The Use of Nostalgia in Genre Formation in Tribal Fusion Dance

• Author / Creator

  Scheelar, Catherine M

• 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.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Cultural appropriation
  • Middle Eastern dance
  • Belly dance
  • Authenticity
  • Dance ethnography
  • Anthropology of dance
  • Anthropology of performance
  • Victorians
  • Vaudevillian
  • Nostalgia
  • Oriental dance
  • Genre

• Graduation date

  Fall 2012

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3NH8Z

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.