Fantasy Belly Dance, 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 Belly Dance concerts hosted in New York City by the Venus Uprising creative salon. This compilation of fantasy belly dance performances is based on creations seen at the “Cult of Myth” show held by Venus Uprising within its Fantasy series.
Many artists performing Fantasy Belly Dance stay within the vocabulary and technique of traditional belly dance, 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 belly dance 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 belly dance reaches for images and themes unrelated to the ethnic origins of belly dancing and to the image of a belly dancer as an entertainer. It embraces dance as theater and plays with spiritual, esoteric, medieval, Gothic, goddess, astrology, mythology, nature, magic, and other themes. Fantasy belly dance performances echo the plots of fantasy fiction, and borrow from the fantasy aesthetics developed by a number of subcultures - Rock, Gothic, Comix, Pagan, Renaissance/Medieval, and more.
This Fantasy Belly Dance 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... bgbd