities, he sets out to transform Aouina, Pygmalion-style, into royalty, the exotic African Princess Tam-Tam, and to take her to Paris to make his wife jealous. But as her pseudonym indicates, the drumbeat is still in Aouina's veins, and she blows her cover once in Paris where, plied with champagne, she cannot resist the call of the wild, and leaps from her chair to execute a furious dance, to the shock and delight of le tout Paris.

Though the blatantly orientalist dancer is now either kitsch or a cultural artifact, dance continues to figure prominently in post-colonial literature and film, where the figure of the dancing girl/woman is marked as scandalous. The shock experienced by Albert Memmi's protagonist in La Statue de sel upon discovering his mother performing a trance-inducing dance, or the multiple instances of scandal caused by the free-style auto-choreographics of Assia Djebar's female characters all point to this iconic role of the outrageous spectacle created by the female body in movement. Even Maïssa Bey's shut-in wife in her short story "Quand il n'est pas là elle danse" dances nude alone in her apartment as a form of revenge, a spectacle in search of an imaginary spectator. In Raja Amari's 2002 film Satin Rouge, the protagonist Lilia, like Princess Tam Tam, undergoes a make-over when she inadvertently discovers and eventually participates in the lurid nightlife of the cabaret belly dancer. Early in the film, we see Lilia, a young widow and mother of a teenage daughter, at home in the midst of her daily drudgery, when she catches a glimpse of herself in a full-length mirror and, to the strains of a crackly radio, begins to undulate. She clearly knows the moves, and we infer there is fire beneath the dowdy housedress. Yet, it is in an effort to spy on her daughter's love life that she creeps into a downtown Tunis cabaret one night, and gets her first taste of the kind of abandon and thrill that only performance can procure. This brand of "oriental" belly dancing is not native to Tunisia, where indigenous folk dancing obeys very different codes of aesthetics, but as the film depicts, Tunisians are raised on a steady diet of Egyptian films and melodramas, and are familiar with the genre. I will demonstrate how Raja Amari both inherits and overcomes the stereotypes of the oriental dancer portrayed by Gréville.