Fantasy Bellydance, with its dreamy,
exotic, highly artistic, non-traditional dances has evolved through the
aesthetic explorations of many 20th century and post-millennial
artists, finding its distinct genre definition and a powerful impetus
through lavish and whimsical Fantasy Bellydance concerts hosted in New
York City by the Venus Uprising creative salon. This compilation of
fantasy bellydance performances is based on creations seen at the “Cult
of Myth” show held by Venus Uprising within its Fantasy series.
Many artists performing Fantasy Bellydance stay within
the vocabulary and technique of traditional bellydance, while others
blend it more liberally with modern dance, jazz, and world fusion.
Other dancers draw on Tribal technique, aesthetics, and concepts to
create fantasy themes and images.
Fantasy bellydance is not a technique or style fusion:
It is an image fusion, a unity of themes and image aesthetics combined
with diversity of technique. Fantasy bellydance reaches for images and
themes unrelated to the ethnic origins of bellydance and to the image
of a bellydancer as an entertainer. It embraces dance as theater and
plays with spiritual, esoteric, medieval, Gothic, goddess, astrology,
mythology, nature, magic, and other themes. Fantasy bellydance
performances echo the plots of fantasy fiction, and borrow from the
fantasy aesthetics developed by a number of subcultures - Rock, Gothic,
Comic-book, Pagan, Renaissance/Medieval, and more.
This “Fantasy Bellydance” program features performances
by New York City dancers Anasma, Autumn Ward, Ayshe, Blanca, Fayzah,
Irina, Neon, Rayhana, Sarah Skinner, Sira, Tanna Valentine, and Uyum
Dans (Elisheva and Kittarina), and brings you rich exotic world music
by composers from the US, Europe, and Latin America.
In this DVD: Atlantis flourishes and perishes; Firebird
lights the forest with its brilliant feathers; Prince Charming loses
his battle with the dragon; pirate wenches clash in a fierce duel; an
invocation to the Moon goddess is recited in a jewel of a dance; a
Mermaid finds and loses love; Salome asks for the head of the holy man;
the Swan Maiden swirls in a magical rite; Eleutheria, Ruler of the deep
seas, unfolds her tentacles; Android emerges from a sci-fi future to
save the world with robotic grace; an Amazon warrior is called to the
battle; Persephone falls from innocence into dark passion; a fantasy
geisha glides mysteriously amid the waves of her silk fans; Aphrodite
is born of the sea; a slinky cabaret seductress dances in an old-world
port at the crossroads of the world...
