American Tribal Style Belly Dance

American Tribal Style® Belly Dance (also known as ATS®) is a modern style of belly dance created by FatChanceBellyDance director, Carolena Nericcio-Bohlman. American Tribal Style Belly Dance is clearly defined and documented with the primary characteristic being that of group improvisation. Tribal is generally performed in a group, often at community events such as festivals and parades, with tribal dancers typically favoring a look provided by wide-legged pants gathered at the ankles (aka pantaloons), tops known as cholis and full skirts.

The early roots of tribal bellydance is accredited to Jamila Salimpour who fostered a fusion of costumes and folkloric dances styles from the Middle East, North African, Spain, and India (such as the Banjara of Rajasthan) and began teaching what she knew and performing all over California and the West Coast. Using traditional folkloric dance elements and costumes inspired by traditional and ethnographic traditions, she presented on stage through Bal Anat a colorful dance company which included musicians, singers and dancers to create a "souk" or almost circus feel. Taking what she herself had learned from native dancers from Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who were dancing in the United States, she began to catalogue "belly dance movement" and began creating a basic repertoire terminology which is still the basis for Tribal Style and American Tribal Style repertoire. Jamila's Bal Anat "paved the way for others to use a fusion of the various regional dances of the Middle East and North Africa as inspiration for their own version of bellydance."

In the 1970s, a former student of Jamila Salimpour, Masha Archer, began teaching a directing her own troupe, San Francisco Classic Dance Company. In her work, Masha blended together the diverse elements of Bal Anat into a single cohesive dance style which she simply styled as "bellydance". Whether this was done in ignorance of the different stylistic origins, or as a conscious aesthetic choice, this approach was some of the earliest and most notable bellydance world fusion work in America.

Masha's student, Carolena Nerriccio, is credited with codifying the first dance style and format to bear the name "tribal bellydance". She has registered their signature style American Tribal Style Bellydance, and over the last two decades plus, Carolena has grown her format and brought it to the mainstream bellydance community through videos, music compilations, and performances and workshops around the world. Dancers inspired by Carolena's work with ATS have since created multiple offshoots of the style, some retaining true stylistic elements of ATS while others have evolved quite far from the original form.

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