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Leila Haddad
The high priestess of oriental dance

The history of dance has always been marked by major figures who have broken with convention to renew the form. They include early-twentieth century artists like Antonia Merce (known as “La Argentina”), who put flamenco on theatre stages, and Isadora Duncan, who liberated the body and developed natural movement that ushered in the freedom of modern dance.

Born in Djerba in Tunisia, the beautiful, regal Leila Haddad is of that ilk. She has won her fight to force recognition of oriental dance as a major art form. Since the early 1980s she has incarnated womanhood at venues where her art was ignored or scorned as “belly dancing”. She has legitimized the term "oriental dance" (raqs el sharqi in Arabic) and brought the dance itself out of the Arab Berber villages where it was misjudged and the cabarets where it was losing its soul.

Leila Haddad is adamant about dancing on stage only. She has upset the rules, making oriental dance a “noble art” and earning it its place in theatres.
Even contemporary dance has, since Isadora Duncan, developed an infrastructure, put in place classes, and gained a following, so creating a chain-effect. Leila Haddad has set the ball rolling for oriental dance. The first step was to teach the dance and produce dancers, which she did through her classes. The next step was directing and choreography. It was important to change perceptions of oriental dance, to lecture on it and speak about at conferences, both in France and in those European countries where it did not really exist. Her approach was comprehensive and pioneering: teach, talk, perform on stage.

Teaching oriental dance For a school of thought on raqs el sharqi

Leila Haddad opened her first Paris oriental dance class in the mid-1980s. It was a bold move at a time when the dance form was unknown or ill-understood, and even disdained by right-thinkers and men in search of exotic cheap thrills. Leila Haddad decided to fight for recognition of the millenarian depth of her Arab Berber culture and to teach oriental dance. The European women who attended her classes did not experience their bodies in the same way as their Arabic counterparts. They now discovered a new continent: their own bodies. The oriental dancer accepts her body as it is, whether young or old, does not hurt it, and does not force it to move in ways it cannot. Her relationship to her body is one of self-seduction – not the seduction of others – and of solidarity among women.

Oriental dancers wear brightly coloured costumes that are anything but kitsch. They have important ritual and cultural significance. Colours, for example, have powerful symbolic, spiritual meanings.

To further understanding of her culture and her art, Leila Haddad has adopted a comprehensive approach that involves researching the history of dance, travelling widely in Arab countries to seek out little-known dances, and speaking at conferences all over the world.

Milestones in Leila Haddad’s career

Internationally acknowledged as the world’s premier oriental dancer, Leila Haddad has performed on stage in London and Los Angeles, Cologne and Oslo, Carthage and Paris. And, like a born teacher, she imparts her knowledge in her dance classes.

In 1984 she danced in the Hans-Peter Cloos production of Othello. She has also appeared in movies, like L"Homme voilé (Veiled Man) by Lebanese director Maroon Baghdadi and La Goutte d’or by French film-maker Marcel Blüwal, in which she plays the role of the dancer Zobeida.

In 1988 she was the first oriental dancer to perform at the Paris festival, Salon de la Danse. For its dance festival the French city of Lille commissioned an original work from her on the theme of Salomé. Entitled the Dance of the Seven Veils, its music was composed and arranged by Julien Jâlal Eddine Weiss and the Al-Kindî Ensemble.

In 1989 she again broke new ground when she delivered a triumphant lecture on the history of oriental dance to a packed audience in the auditorium of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

In 1992, as part of the festival Danses Contemporaines et Orientales, the Théâtre Contemporain de la Danse and the Institut du Monde Arabe commissioned her to create two new original works, Rouh and A la Recherche de Tanit.

In 1993 she performed the first version of Sur les Traces des Ghawazees at the Tempodrum in Berlin and the Austria Theater in Vienna with the Musiciens du Nil. In 1994 she created Aquarelles for the Théâtre du Rond Point in Paris. In 1995, the Institut du Monde Arabe asked her to choreograph L’Orient d’une Danseuse - Rêveries sur le Nil as part of its season devoted to Egypt. Performances were sold out.

In 1996 she created Nomades, which was premiered at the Café de la Danse in Paris as part of the Estivales festival. In 1997 the Culturegest festival in Lisbon. In 1998 the San Francisco International Belly Dance Festival

In 2000 her work Zikrayat premiered at the Théâtre Mogador in Paris, in homage to Oum Khalsoum. In 2003 her new version of Zikrayat is performed at Théâtre du Trianon in Paris.

In 2006, Leila Haddad created In the trail of the Ghawazee at Théâtre du Trianon in Paris with the Gypsy musicians from Upper Egypt.

Leila Haddad continues to show Zikrayat and to dance solo at festivals and performances in countries worldwide, like Sweden, Slovenia, Macedonia, France, Tunisia, Singapore, and New York and San Francisco in the US.

In parallel Leila Haddad travels widely to teach oriental dance and train new teachers.