This interview with Rachel Brice dives deep into recent American belly dance fusion history and fashion. Rachel reminisces about her influencers Suhaila Salimpour, Carolena Nericcio of FatChanceBellyDance® (formerly ATS), and Jill Parker, and opens up about inclusiveness and past mistakes fusing dance forms.

It is such an honor and a pleasure to welcome Rachel Brice to A Little Lighter! There is a beautifully written bio of Rachel on https://www.rachelbrice.com/about, so I’m going to share it with you piece by piece as we take a little journey through the career and life of Belly Dance Fusion icon Rachel Brice

“Rachel Brice first fell in love with Belly Dance at 16 years old, when she saw a group (who later became Hahbi Ru) at a Renaissance Faire, and started classes immediately. Soon after, she discovered a video of Suhaila Salimpour which she obsessively studied. She began making her living by performing American Cabaret Belly Dance at restaurants and teaching yoga while putting herself through school.”

Just BEING Young is Sexy. What Does your Dance Say About you at This Point in Your Life?

#1. Let’s pause your bio here. I remember hearing you say something like, “I used to think belly dance wasn’t about being sexy. But come on. Just being young is sexy.” And that really struck me. You and I are just a few years apart in age, and after I heard you say that, I saw dancers in their 20s in a new light. What do you want your dance to say about you at this point in your life and career?

So, I’m challenging a lot of my own BS right now. it’s really easy to have ideas about what something’s gonna be like, when you arrive there.

But destinations are rarely like you anticipate they’re gonna be, and that’s how aging has been. When I was younger I thought, women should embrace aging.

I feel differently about my appearance. I’m not always proud of the way I feel about it. it’s different than I thought.

There is something to be said for having lived through decades. We just need to find a place in our culture that celebrates experience. And I feel like a lot of times there’s this huge rift between older generations and younger generations because both of them are defending themselves instead of the older generations being fascinated and excited about the changes that are happening and the younger generations being excited about what people learned in the past.

I think Gen Z’s amazing and I’m super excited by the changes that they’re making.

And they seem to be really appreciating elders too. So I think something is on the horizon. For the relationship between younger and older generations. So I’m looking forward to that.

Should belly dancers wear bindis?

I think that it’s really Gen Z that’s making us realize so much because I’m of the previous generation where when I was dancing in nightclubs and restaurants and meeting people from the Middle East, they were like, wow, how did you get interested in my culture? That’s so cool.

And, then their kids come along and are like, wait a minute, you’re gonna make fun of my parents, and then you’re gonna wear a bindi? I don’t think so.

So this next generation is speaking up in a way that their parents hadn’t. And I wasn’t there when that shift happened.

I was happily on a plane somewhere thinking that opinions are fixed in time and space. And when I started reading, the bindi is a really great example of how many different feelings there are about a cultural object and what that object represents. I mean, there’s no way that you could say that a person from India feels A, B, or C.

The bindi is a great example of how many different feelings there are about a cultural object.

There are so many different feelings about it. And yeah, so the more I’m learning the more I’m realizing that whatever I do, I need to investigate it and learn enough to where I feel comfortable with doing it, but also still be open to the fact that I could learn more and need to let it go. Here’s the big challenge.

Whatever I do, I need to learn enough to either feel comfortable doing it, or let it go.

You know, as long as I’m more interested or as interested in how my actions affect other people as I am in how they feel about me I think that there’s the opportunity to learn.

If I am genuinely interested in how my actions affect others, there’s an opportunity to learn. If I am defensive, I lose that opportunity.

But if I’m defending myself like we’re gonna do, then I lose that opportunity. So, yeah, I sure hope that I find something that I feel is a respectful homage that brings people together that I’m as in love with as I was with some of the previous incarnations of the dance that I was doing.

Cuz man, I had so much fun. It’s so much fun. I loved it so much and I still love it, but I just haven’t found the pants that fit, I guess.

Most Belly Dance Venues Have Disappeared, and Now we Dance for Each Other.

#2. I interviewed Suhaila Salimpour on this podcast back episodes 38 and 44, and we talked about the history of belly dance and where we are now. What are some of the best changes you have seen in belly dance since you started dancing in the 90s?

I think my answer’s gonna be less about the actual dance and more about the community, I think because of the loss of so many venues.

We don’t have the same kind of Middle Eastern restaurants in America that we did before 9/11. The community has really decided to keep it going through all of these festivals and theater shows. And in a lot of cases, it’s dancers dancing for each other and, maybe you get five or six husbands or boyfriends or kids that were dragged there.

But, generally speaking, instead of us dancing for non-dancers the way it was in the eighties and before, we’re really doing a lot for one another.

And it’s a testament to how much we love this dance. No audience. Fine. We’ll do it for each other then.

And I think that’s pretty amazing that we’ve figured out a way to keep it going.

The Big Belly Dance Bands Have Dissolved.

#3. I believe you are a person who fully embraces your shadow self, so I think you will also appreciate this question. What are some of the unfortunate ways you have seen belly dance change since you started dancing in the 90s?

One thing for sure that I really miss is the large number of musicians hanging out on a regular basis and playing music together. In the Bay Area in the late nineties when I went to school for dance ethnology at San Francisco State, one of the awesome extras that I didn’t expect when I moved there was that I would meet this large group of people that not only hung out all the time but were constantly learning and growing and striving to be better. And I learned so much about practice from these people.

One of my favorite things was that Tobias Roberson, who was my boyfriend at the time, had created this life where he would play music all day, then he would teach, and then he would do gigs. And when he was hired to play a show people were just basically seeing him do what he did all the time anyway.

https://open.spotify.com/track/6NhzQCKIztsUWo7q2EMf91?si=3d4894ec24ca4e23

And I remember thinking that that was such a huge difference. Rather than practicing for a show, I felt like people got to see a snippet of his life and he didn’t have to prepare for his show because he was always playing for hours.

I had such a struggle with practice. But I started to develop a practice at that time as a result of hanging out with him. And their bar for excellence was so high. And they were constantly playing music togethers like Dan Cantrell of The Toids, and Peter Jakes of Brass Menagerie and a whole crew of people that were just constantly playing music together.

https://bellydancebodyandsoul.com/belly-dancing-to-live-music-tips/

And so t...