Defining “Fusion” Belly Dance for My Research
Since Donna Mejia’s blog about tribal fusion in 2020, the fusion community in the United States faced a significant reckoning. Her appeal to the community to depart from the term “tribal” and embrace a more ethical, descriptive title made waves throughout the country. It also had the side-effect of sparking thoughtful conversation and discourse on the words we use to describe our dance, especially as it pertains to reconciling with the unsavory appropriative history that undergirds much of the aesthetic philosophy of fusion.
When I wrote my thesis (Donna was on my graduate committee, btw), I was tasked with defining “fusion belly dance” in order to narrow the scope of the world I was exploring in my paper. If you’ve never attended graduate school in the arts and humanities, you may be unfamiliar with how truly narrow and specific research projects have to be for a thesis. Given that I was in a 2-year program, I had to use language that signaled to the specific focus of my research, and after the mass departure from the term “tribal,” I was left without an institutionalized term for the style and community that I was studying.
Not only did I need to find a term and a definition that served my research, but it had to be succinct. When I wrote my undergraduate thesis, I used the term “male and masculine” as my catch-all term for what some people call “masculine-presenting people.” My feelings on the phrase “male and masculine” have evolved since I wrote that paper (a subject for another time), but the main headache was the fact that I had to type those words over and over and over. Male and masculine, male and masculine, male and masculine, male and masculine… It drove me nuts.
Donna’s proposed alternative for departing from “tribal” is by implementing her concept called “Transcultural Fusion Dance” (TcFD). Donna herself says, “Adopt this new language far and wide as an umbrella term for our genre, and then customize a subtitle-descriptor that aligns with your interests…My own style is a mashup that dialogs dances of North Africa and the Arab world with hip hop, electronica, and Brazilian dance” (Mejia, n.p.). It’s a way of being more specific about your own dance background to acknowledge your primary influences as a belly dancer.
As much as I respect this approach to language, this concept didn’t quite address the purpose of my research. I recognize that she urges readers to use this as an “umbrella term for our genre”—our genre being fusion belly dance—but since the term is intentionally decoupled from “belly dance,” to me, it is simply too broad to be applicable to my scope of research. I can easily see someone who is not a belly dancer utilize this term to describe their own confluence of dance interests, which separates it from my focus on belly dance. At the same time, I can see a belly dancer who is not part of the fusion subculture, but who hybridizes belly dance with other discrete disciplines (explored further below in the “Hybrid Belly Dance” section) using this term to define themselves, which separates it from my focus on the fusion community, as I define it in the next section, “How I Define Fusion.”
Moreover, without a semantic connection to belly dance, I was concerned that 1. it wouldn’t be easily understood to a non-belly dance audience, and 2. that belly dancers wouldn’t see that I was signaling to them with my language. In other words, TcFD is a great tool for self-definition, but it doesn't define a community. I needed a term that both encompassed the community I was studying as well as the shared movement canon within that community. And without the term “tribal,” I had to figure out a different path forward. Donna’s concept is an invaluable tool for dancers looking to articulate their influences, but for my research, I needed a term that clearly signaled my focus on fusion as a style, a community, and a tradition.
So what did I do? I just dropped the “tribal” and kept it simple: fusion belly dance.
How I Define Fusion
Presently, I define fusion as:
"A form of belly dance that emphasizes fluid, serpentine qualities of the limbs and torso, contrasted with sharp, hard-contraction isolations. Fusion was born out of an extension of the Jamila Salimpour family line. Among its key influences are waving, pop-and-lock, Indian classical styles, and Flamenco. Fusion rose to popularity in the early and mid-2000s due to: dancers like Mardi Love, Rachel Brice, and Zoe Jakes* in the former stage production 'The Bellydance Superstars’; dancers like Amy Sigil and Carolena Nericcio, students of the Salimpour family tree**, who created cued improv systems that characterize much of the movement canon of fusion; troupes and productions like Le Serpent Rouge, The Indigo, and Bellydance Evolution; among other many influential forces.”
To put it more simply, what I call “fusion” is just “tribal fusion” without the “tribal.”
My defense of this is that tribal fusion is very distinct from other forms and styles of belly dance. Like any style of belly dance, there is plenty of individual variation, but there is also a shared canon of movement with specific stylizations that are immediately distinguishable and legible based on this shared movement ancestry**.
You may be wondering, what about people who fuse belly dance with other disciplines? Aren’t they left out of this definition? Yes, and that’s why I had to distinguish between fusion and hybrid belly dance.
Fusion belly dance is defined separately from hybrid belly dance due to the way fusion operates as a community and subculture within the belly dance industry. Even though fusion was proliferated and popularized by different formative figures throughout different geographic areas of the United States (and the world, but my research focuses most specifically on the West Coast*** of the US), it still remains as a mostly homogenous community. Though fusion-specific festivals have dwindled in numbers in the past few years, “fusion” is often separated from “not fusion” in festivals, competition, and performance productions (see: The Bellydance Superstars, Bellydance Evolution, Pomegranate Studios productions, etc). In other words, people who study (what I define as) fusion share common traditions and communities that were often separate from other belly dance communities.
Hybrid Belly Dance
In this section I explain the difference between fusion as a style and hybridity as a concept. I am not the first person to theorize about the difference between “fusion” and “hybrid” belly dance. In 2019, Abigail Keyes wrote a blog about this very thing, “What We Get Wrong About ‘Fusion’ Belly Dance.” Her distinction between these two terms had to do more with ethics, legibility, and cultural competence:
“The way I see it, hybridity comes from long time study of two or more movement forms and/or traditions, so that they blend together in the practitioner’s body. The movements become part of their physical essence, interplaying and intertwining in the same time and space. They mix and mingle, blending together organically and with ease.
I would go so far to say that hybridity comes from humility. The dancer submits themselves to the dance forms and the legacy, history, and cultures from which they come, letting them seep into their body. The dancer surrenders to the movements, letting the movements wind their way through their physical selves. They allow it to happen.
Whereas, I see ‘fusion’—at least in belly dance contexts—as being something more forced and perhaps more superficial. The dancer is trying to blend something together, rather than allowing them to blend together. The word ‘fusion’ has taken on a connotation that there is effort behind the creation.
In my eyes, hybridity builds from the foundations and goes upward. Fusion is often imposed from above.”
(Keyes n.p., emphasis added)
In regards to hybridity, we agree that “hybrid” involves the integration of a separate movement discipline/s into belly dance in a way that is legible. However, Abigail’s defining of these terms serves a different purpose for her blog and practice from what I do with my research. For me, I deploy the concept of “hybridity” as a way of signaling that I am referring to dancers who mix belly dance with another discrete discipline: Flamenco, salsa, hip hop, Odissi, etc. While it does “fuse” belly dance with other styles, it lacks the sartorial, canonical, and genealogical influences that are endemic to what characterizes fusion.
Oftentimes (but not always), dancers who perform hybrid belly dance are not otherwise associated with the fusion belly dance community and its attendant traditions, roots, and trends. In my experience, these dancers usually come from a different belly dance tradition—cabaret, raqs sharqi, etc. That is to say, in my definition, a raqs sharqi dancer who sometimes mixes salsa with her raqs sharqi is performing hybrid belly dance, not fusion belly dance.
(On a spicier note, in my opinion, dancers who mimetically embody the aesthetic philosophy of fusion without training in Salimpour style/s, cued improv, or other institutionalized fusion dancemologies—Dancecraft, 8 Elements, etc—are also not performing fusion. But that’s a topic for another day.)
It’s About Community
Like I said before, for me, the term “fusion belly dance” refers not only to a distinct stylization and aesthetic philosophy, but roots in a shared community. Think Tribal Fest, TribalCon, Fusion Evolution, The Mega Massive, Spirit of the Tribes, etc. (If you’ve read all the way through to here, and are planning to leave a social media comment, use the 🤌🏻 emoji so I know you read the whole blog!)
I’m going to give a short list of disclaimers now in attempt to get ahead of some anticipated criticisms:
No, not every single dancer who attended these events was a full-time fusion practitioner.
Yes, sometimes dancers at these events performed hybrid belly dance.
Yes, some dancers who perform hybrid belly dance do hold membership with the fusion community outside of that individual performance.
No, the boundaries I draw around these definitions are not concrete, clean-cut, written in stone, or immutable.
No, I don’t expect the fusion community in the United States**** to adopt my definitions as gospel.
Yes, you’re allowed to disagree with me and use your own definitions.
As I continue through my PhD research projects, I will continue to use these terms as I have defined them. As the community shifts and new terminology is incorporated, these definitions I use for my research may change, and this is how I’ve been using them since about 2022. This is the simplest solution I have implemented to solve my research problem: What term is capacious enough to represent the stylization, aesthetic philosophy, and shared community that the US used to call “tribal”?
* Yes, there are other influences other than the people named in this list.
** Amy Sigil trained with the Salimpour school, whereas Carolena trained with Masha Archer, who briefly trained with Jamila Salimpour.
*** Yes, this focuses specifically on the West Coast lineage of fusion. The West Coast is my primary area of study, so the influences, formative figures, and mobilizers of fusion in other geographic areas of the US is outside of my scope of research and practice.
**** Outside of the US, most fusion belly dance communities still use the term “tribal belly dance.” I am not suggesting that my terminology is appropriate for a global audience. I recognize how etymological and socio-cultural conventions work differently outside of the US, which is why I am careful to specify that my research and its attendant lexicon is contextualized as specific to the US.
Works Cited
Keyes, Abigail. 2019. “What We Get Wrong About ‘Fusion’ Belly Dance.” Blog (blog). May 16. https://www.akeyesdance.com/belly-dance-fusion-hybridity-and-embodied-culture/.
Mejia, Donna. 2020. “Transnational Fusion Dance…An Open Letter to My Dance Community.” Blog-Ish (blog). January 10. https://donnainthedance.com/2020/01/10/transnational-fusion-dance-an-open-letter-to-my-dance-community/.
