Mary Snow Wyga is a performer, instructor, and ongoing student in Middle Eastern dance arts, both as a soloist as well as with Guelph’s own Invoketress Dance troupe. Since commencing her studies in 2003, she has studied the wide breadth and depth of the dance form commonly known as Belly Dance, training with a myriad of world-renowned instructors in Canada and the United States. In this video, she is showcasing and identifying four different styles of Belly Dance, those most likely to be seen by the general public in Ontario: Beladi, Raqs Sharqi, FatChanceBellyDance Style®, and Fusion. By doing so, she hopes that viewers will realize that Belly Dance is quite a vast and diverse dance genre with many dance sub-genres which fall underneath its umbrella, each with its own cultural history, context, and diaspora. This will also demonstrate how Belly Dance is an ever-evolving dance form. With a presentation which includes examples of costuming, performances, historical context, and other pieces of information, viewers will begin to notice subtle differences when they see what is generically known as “Belly Dance.”
