Raqs: One Possible Future.

OK. First came American Tribal. Then came Jill Parker, who's attempts to rework the ATS aesthetic with other dance styles via ultra Gypsy begat Tribal Fusion. We got some interesting experiments and branch-offs, like Urban Tribal, which kept this idea of fusing ATS going along pretty understandable lines.

It's the Rachel B. et al explosion where things get confusing. they got the tag Tribal Fusion, I think because Rachel was purported to fuse Yoga and ATS, and she wore the Tribal Fusion-y outfits, so....Yet she doesn't, in no small part because Tribal fusion is a unifying aesthetic far more than it it a unifying dance style, and also because she's not dancing Yoga, dammit, she's using the flexibility from Yoga to extend and expand the Raqs Sharqi repertoire.

So now you have Tribal Fusion as this catch all for a lot of concepts that aren't really fusions with anything. And while all this is going on, Ansuya's BDSS appearances starts to (inadvertently) popularize the concept of "Tribaret", which is basically doing American Raqs Sharqi in costuming that's usually bedlah with some ATS/Tribal Fusion elements, like the jewelry, and maybe some moves.

From there, it's a short jump to figuring out how to work ATS, or Tribal Fusion, into various types of Raqs Sharqi; with similar movement vocab, it's easy, but they've grown and evolved enough that they're difference branches off the same tree, branches now growing back into each other, just a little. Hell, I'm doing it, one can argue (and I do argue for it's usefulness). what I think is going to occur is more and more dancers like Lisa Zahiya and Madja Anwar -- younger dancers with solid ATS/Tribal Fusion and Raqs Sharqi training -- will be the building blocks for bringing the two forms together in a ethical and artistically viable way.

So, yeah, it's all Fusion, but it's also how evolution works. And, interestingly enough, it's really not eating our own young. And I say this as a HATER of the term "Tribal Fusion"...