Turning exotica into a common thread

With an innate ability to weave the subtle nuances and textures of oriental music into movement, Veronica Simas de Souza no longer confines belly dancing to Greek and Turkish nightclubs. As archaic as that thought may be, Veronica or Veve as she is called, believes this oriental dancing mirrors the ''reality where women, as rhythmicpriestess, respond to the music.With a dance background that includes studies and performances in Middle Eastern, African, modern, ballet, and Latin dance forms, Veve’s inspiration to teach the dance came from her Guruji Sunayana Hazarilal from the Banaras Gharana founded by Pt Janaki Prasadjim under whom she trained for Kathak. "My unique, exciting and colorful dance style is the understanding of the very soul of Raks Sharqi combines with a world-fusion repertoire that ranges from samba to interpretive dance,” she says.Veve believes that art should transform. She draws upon her expansive movement vocabulary, wild creativity, goddess inspires spirituality and fierce courage to forge transcendent experiences for her audiences. About the dance form she says, "”I am committed to a powerful and truthful purity of the movement that is, by nature, ecstatic. This is a mesmerizing dance form that emphasise a lot on body isolation, intrinsic movements of the hip, belly and the torso. There's a lot of muscle control and you need a lot of body awareness. With belly dancing, you need to be able to study music and its rhythm. As you progress, it's almost like you can conduct an orchestra with the dancer becoming another instrument of that ensemble. It's about the proficiency of the music and the interpretation of the mood of the rhythm as well as the lyric.”The dance, popularly called belly dance has gone by many names. It developed through the influence of many different areas and continues its long process of development today. Recognized as a dance style of its own rather than it's exotic connotation, Veve has been trying to organize free workshops so people genuinely interested can get to know about the dance form and it's evolvement. Making her way to india the first time around in 2002, she says her decision to teach has nothing to the fact that Asian countries are booming and there's money to be had. “I was in Thailand before I moved here and I heard so much about the country that when I finally visited I just immediately fell in love with it. Dancing is a common thread for all art forms. And with the divrse classical art that is entrenched in this country, how could I not learn.,” she says.In between telling the auto rickshaw driver “Yahan se left, kuchh problem hai? Relax ” to talking about the transcendental progression of the dance, Veve says she has allowed herself to develop a new concept in dance awareness and meditation as well as her communication skills.Her pupils and classes include women of all ages and she believes belly dancing give everbody a tool that paves way for an opportunity to create beautiful movements. “It increases your awareness and forces you t understand how your body moves. Nothing is automatic and anybody can look great with the amount of grace it brings into your body. You become more beautiful.”In her own words, “The beauty is to perform the simplest of movements to the divinity of understanding the intrinsic rhythms of the body”.