The Use of Nostalgia in Genre Formation in Tribal Fusion Dance

Abstract

Contemporary Oriental dance practitioners that explicitly tie their artworks to the East often validate their involvement by crafting their dances and aesthetic to ever-shifting definitions of authenticity and ethnicity. However, practitioners of the youngest belly dance style have increasingly turned away from the East as a reference point, blending modern electronica and urban dance forms with historically Western aesthetics such as Victorian fashion and vaudeville theatre. Through the use of temporally marked elements of the Occident’s historical fascination with the Orient, Vaudevillian Tribal Fusion performers draw attention to the role of the West in the intercultural evolution of modern belly dance which allows dancers to escape issues of authenticity and cultural appropriation. More than mere aesthetic play, this highlighting of a long history of North American belly dance suggests Tribal Fusion dancers’ own validation strategies in a transnational dance subculture which is fraught with romanticization of the exotic Other.