Fusion and Synthesized Awareness

Question for the day: Should a dancer understand something about the culture of dances she is trying to fuse? Should she understand something about originating cultures that inspired other dance forms?

Simple answer: Yes. Fusion dance is not fusion until the person fusing the styles actually knows how to do the two styles she is fusing and understands how they relate, their background and intent. When we first began developing Fusion Dance, we had studied raks sharqi, folkloric, Tribal (the style that pre-dated ATS) and Am/Cab (this was the original Fusion and remains so for many of us). So we already were performing and teaching the dance forms prior to fusing. I also studied international folkdance, with an emphasis on ME folk dances, as well as African dance, and studied theater. It was in studying and mastering the original styles that we were able to understand and develop the parameters for Fusion and create Fusion dance without confusion as to intent.

Synthesized Dance, however, is the next step beyond Fusion Dance. While Fusion has the parameters that the fused forms must be related to each other, Synthesized Dance has no such limits. It is, in effect, the blending of anything and everything, depending on the imagination of the dancer. While I enjoy good Synthesized dance (what some call fusion erroneously), I find it disturbing when dancers do not know a dance style or form they are trying to incorporate into their synthesis and just “invent” things they think it might have in it. The idea that dance forms must be at least studied and the dancer have some training behind her is still critical to good Synthesized dance- becaseu the dancer must be trained properly in order to understand the movements of what she is synthesizing.

I also find it jarring when a dancer is presenting Synthesized Dance (remember this is a blend of completely unrelated dance forms) and calls it “bellydance”… Synthesized Dance is not bellydance, it has no bellydance-specific cultural background (remembering that bellydance is a dance of identified cultures), combines dance forms from across the globe, uses music from all genres and features a wide range of costuming unlimited in scope and has a different relationship to the audience than bellydance. I once saw a group try to combine hip hop, Greek folkdance, a Michael Jackson imitation and martial arts and still identify their performance as “bellydance”… it was not. As someone once said “just because you CAN, the question remains: Why should you? What are you trying to say with your dance?”

And even in Synthesized Dance, the performer must understand and be able to perform , at the very least, the movements from each form she is trying to synthesize well. Watching a dancer trying to synthesize several forms in which she is poorly trained or does not have an understanding of the proper technique for the movements is not only painful for the audience, but a tragedy for the dancer and the dance.

First we master, or at least train, the dance forms we wish to fuse or synthesize. Then, we complete the process by defining what we are doing, understanding the parameters of what we are doing and doing it to the highest level we can, so that the audience can see the fusion or synthesis as a well-presented whole composed of many parts base don a level of skill, imagination and creativity.