About Alicia BellyCraft

Alicia BellyCraft “Dancing through Life.”

A versatile and innovative artist by nature, this beautiful and mesmerizing second generation bellydancer has enchanted audiences worldwide as a performer and teacher with a style and approach that delivers power, drama, and intensity on stage as much as she inspires and instructs with fun, laughter and joy off stage.

Performing under her mother’s tutelage at age seven, she remains grateful of the fortunate childhood she had surrounded by Middle Eastern music and world dance simultaneously integrated into the eclectic “soundtrack” of her childhood. As a young adult, she would be drawn to the emerging new wave of music and fashion of the eighties and early nineties and her dancing would be both inspired and transformed by the alternative club scene that became her artistic source of inspiration through her youth. Those years would also later inspire her trend setting dance company’s, gothic industrial style and intensity.

In 2003 Alicia would return to her roots in traditional bellydance as a student, performer, and eventually a teacher for the prestigious Mid-Eastern Dance Exchange in Miami Beach under the legendary Tamalyn Dallal. It wouldn’t be long before she discovered Tribal Fusion Bellydance and make travelling a priority to attend as many seminars, workshops, intensives and privates as she could. She would dedicate herself fully to its approach and artistic freedom and to this day continues to learn from both its originators and its pioneering innovators including Rachel Brice and Amy Sigil.

Her video collection of stage performances over the years, many available on line, showcase her passion to challenge herself as a soloist to a variety of musical influence and her company’s original trend setting performance in 2007 would be one of many to equally express her talents for choreography and bring her national attention. Soon afterwards Alicia and her dance partner, Heather, were hired to represent gothic bellydance in World Dance New York’s Fantasy Tarot show and DVD production in 2008 as the Hanged Man. In 2010 due to circumstances as life would have them, Alicia would retire BellyCraft as a company to pursue her own BellyCraft as a soloist and teacher. Just recently, her powerful and captivating approach as a soloist led her to be cast a goddess in Toronto’s one of a kind theatrical event, “Land of the Eternals”, which featured dancers, an Olympic medalist, and famous figure skaters on pic skates in a mythic tale of Celtic based folklore.

Alicia currently teaches her unique, challenging, fun and very rewarding approach to bellydance in South Florida at Lotus Dance Studio and continues to share her BellyCraft worldwide via workshops, seminars and performances.

What is BellyCraft™?

..."An art nurtured is an art that reveals."

BellyCraft belly dance is my approach to belly dance as an art form and personal practice. Inspired by my first troupe, the name just came one day and at a perfect time with a perfect fit. It remained that for all of BellyCraft’s different manifestations and performances and remains that now as I focus on being a soloist and teaching to a wider audience. It is my own methodology, ritual and process from first inspiration to properly evaluating critiques after performing and developing further from there and on to the next one. It’s my continued careful integration of all I have learned and distilled from both traditional and modern teachers and the empowerment I have gained from cross training specifically to assure I dance through life and do not fall to injury or boredom along the way.

I, by my nature, emphasize the importance of intuition, creativity and individuality but likewise I also value and believe in a classical dancer’s work ethic and nurturing the passion to build one’s instrument. Sound fundamentals rooted in strong and tested (safe) foundations determine how far you can stretch the limits of your dance as well as how quickly you recover from them. They are what give you power and grace alike by providing what is in essence, the actual core from which all your natural talents can shine.

You can be as innovate and avant-garde as you want in any art form but you must be aware, professional and matured enough to know you will be observed and ultimately critiqued (intentionally or subconsciously) on your technical base and your ability to convey it through your particular and unique expression. Underneath it all, it’s about honestly expressing yourself and your vision as best you can in relation to others.

Underneath it all…

If you create from within, using what is uniquely your own, develop that and then express it in a manner that carries it over from the threshold of imagination to the one of genuine expression with technical precision, you are practicing BellyCraft™.