Hi! Im Anna - Sword Dancer - My introduction to Hive

I'd like to introduce myself, I'm Anna, a Tribal Bellydance performer and teacher; also a 'Fire Flow Arts' enthusiast and performer and a Massage Therapist. I'm really chuffed to have found the HIVE community, thanks to my friend Asher.

I'm originally from the Midlands in UK, but have been living in Mallorca for 8 years now.

So, when I say 'Tribal Bellydance', I'm sure you're all thinking of traditional 'Raqs' or oriental bellydance consisting of sparkly sequinned costumes, jiggling hips and hair swishing, however, the style of bellydance I have taught and performed for the last 13 years is slightly different. Its called FatChanceBellyDance® Style, it originates from America and used to be called 'American Tribal Style' but that was recently dropped due to feelings of misappropriation of the words 'American Tribal' but anyway, I digress.

Tribal Bellydance has a few substyles, but FatChanceBellyDance®, the style i am certified in, is a mix of nomadic and ethnic styles of female group dances originating from India, Northern Africa, and migratory tribes of Europe. Steps from these styles of dance were taken and turned into a dance 'format'. Its also a group dance that is completely improvised, its kind of like a language with a system of movement cues, but it can also be danced solo. For instance, if I execute a 'floreo' (wrist circle) with my right hand, the troupe of dancers behind me know that we are about to execute a certain step for the next 8 counts of music. So no choreography, every piece of music is danced to and expressed to completely differently to the time before, and it means that i can travel abroad to meet other members of the worldwide FCBD® community and probably be able to communicate verbally, but we're able to communicate through dance 'cues', dancing together in complete synchronicity. Magic eh?!

So i started my dance journey in 2003 the year after I left university. I was looking to keep fit, I've always preferred dance to other forms of exercise. My local community centre had 'traditional' bellydance classes, a couple of good friends and neighbours I knew were also interested, so along we went! And it was great fun! I even got to perform with the group at a local community event. I look back now on that performance in 2004 and i was SO NERVOUS, it was awful! But its getting up there, moving, and enjoying yourself that counts, so it felt like a big achievement. I went to these classes for a few years, they gave me good foundations and taught me fundamentals about isolating movements of the body. I will forever be grateful to that first teacher of mine, Janet Rose. She's still teaching dancers of all ages and abilities in Nottingham today!
Around this time, i also got together with the same group of friends and 2 or 3 female neighbour friends and we got into swinging poi around, so set up a 'Circus skills' group at the same local community centre. I cant take credit for being the main organiser but i did lead a couple of classes in poi whenever i learnt a new move. Poi is an old Maouri self defence artform consisting of swinging 2 ball around on the ends of chains or rope. It got developed into a 'flow' dance format, and I was so impressed seeing people do this with fire at festivals I was determined to learn it myself! I eventually achieved this, the thrill of the fire, with its heat and sound swinging around your head and body is a proper buzz, and i learned to only do the movements that've been practiced a billion times with the ball ends not on fire!! As accidents do happen! (I've witnessed a few, and am aware of the death of a Hungarian fire dancer called Linda Farkas during a fire skirt performance in 2016:-( I eventually moved onto Fire Staff and Fire Fans, these fire flow props are still something I practice and perform with from time to time to this day.

So in 2010 i saw a Rachael Brice video, well actually she dances in a music video to a song called 'Snake Charmer' by Bassnectar/Kraddy.

I was IN LOVE! i thought, now THAT is the style of bellydance i want to learn. It also coincided with a hafla (a belldance party where we all perform for each other an have a bellydance disco/ drumming session at the end) where i saw a 'Tribal' style troupe dance, with tattoos and in coin bras and camel tassels, it seemed such a cool and different style to what i knew as 'bellydance' i just HAD to find out more! So i scoured the internet in search of a performer or teacher of this style local to me, and found a dancer called Beatrice Flowers in my town, hooray! So i emailed her and told her about how insprired i was by Rachael Brice and the troupe i had seen at the hafla. She replied with the longest and friendliest email ever. She informed me that the style of dance danced by Rachael was called Tribal Fusion, and you have to learn the tribal basics and movements, before you can perform 'fusion' like this. Beatrice was an established Tribal fusion performer and certified to teach 'FatChanceBellyDance®' Style of dance, and it just so happened she had a new beginners class starting in a room above a local pub in a few weeks! I was there like a shot!

I took to the classes and Beatrice's teachings with full enthusiasm! I was hungry to learn and perfect the steps and became such good friends with Beatrice. She still is in fact, one of my best friends to this day. Im not sue if im a natural dancer really, it did take some time and corrections to learn and get the isolated movements into my muscle memory, but i enjoyed every minute of it! I ate, slept and talked Tribal Bellydance all day, and in fact for quite a few years. The style of the costumes and jewellery were just right down my street, so of course all my spare income was spent on gathering these exotic beautiful items. You see, when i get into something, i dont do it by halves, if i like it, i get obsessed! So outside of classes i formed a close friendship with Beatrice, she had a garage she had had converted into a little dance studio with mirrors, and only lived a 10 min drive away from me, so i went to her house occasional evenings armed with a bottle of wine, and we would dance together and drink wine and chat afterwards. With practice, i became quicker and more confident at recognising her 'cues' and mimicking her movements so we synchronised as a duet, and got brave enough to 'lead' her with my steps and cues. i danced my first 'Tribal duet' with Beatrice a few months later at a local hafla and we went on to perform at local events and festival across the Midlands together up until she moved to Kuala Lumpa in 2014.

So in 2012 Beatrice had set up a local regular class at a dance gym and named her dance school 'Nottingham Tribal Belly Dance', when she left, she handed the reigns to myself and another established local FCBD style dance teacher. We studied intensively the steps to be taught before the class and created quite a following of students! i had taken my certification in FCBD 'General skills' in Sweden with the creator of the art form Carolena Nericcio in summer 2012 and felt ready to teach and perform what i had learnt.

The classes were a real success, and we began looking into finding performances across the Midlands UK for our troupe and delving deeper into other aspects of Tribal Belly Dance, this was when i discovered an area i had some natural talent ... dancing with a sword! I completed my 'Teacher Training' certificate in Essex UK in 2014 so became a fully validated instructor and registered as a 'Sister studio' to the main FatChanceBellyDance studio in California which created a listing on the official FCBD website so i could be found by and connected to dancers of this style all over the world.

So as you can probably tell from my profile page (and Facebook,Instagram and Tiktok pages) I'm now a specialist in Tribal sword dancing with an International reputation and hoard of online students. Outside of the Nottingham tribal Dance school, between 2013 and 2015 i had taught sword dance at workshops hosted by other UK Tribal belly dancers and performed with fire and swords at festivals such as Barefoot festival in Leicester UK, then came a big change! I moved with my husband and friend to Mallorca, Spain in December 2015 to set up a small business and life in the sun! The one thing that came with this move was that i was terrified about was not having other dancers to dance my niche style of dance with, as Mallorca is a small island with approximately 1 million residents and 3 millon visitors every summer. So a few month after settling here i searched Facebook for 'Tribal' dancers on the island and found a local dance studio to rent and began advertising classes in the hope i would get one or two people interested. And i did! i was fortunate to have 2 girls arrive that spoke fairly good English and another 3 or 4 didnt, so just muddled through with their kind assistance. As with all dance classes, in time, you get the few dancers that are hooked, and some of the others not so much stop attending, but thats ok, we had a core 5 of dancers including myself that met weekly, sometimes more often, and worked hard on perfecting the steps and synchronicity required to perform. 2 or 3 of the dancers were already established and known on the island as traditional oriental style bellydancers so took to the tribal modifications of the steps like ducks to water; and already had contacts with events organisers on the island so procured us some gigs to work towards. After only 8 weeks of classes i spoke to the guy i rented the dance studio from and got us a gig at 'Europe Day' on an open air stage on a beach in the small town my classes were held in. I mentioned this first ever gig in Mallorca to Beatrice Flowers, and she actually flew over to come and perform with us. The performance was a little chaotic, but as Beatrice had always taught me 'if all goes wrong, remember just to smile and shimmy', so we did, and the mistakes of that first performance really helped us to refine our group performance and deal with the nerves.

So began my performance experiences with my new Spanish troupe which one of the members named 'Dahlia Tribal'. There were 5 of us in 2016, we performed at events at parties at Fincas and Theatres all over Mallorca, many unapid, a few paid, but that's how you get your name and artform out there! We became popular with the worldwide community of Tribal dancers online and were asked to perform in Madrid. During this time i was still practicing my sword dance skills and began teaching the basics to the troupe so we had more to demonstrate in a 20 min 'show' to really showcase our dance and the variety it can encompass. We also started developing dancing FCBD style with tambourine after being inspired by a Russian troupe of dancers on YouTube. This was a workshop i taught with Dahlia in madrid in 2018 and we performed this style on stage in the main show that weekend. Coming from the UK where 'haflas' were a regular wekeend thing up and down the country, we decided to organise our own Christmas hafla in 2019, Beatrice flew over again, Dahlia tribal performed and even some of my new beginners i had recently gained from my regualr classes held in Palma. it was fantastic to feel tha this 'seed' i had planted on the island (my beloved dance artform) had grown into something big enought to have more than 10 dancers party nd dance together which each other. Proud moment! We went on happily dancing together until the pandemic hit in 2020.

In 2018 my sword dancing icon, Melody Bustillos brought out a new DVD containing FCBD® Single an Double Sword Steps, I had been in contact with her and been working through the DVD alone, as it was a style of dance i was already teaching and determined to advance in and master. Dahlia Tribal all had 2 swords and we had performed one or 2 shows with these by this point. Once the pandemic hit, I had plenty of time on my hands in the month of 'lockdown' here, so chose to study 1-2-1 online with Melody and practice, practice, practice! Also, I had noticed that the world of taking online dance classes had exploded at this point with everyone at home and looking for some fun exercise and connection with others, so decided to start my own online sword dance classes with what I had learnt from Melody. Since then, I've gained quite a worldwide following of students and dance friends and feel things are going well.

And here i am now, a FCBD® Sword dialect instructor and performer enjoying what I do in 2024 and for the foreseeable future!

I guess most of my content I post will be dance/movement/flow based ponderings, from my experiences, performances, students and from others that inspire me. I'm a massage therapist also, so I'm fascinated by anatomy and the capability of the human body. I look forward to reading other content based around human interactions and experiences, dance, nature and travel.