Fusion is, as I see it, or at least as I try to approach it, a space of deep freedom, research and responsibility. It works more as a concept than being a style itself, and it is difficult to define as it can be the blending of a lot of dance styles and each dancer as space to choose what to incorporate in their fusion. I consider this a lifetime work and study.

My personal focus has been between MENAHT (Middle East North Africa Hellenic Turkey) dances and street and clubbing dances from north Afro-American culture, and it’s already too much to take in.

In the last decades Occident as erased the singularity of each one of the enormous ammount of dances that we can find in this big territory (MENAHT) and called it “Bellydance” but we’re finnaly starting to be highly critical about it, because it’s a name coined by colonialist eyes, biased by all the ideas of a white XIX century society. Some people called it Raqs Sharqi (Dance of the East) or Oriental Dance, and sometimes it refers only to traditional Middle Eastern Dance Forms or a specific style from Egipt. Each region and group as their own dances and traditions, wheter being traditional, folkloric or classic. We need to decolonize the construction occident did for so many years.

“(Tribal) Fusion Belly dance” is a North American style, that can be rooted in the dances done by Jamila Salimpour, that started teaching a “composite of belly dance styles” in 1949. After that a student of hers, Caroleena Nericcio founded what was called ATS (American Tribal Style), a modern approach to “bellydance”, performed as group improvisation, heavily inspired in North African dances and costumes, Flamenco and Indian classical dances. Today the name of the style was almost fully banished and the dance is suffering from a huge debate about cultural appropriation. The discussion is in its high pick and it was highly needed for a long time now.

The story continues and the style was highly popularized by Rachel Brice, and gained several forms and branches, where I can situate myself, studying the origins and trying to discover the differences between all these influences and gathering them with the other styles that occupy my body as Waacking, Vogue, Hip Hop, Breakdance, House Dance and finally Contemporary Dance.

The videos in this section are all from short performances presented in “Fusion Bellydance Festivals”, where the work needs to have between 2 and 6 minutes, as the stage is shared by an incredible number of artists per night.

It runs outside of the institutional spaces. It’s a self ruled community.