A collection of 16 classic performances by the most prominent Egyptian belly dancers of the 20th century. The selections are from appearances in movies and other shows over a 30 year period.

Sisters Veena and Neena Bidasha have been bellydancing since their childhood and have travelled around the world learning, refining, performing, and teaching this ancient and erotic dance. Now they have created a series of videos to instruct students in the arm movements, shimmies, and sultry looks of bellydancing. BASIC DANCE begins with a brisk warm-up routine and continues with a step-by-step tutorial isolating the upper and lower body while slowly demonstrating each hip drop, shimmy, and undulation in the full choreographed routine.

A woman stands in front of a building, a chair to her left, dressed in black, full skirt, quarter sleeves, and a scooped bodice. Her hair is piled high. She bows slightly, and, with finger cymbals, begins to dance the cooch.

Enter our dark labyrinth and meet an exotic array of striking characters and creatures: Souls possessed by an ancient evil spirit; a black-winged fallen angel; an incarnation of Kali and Isis; a leopard-woman from the island of Dr. Moreau; a tormented silent movie vamp; a Gothic “Lolita” in love with Death; a wanderer in spiritual exile; a snake morphing into a human; a seeker violated and redeemed by divine domination; a Siren exercising her lethal charms; a worshipper of a winged serpent; a flame whose deadly habits are all-too-human; a run-away gargoyle; a maiden transforming into a warrior sorceress; a haunting deja vu where victim, violator and avenger merge into one... and more.

In this beginner-level doumbek course, Amir Naoum teaches Southwest Asian drum rhythms and doumbek techniques to drummers and dancers.

Stark...sublime...intense. The phenomenon of Gothic Bellydance or "Raks Gothique" is a multitude of poetic visions born out of the Goth, or Gothic, subculture, music, imagery and fashion, and expressed in the language of Bellydance.

A stranded carnival dancer takes on a corrupt political boss when she marries into small-town society.

A doctor uses special eye drops to give himself x-ray vision, but the new power has disastrous consequences.

In southern France, a Franco-Arabic shipyard worker along with his partner's daughter pursues his dream of opening a restaurant.

A mismatched couple discovers that whatever can go wrong will go wrong during a family visit.

A Brooklyn postal worker follows her Egyptian boyfriend to Cairo where she takes belly-dancing lessons from a legendary but disgraced Egyptian dancer.

A Texas congressman sets a series of events in motion when he conspires with a CIA operative to aid Afghan mujahideen rebels fighting the Soviets.