Eponymy and Embodied Citation in “Le Serpent Rouge”: How Fusion Belly Dancers Perform Nomenclature

Fanoos Magazine Oriana
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Drake Von Trapp Introduction

Belly dance’s naming conventions in the United States have been subject to analysis and criticism for decades. While some dancers fight over whose codification system is the “correct” one that everyone else should conform to, others believe that codifying the belly dance movement canon would extinguish something special about it. With the advent of systematized and cued improvisational forms of belly dance such as the Salimpour Formats, Fat Chance Belly Dance (FCBD), and Improv Team Sync (ITS), codification of belly dance became necessary in order to maintain a stable lexicon of movement and terminology. As such, many belly dance movements have become necessarily, yet contentiously, codified. That said, though there are many belly dance movements that are generally institutionalized into the broader belly dance movement canon, the stylistic differences and interpretations will vary between dancers.

One peculiarity in belly dance naming conventions is the persistence of eponymy, or the naming of movements, techniques, and combinations after other dancers. Jamila Salimpour is credited as the progenitor of this trend, one of the early pioneers in American belly dance history. Since her efforts to codify belly dance vocabulary, many other belly dancers have followed, naming their own style’s movements, combinations, and sequences after the dancer who inspired them. Many of these Salimpourean names persist through belly dance vocabularies to the present day, though many dancers may not realize it was Jamila who first named them, or that these moves are named for specific dancers at all. In this paper, I posit that this eponymic tradition is both a form of embodied historiography and citation as well as a technology of cultural memory for a dance form that often has an ambivalent reputation in the broader belly dance community.

The reasons for using “The Indigo” as the subject for this analysis is for several reasons: 1. The dancers who make up the “Le Serpent Rouge” touring production—Rachel Brice, Zoe Jakes, and Mardi Love—are undeniably influential, highly visible, and internationally recognized for popularizing the aesthetic philosophies that shaped the movement and sartorial traditions within fusion belly dance. I will elaborate on their backgrounds more in the following section, but to the uninitiated, these dancers are essentially “household names,” and are the primary catalysts in the global proliferation of this style. 2. They share a convergent belly dance lineage that descends directly from Jamila’s eponymic naming system, and as I will demonstrate in future sections, they continue to use this tradition in the present day. All of that to say, “The Indigo”’s work popularized and standardized many eponymic movements, and their global and communal legibility has legitimated this in contemporary fusion belly dance.

A Very Brief, Incomplete Timeline of Fusion Belly Dance

As previously stated, Jamila Salimpour is credited as the first belly dancer in the US to use eponymy to codify certain belly dance movements. Jamila started learning belly dance in the late 1940s, imitating Egyptian Golden Era dancers she witnessed in the cinema at the La Tosca Theater in Hollywood (Keyes 2015, 9). A bit later in her career, Jamila moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco where she saw belly dancers of different styles for the first time: “We worked in the same club and imitated each other’s specialties, of course, not in the same show, and usually only after they’d left town” (Sellers-Young 2005, 281). Having no formal training in belly dance, Jamila developed her own system of naming and structuring belly dance movement “that codified the sum of her exposure” to all her influences, and most notably, the dancers she modeled several movements after (Sellers-Young 2005, 282). This led to her naming many of the movements she taught “after specific dancers such as Ahmad Jarjour, Maya Medwar, Samiha, and Zenouba” (Salimpour and Salimpour 2018, 4).

Jamila, as one of the first belly dance teachers in the US, was the primary teacher of many of the subsequent generations of belly dancers. Because the lineage of fusion is passed down through the teachers trained by Jamila’s eponymous codification system, this tradition of naming movements after dancers is foundational to the structure of fusion pedagogy and cultural memory. Notably, she trained a dancer named Masha Archer in the 1970s, who trained for two and a half years with Jamila before going on to teach her own classes and forming the “Classic Dance Troupe,” a belly dance group that was an “eclectic blend of classic Egyptian, Folkloric and any other influence that she found enticing” (Djoumahna 2007, 42), which lasted fourteen years (Davina Tribal Collective n.d., n.p.; Rall 1998, 20). In 1974, fourteen-year-old Carolena Nericcio began taking classes with Masha, and after the “Classic Dance Troupe” disbanded, Carolena founded Fat Chance Belly Dance (FCBD) in 1987 (Davina Tribal Collective n.d., n.p; Djoumahna 2007, 2; Rall 1998, 20). Shortly thereafter, Jill Parker became a member of the troupe in 1989. After leaving FCBD, Jill formed “Ultra Gypsy Dance Theatre” in 1996, the first iteration of “tribal fusion” that departed from the cued improvisational format of FCBD (Tribalfusionbellydancing n.d., n.p.). This can be thought of as the “tribal fusion turn” in American belly dance, marking a huge cultural shift that produced many of the pioneers of this dance style, including the ones I am analyzing in this paper.

Rachel Brice, the artistic director of the company, first discovered belly dance after watching John Compton’s troupe “Hahbi’Ru” at the Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire (von Trapp 2023, 22), and later studied with Jill and performed in her “Ultra Gypsy” troupe (June n.d., n.p.). Rachel is credited as the first renowned “tribal fusion” soloist, which marked another shift in the fusion belly dance community. Zoe Jakes began her serious study of belly dancing with Katarina Burda, an original member of Jamila’s troupe Bal Anat, later performed in Katarina’s troupe “Aywah!” Zoe then studied with Suhaila and Jamila Salimpour and performed in the “Suhaila Dance Company,” before subsequently studying with Jill (Barsalou 2013, 11, 13; Rhaj n.d., n.p.; DaturaOnline n.d., 0:33). And lastly, Mardi Love, whose primary teacher was Heather Stants, a FCBD-trained dancer who created Urban Tribal Dance Company in San Diego in 1999 (Equinox Dance Project 2020, “About Mardi Love”; Tribalfusionbellydancing n.d., n.p.). Mardi later moved to the Bay Area where she “started messing about” with Rachel and Zoe, and went on to be a highly influential figure in the sartorial and kinetic philosophies of fusion belly dance (ibid). Though Mardi has remained a very private person despite her international recognition, Rachel regularly speaks effusively about Mardi and how she’s shaped Rachel’s personal relationship with fusion.

The purpose of this abbreviated history is to demonstrate how entangled the lineages of fusion belly dance are, and that in most instances, these lineages lead back to Jamila. By teasing out all the connections between these dancers, it is easy to see how the eponymic naming tradition became embedded in the broader cultural traditions of fusion belly dance, which persist through today. In the next section, I detail the different methods I used to analyze this tradition, its utility, and its deployment.

Method and Analysis

To determine which movements to trace during my movement analysis, I combed both Zoe and Rachel’s instructional videos on the Datura Online website, and noted which videos they labeled with names of dancers. I also audited the Salimpour School’s publications (primarily The New Danse Orientale [2018]) for the historical background on the Salimpourean-derived movements, which conveniently noted whom certain movements were named for. I spent several days closely analyzing three different performances of “The Indigo”’s production “Le Serpent Rouge”: one performance from 2007, 2008, and another in 2010. Additionally, my positionality as a long-time practitioner of fusion belly dance as a performer, teacher, and researcher enables me to detect nuances in the movement vocabulary that may be illegible to the uninitiated.

While watching, I noted the movement/s, dancer/s, and time stamp/s of every iteration of the usage of an eponymic movement. This allowed me to map the frequency and commonality of each movement I noted from my audit of the Datura Online instructional videos, which helps to reframe the performance holistically to determine the prominence of these movements. This data collection is not representative of the whole of eponymic usage in fusion belly dance, but “Le Serpent Rouge” is uniquely a highly concentrated site of legible eponymic movements.

Through my auditing of Datura Online and the Salimpour texts, I identified seven total eponymic movements present in “Le Serpent Rouge”: Indigo kitty push, Cab Maya, Maya, Samiha, Mardi Roll, Twisting Mardi, and Sonia. Of these movements, the “Mardi Roll” was utilized the most often for a total of ten times across all three performances. This shows that these eponymic movements were used liberally and made up a significant portion of the movement canon within these performances. Furthermore, both Rachel and Zoe feature instructional videos on Datura Online of several of these movements, which serves to standardize and informally archive these movements into the broader fusion belly dance canon. It is also important to note that these eponymic movement sequences I mapped are highly recognizable and distinct, which enables these sequences to operate as embodied citations.

As I claimed in the introduction, eponymy emerged as a tool of preservation and embodied citation for a style of dance that did not have an established lexicon prior to Jamila’s naming system. For this paper, I define embodied citation as the way eponymic movements can signal an individual’s dance lineage. This enables fusion belly dancers to cite their dance pedigree performatively and pedagogically, as well as to signal their cultural membership to the fusion community. Eponymic movements are then able to function as semiotic codes, recognizable to dancers who know the code without needing to be informed explicitly. So by using eponymy as embodied citation, fusion belly dance’s unique lineage is reinscribed in the canon of movement and perpetuates the circulation of that citation amongst fusion belly dance practitioners, preserving both the movement influences and crediting dancers for whom the movements are named.

In “Le Serpent Rouge,” one of the movements I mapped is called the “Twisting Mardi,” a composite of several layered isolations that separated out would be stylistically nonspecific, but when put in this particular combination become an unmistakable signal of Mardi Love, the dancer for whom it is named for. In the video “The Indigo's - Serpent Rouge at Tribal Fest 7 part 1,” Mardi Love herself performs the “Twisting Mardi” at 6:33 (danomoon 2007). Earlier in the same video, Zoe performs it at 3:39, and the differences between them are striking. Most saliently, the affective impact is evidently different between the two: Mardi maintains a coy, relaxed expression while the jaunty drum solo and clear ringing of her finger cymbals impart a warm, inviting stage presence; contrasted by Zoe, whose glitchy, buzzing electronic music paired with her intense expression set a suspenseful, haunting atmosphere. These affective differences cause the “Twisting Mardi” to resonate very differently, though they both perform the biomechanics quite similarly. Placing them in conversation with each other, it’s clear that Zoe’s performance of the “Twisting Mardi” is successfully citing Mardi Love, even though her execution and affective impact are unique. In that moment, Zoe’s “Twisting Mardi” is standing in as a surrogate for Mardi: a recognizable invocation that functions as an embodied citation for Mardi Love, communicating Mardi as an element of her dance lineage, and thus, her influence in the fusion belly dance canon and significance to the community’s cultural memory.

The Elision of Fusion

The utility of eponymy has been theorized about belly dance nomenclature before, but has specifically left fusion belly dance traditions out. In Ainsley Hawthorn’s 2019 article “Camels, Temples, and Jewels: Representing Middle Eastern Movement in Canadian English,” she analyzes the results of a survey of one-hundred and fifty-four Canadian Oriental-style belly dancers on the terms “English speakers have invented their own movement names to conform to a Western dance pedagogical tradition that relies on nomenclature” (772). Based on the results, Hawthorn concluded that belly dance nomenclature has drifted away from Orientalist imagery and presently relies more on “personal names” and “auditory imagery,” such as eponymy and onomatopoeia (2019, 783). She argues that this eponymic naming tradition can be used as a tool of decoloniality, as it “reframes those dancers as agents who have made distinctive contributions to the genre,” which disrupts “depersonalization,” or the way media representations of the Middle East perpetuate racialized archetypes rather than individuals (2019, 784). That is, by using eponymy, this can serve to deconstruct harmful Orientalist tropes that reiteratively exert Western hegemony over the Middle East.

This becomes complicated, however, when we take the eponymic tradition in Oriental-style belly dance and apply it to fusion. In her article, Hawthorne only specifies the decolonial utility of this eponymic tradition for dancers with Middle Eastern and North African heritage as designated by Oriental-style dancers. This was partially by design, as she instructed the respondents to “omit terms describing…any genre of belly dance other than Oriental style, such as American Tribal Style or Tribal Fusion” (2019, 778). I find this peculiar, given that Jamila’s codification systems are frequently used by fusion belly dancers practitioners, which is especially evident in many cued improvisational styles of belly dance, some of which have been hugely popular for over twenty years now. Though Hawthorn does acknowledge Jamila’s role in pioneering this tradition, the reason for this restriction is curiously unacknowledged. This exclusion of fusion belly dance inadvertently reproduces the power structures that continue to render fusion illegible in both academic scholarship and intracommunal discourses.

While in both instances belly dancers use eponymy as a political tool, I would argue that the deployment of eponymy in Hawthorn’s analysis serves a very specific, context-dependent purpose that is different from the way fusion belly dancers continue to use eponymy. Hawthorn defends that the eponymic naming tradition, when naming movements specifically after Middle Eastern and North African dancers, can help to attenuate the effects of Orientalist archetypes that contribute to the depersonalization of Arab peoples. I submit that the utility of eponymy in fusion serves a different purpose from that proposed by Hawthorn in regard to Oriental-style belly dance—not as an effort to “de-Orientalize” the Middle East, but as a tactical strategy that preserves the cultural memory of formative influences in fusion belly dance. Fusion belly dancers use eponymy to literally construct, document, and perform their own history, which has become necessary due to its exclusion from theorizing and investigation as a valuable site of data.

This cultural “us vs them” division between Oriental-style belly dancers and fusion belly dancers goes back decades. Though the division is smaller in recent generations, in my experience most dancers still identify primarily with one camp or the other. To analogize, fusion is to Oriental-style belly dance what goth music is to pop music—it’s not necessarily uncommon, but it is distinctly its own style with an attendant aesthetic philosophy and stylized movement canon (see Fig.1). In other words, fusion operates as a subcultural community under the belly dance umbrella. In the US, fusion and Oriental-style belly dance do share Jamila as a common ancestor, but with Masha Archer’s departure from Jamila in the mid-1980s, this caused a branch in the belly dance family tree that established a completely separate lineage from Oriental-style belly dance, leading fusion belly dance to eventually form a distinct subculture. I propose that the subculturalization of fusion is partially responsible for the dearth of theorizing on fusion belly dance nomenclature.

Figure 1: L: A promotional photo of the tribal fusion dancers in the “Bellydance Superstars” (from L-R: Kami Liddle, Sharon Kihara, Zoe Jakes, Moria Chappell); R: A promotional photo of “The Indigo” belly dance company (from L-R: Rachel Brice, Mardi Love, Zoe Jakes).

Figure 2: Promotional photo of “Belly Dance Mirage” belly dance company. Names not listed. The Limits of Eponymy

In this section, I’m going to use my own experience in the belly dance community as a practitioner for over eighteen years to acknowledge and reconcile the limits of eponymy as a tool for fusion belly dance. The most common way eponymy is disseminated in fusion belly dance is through pedagogy. As stated previously, many of the movements I mapped in “Le Serpent Rouge” are available on Datura Online, and in the “Twisting Mardi” case study I used, Mardi Love is cited directly as the influence in the codification of that movement sequence. Dancers who learn the “Twisting Mardi” from Datura Online are not merely receiving a stylized belly dance combination—they’re also participating in the reinscription of Mardi Love on the fusion belly dance community’s cultural memory. However, if a belly dance student is ignorant of prior fusion belly dance history, this performance only communicates Mardi’s significance, not necessarily the history that Mardi represents. What happens when fusion belly dance students aren’t taught their style’s history?

I started teaching fusion belly dance history workshops after completing my master’s thesis, an oral history of John Compton. It was through researching John that I truly realized the scope of the entanglements of the fusion belly dance family tree. Telling his story necessitated that I untangle threads and make connections between dancers, events, and dates in order to fully understand how the stylistic influences were passed down and sustained. As a result of this investigation, I ended up with a decent primer for fusion history, something that had yet to enter the belly dance community in an accessible way. Much of this information lived in informal sources, such as magazine articles, podcast interviews, and program-specific handbooks like The Salimpour Compendium and the “Dance Cohesion Stage 1” manual; and through academic articles, theses, and dissertations.

Informal sources on belly dance are easy to find, but veracity can vary between sources, and it is common for these sources to lack citations, positionality statements, or disclosures as to how the information was obtained. Program handbooks and manuals can be great resources for historic data, but unless a belly dance student pursues certification in one of those programs, they are either unable or unlikely to encounter that program’s scholarship. Academic articles, theses and dissertations, and scholarly publications can be good sources for belly dance history, but similar to Hawthorn, the majority of academic research on belly dance does not acknowledge how things operate differently in fusion belly dance communities. Moreover, the average person does not have access to university libraries or the requisite educational background to understand the often-opaque language of academic publications. All of that to say, the information exists, but most substantiated resources for this history are inaccessible to the majority of belly dancers.

The embodied knowledge of fusion belly dance history is circulated broadly through workshops, classes, and certification programs, while the more substantiated, peer-reviewed information exists in privileged resources that most dancers cannot access. As a result of this, the most common feedback I hear from students when I offer history workshops is that they have never heard of these formative figures before. This shows that a portion of fusion belly dance students may not even know this information exists at all, much less how to go about locating it for themselves. So when a fusion belly dance student learns an eponymic movement sequence like the “Twisting Mardi,” but they have nothing to historically scaffold that onto, is it still transmitting knowledge? Yes, but also no. Without this scaffolding to contextualize the eponym, the potential for transmitting genealogical data is localized.

As established earlier, fusion belly dance’s legibility is structurally stifled by both intra- and intercommunal ambivalence. This stifling decouples the embodied knowledge from the historical context—dancers inherit the canon of movement and the nomenclature, but not necessarily the requisite significance that canon and nomenclature represents. Therefore, this gap in many fusion belly dance students’ knowledge oxidizes the potency of eponymy for cultural memory and historic preservation. In the case of the “Twisting Mardi,” Mardi Love is recognized as part of the fusion belly dance lineage, but the eponym alone doesn’t communicate its attendant genealogical context. Just because you know Mardi Love doesn’t mean you know about Masha Archer or Jamila Salimpour. The only way to get both would be to teach history concurrently with movement education, but sharing the family tree of every eponymic movement you teach could easily become cumbersome and disrupt the flow of the class. In this way, eponymy on its own doesn’t necessarily “solve” the gaps of historical education for fusion belly dance students. Teachers can offer resources, but unless a student is enrolled in a belly dance certification program that imparts this knowledge, a standard belly dance class is not the ideal vehicle for socio-historical lecturing. I would also argue that Hawthorn’s defense of eponymy as de-Orientalization suffers from the same limitation—if the belly dance student does not recognize that the title of a movement represents a Middle Eastern or North African dancer, then its power to resist depersonalization may not interpellate completely.

Though this section covered how eponymy has limits for archiving the history of fusion belly dance, I argue that it is still a useful tool for preserving cultural memory and signaling community membership. When paired with historical education, eponymy can be an even more potent strategy for transmitting community knowledge. The eponymic naming tradition holds value in standardizing the embodied citations that characterize the fusion belly dance movement canon, which echoes back to the earlier generation of formative figures in fusion belly dance, even if their legacy is mediated through a different eponym. Despite the partiality of embodied historiography, it remains a vital mechanism for sustaining cultural memory in fusion belly dance.

Conclusion

In this paper, I argued for the utility and necessity of the eponymic naming tradition in fusion belly dance as a vital mechanism for transmitting lineage, honoring formative figures, and preserving cultural memory within a subculturalized dance form with an ambivalent reputation. “Le Serpent Rouge” is where eponymy’s impact demonstrates its materiality. My emic position in the fusion belly dance community and previous research background allowed me to quickly identify the connections between Rachel Brice, Mardi Love, and Zoe Jakes, tracing them all the way back to Jamila Salimpour’s eponymic naming system. This lineage elucidates “Le Serpent Rouge” as a significant node of eponymic data and an intersection of history and cultural memory.

Eponymy is a useful strategy for cultural memory preservation, but on its own, its efficacy is limited. Learning, observing, or creating an eponymic movement does not automatically transmit historical context through osmosis. Without additional historical education, eponymy’s usefulness for communicating the lineage beyond the titular dancer is diluted. Rather, eponymic movement education should supplement ongoing historical and cultural education in order to produce curious students and sustain the beloved embodied knowledge that binds the fusion belly dance community together.

References

Barsalou, Laura. n.d. “Zoe Jakes: A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Yallah Magazine.

danomoon, dir. 2008. Tribal Fest 8 - The Indigo Part 1. Intro and Mardi’s Solo. 07:29. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm4uwcHKARc.

Datura Online. n.d. “Datura Dance: Who We Are.” Accessed December 6, 2025. https://datura.dance.

Djoumahna, Kajira. 2007. The Tribal Bible. Desert Dancer Imports.

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“History of ATS®.” n.d. Davina Tribal Collective. Accessed November 28, 2025. https://davinatribalcollective.tripod.com/history-of-ats.html#:~:text=American%20Tribal%20Style%20is%20a,San%20Francisco%20Classic%20Dance%20Troupe.

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Shay, Anthony, and Barbara Sellers-Young. 2005. Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy. Mazda Publishers. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_facbooks/39.

von Trapp, Draconis. 2023. “From Bal Anat to Hahbi’Ru: An Oral History of John Compton, American Male Belly Dancer.” Master’s thesis, Texas Woman’s University.

Jakes, Zoe. n.d. Why Are Old School Moves Important? With Zoe Jakes. 2:44. Accessed November 28, 2025. https://daturaonline.com/programs/why-are-old-school-moves-important-with-zoe-jakes.

About the Author

Drake von Trapp is a belly dance historian, researcher, master teacher, and performer, recognized for his pioneering research on male belly dancers in the U.S. He holds a BA and MA in Dance, a post-master’s in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies from Texas Woman’s University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at UT Austin. He shares his intellectual and creative work with the world through touring, teaching, and performing internationally; as an official Datura Online teacher; and through the virtual belly dance studio he co-owns with his dance and life partner, Kamrah.

As a scholar, his work on men in belly dance is recognized for its historiographical insights of how men are represented in belly dance history. Onstage, he is known for what he refers to as “old style” fusion belly dance and multitonal finger cymbal compositions, which takes cues from the Salimpourean, Bricean, and American cabaret dancemologies. Drake also has extensive formal pedagogical training from his university studies, NASM personal training certification, and from within the belly dance community. He is a Stage 1, 2, and 3 Trained Teacher in April Rose’s Dance Cohesion program; and Level 1 certified in both Suhaila and Jamila Salimpour formats.