As the audience begins clapping, the Queen of the Night glides barefoot onto the stage, arms floating above long, auburn tresses, red-painted fingers flickering like snakes' tongues in the smoke-filled air. Considerable cleavage quivers within the confines of a silver-beaded bikini top whose central tassel shimmies and shivers in a little dance above the siren's navel. Dusky thighs flash from a gauzy slit skirt, while one hip, then the other, circles forward, accelerating into thrusts so violent and impudent that an Egyptian man seated next to the stage suddenly starts backward as if struck.

A quick costume change, and the dancer returns with a rhinestone-encrusted cane, swinging it overhead, balancing it on her left breast, left hip and the curve of her buttocks. Grasping the tips between her fingers, she rolls the cane up and down over her lower pelvis then arches her back underneath, finally balancing it over her fishnet-stockinged belly button for a series of suggestive lifts. Once performed by peasants with staffs cut from the sugar-cane fields, this 21st-century dance looks less like an ancient fertility rite than a time-warped vaudeville act, a combination of cheerleader baton twirling, a Caribbean limbo contest and masturbation.

It's all entertaining enough, especially for tables of foreign tourists who have no idea that the dark-haired, dark-eyed belly dancer prancing before them is no genuine Oriental houri but a self-trained British import, Liza Lazizah.

"Cairo[, Egypt] is the mother, the central nervous system of Oriental dancing," Lazizah tells me over a cigarette after the show, describing her career trajectory from minor clubs in Syria, Tunisia, Jordan and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where she was finally spotted by an Egyptian agent. A throaty voiced Joan Collins lookalike from London, where she first danced at a Lebanese restaurant near Regents Park, she's finally made it to the big leagues at the age of 36. "I'm not interested in going around tables, getting money stuffed down my bra," she says, sniffing at foreign dancers who angle for tips from sex-starved fans. "Oriental music gives me goose pimples. When I first heard it I was totally mesmerized. It was like a call from God."

Cairo may be to belly dancing what Hollywood is to movies and Broadway is to theater, but go to any dinner club these days and the belly dancer is likely to be an ingenue from Russia, Australia or Scandinavia. It's not so much that today's fans prefer foreign talent but that Egyptian women are abandoning the profession in droves.

In 1957 some 5,000 belly dancers were registered with the Egyptian government, compared to just 372 today. Islamic fundamentalism has forced a generation of Egyptian performers to retire and take the veil, and while package tours remain a captive audience, local interest is drying up because youngsters raised on MTV think belly dancing is old-fashioned and prefer to dance their nights away in discos.

Dwindling economic returns have led every five-star Cairo nightclub but one to close their doors, forcing the three most famous Egyptian dancers, including the 50-something Fifi Abdou, to branch into films and lucrative private weddings. Their fees -- $10,000 an hour and up -- are so high that rich Cairene families have been known to save money by flying in entire Brazilian dance troupes or American music groups like Kool and the Gang.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk