Belly dance the solo improvisational dance form that is a part of family celebrations in North Africa and the Middle East was called the happiness dance by Ibrahim Farrah, the founder of Arabesque: A Journal of Ethnic Dance. Improvisation has been a central component of belly dance classes as students from Toronto to Singapore, from London to Cape Town, from Paris to Beijing seek to discover happiness through the exploration of their self-expressive potential. This essay considers improvisation from the framework noted by Margaret Thompson Drewal as “an interpretive strategy for negotiating the present as well as embodiment of skills and techniques that have withstood the test of history.” As such it considers the nomadic positioning of improvisation in belly dance from the dance’s presence at family celebrations in North Africa, Middle East, and related diaspora to its inclusion in the second wave of feminism in North America and Europe and the development of new hybrid styles of the dance and theatrical representations of the form that have grown out of improvisations that have united the vocabulary of belly dance with other dance forms.