Little Egypt (dancer)

Little Egypt was the stage name for three popular belly dancers. They had so many imitators, the name became synonymous with belly dancers generally.

Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos, (c. 1871 - April 5, 1937), also performing under the stage name Fatima, got her start at the Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone, Arizona. In 1893 she appeared at the "Street in Cairo" exhibition on the Midway at the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago. Mark Twain had a near fatal heart attack watching Farida go through her paces in 1898.

Ashea Wabe (born Catherine Devine (1871 - January 3, 1908) danced at the Seeley banquet in New York in 1896, enjoying a fleeting succès de scandale.

Fatima Djemille (died March 14, 1921) appeared at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, a belly dancer who went by the stage name of Fatima got her start at the Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881. In the reopened saloon's lobby hangs a larger-than-life sized painting she donated entitled "Fatima". It bears six patched bullet holes; one can be seen above the belly-button and a knife gash in the canvas below the knee.

In 1893 Spyropoulos went to Chicago to appear at the World's Columbian Exposition. At the Egyptian Theater on the fair's Midway Raqs dancers performed for the first time in the United States. Sol Bloom presented a show titled "The Algerian Dancers of Morocco" at the attraction called "A Street in Cairo" produced by Gaston Akoun, which included Spyropoulos, though she was neither Egyptian nor Algerian, but Syrian. Spyropoulos, the wife of a Chicago restaurateur and businessman who was a native of Greece, was billed as Fatima, but because of her size, she had been called "Little Egypt" as a backstage nickname.

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