Belly Dancing Workshop in Chennai Made Me Feel Honoured: Bindu

Award winning belly dancer Bindu Bolar, who was in the city to conduct a workshop on the basic moves of tribal fusion dance, talks about the enthusiasm shown by people here to learn the unique art form

CHENNAI: Dancer Bindu Bolar, a well-known belly dancer who specialises in the tribal fusion form, was in the city to teach her style to the dance enthusiasts. The tribal fusion form, according to her, is a much darker version of belly dance, which involves different ways of muscular movement. The dancer, who has been busy conducting workshops all over the country, the most recent one being at Mumbai where she taught the advanced and basic levels of Tribal Fusion Belly Dancing, said that aspiring dancers were all the same in quality and showed similar levels of enthusiasm.

“However, one thing that made me happy while conducting a workshop is Chennai is that the participants here were sincere and did not come to pass time. I liked the eagerness with which they came forward to correct their moves. This made me feel honoured to conduct the workshop,” said the Tribalina, as she is called.

The dance form, which originated in San Francisco, involves adding a tribal touch to belly dance and everything associated with it — music and costume. All of it needed to be a bit more metallic and darker, she said. The form of dance was not very well known in the country and there were just a handful of performers. It had a masculine and feminine aspect to it and involved a different way of moving the muscles, explained the Mangalore-based award-winning dancer, who had learnt the dance from the place of its origin.

A tribal fusion belly dancer for over five years, Bindu said that learning to make the right moves using the correct muscles effectively and bringing out the correct groove took years of practice. “Like any classical dance form, this requires several years of practice before a dancer attains perfection,” she added.

Speaking about the city, the dancer said that it had very little exposure to tribal fusion, and belly dance. The performers in Chennai were fewer than those in Mumbai or Bengaluru. “This workshop, in which I am teaching the basic moves, could be one of the first to give exposure to the city’s dancers,” she said, speaking at the workshop conducted by the High Kicks all-girls dance ensemble and Lights Camera Dance, over the weekend.