FusionCasting

Natasha Atlas on "fusion":

It is easy to mock the word "fusion", but it is the only word Atlas feels comfortable with in terms of describing her own music. "People say, 'Oh, fusion, eurgh, this is a new thing, and we don't like it,'" she says stonily. "No, actually - it's not a new thing. It's what the Rahbani brothers were doing in the 50s, 60s and 70s, trying to make a kind of union between Arabic music and western music. It's not that I'm here going, 'Oh, I'm going to do this, and mix this with that, and hey, isn't it new and punky and original?' No, it's not, it's been happening way before. And this fusion is natural to me, because that's what I am."

Things are quite like they were when I first started railing about the demonization of "Fusion" in the raqs world.  That railing has subsided, and my observation that the fight is dying down is the reason why. The various offshoots of Carolina's experimentation -- and yes, that included Gothic -- have nested in the community's consciousness, if not in the mainstream.  That which was to destroy the dance, has in some ways saved it, a cycle I expect to see again, and again.

Indeed, a large, yet unspoken, part of the fear of the various Fusions were that they'd Take Over "belly dance".  The dancers who criticized seem to come from a background where there was, in fact, One True Dance, and any others were of a lesser caste.  But that does not account for the many people who also pointed out, rightly, the shaky quality of many Fusions, and the disregard for the cultures that generated this form.  These things slowed Fusion's acceptance in the greater raqs culture, and still haunt it's efforts, to this day.

Again, all these things we wrongly call "Belly Dance" are still an artifact of a fusion.  The record is clear on the aspects of the more traditional dances that Bad'ia encouraged/ordered the dancers at the Casino Opera to change, and that many of those changes were motivated as appeals to the Westerners, and Saudis, coming in to watch the shows.  It is fusion, what they did, and in a similar way as to the changes that created American Tribal Style -- or what Atlas describes that the Rahbani brothers did.

That does not absolve us, the participants, or responsibility; no matter what, it's their dance, not ours.  And yet, it a quest for purity, we risk dropping the truth for a feel-good moment of superiority.  Given that this early fusion may have lost us, and them, the essence of a truly native form, it's all the more critical to keep all the forms intact, but also to allow others to open the dance up the way Bad'ia did.