Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos, ( – April 5, 1937), also performing under the stage name Fatima, had 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.
Raqs dancers performed for the first time in the
United States at the Egyptian Theater on the fair's Midway.
Sol Bloom presented the show "The Algerian Dancers of Morocco" at the attraction "A Street in Cairo" produced by Gaston Akoun, which included Spyropoulos, though she was neither Egyptian nor Algerian, but Syrian. The melody that accompanied her dance became famous as the Snake Charmer song. 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. Her husband's name was Alexander Spyropoulos. His restaurant's name was The America and it was located at 705 S. Halsted, in Chicago. They lived together at 1338 s Fairfield Ave. They married in 1906. They had no children. [Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1983] Spyropoulos gained wide attention, and popularized this form of dancing, which came to be referred to as the "Hoochee-Coochee", or the "shimmy and shake". At that time the word "belly dance" had not yet entered the American vocabulary, as Spyropoulos was the first in the U.S. to demonstrate the "danse du ventre" (literally "dance of the belly") first seen by the French during Napoleon's
incursions into Egypt at the end of the 18th century. Some time after Spyropoulos went to Europe, she performed under the stage name "Little Egypt." Subsequently, several female dancers adopted the name Little Egypt and toured the United States performing some variation of this dance, until the name became somewhat synonymous with
exotic dancers, and was often associated with the
Dance of the Seven Veils. Spyropoulos then claimed to be original Little Egypt from the Chicago Fair. Recognized as the true Little Egypt, she disliked being confused with Ashea Wabe, after Wabe's performance at the Seeley banquet in 1896 ended up in her arrest and a full-scale New York City scandal. Spyropoulos danced as Little Egypt at the 1933
Century of Progress in Chicago at the age of 62. At the time of her death, she had filed suit against
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the use of her name in the motion picture
The Great Ziegfeld, claiming that the producers of the movie failed to ask for her consent. ==Ashea Wabe==