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irinaxara@gmail.com or (949)394-9228 / http://www.irinaxaradance.com

Orange County and Los Angeles

Weddings, parties, nightclub events, art shows, musical performances

BELLYDANCE CLASSES: IrinaXara offers location-based private or small group instruction in bellydance basics, bellydance fusion (with Raqs Sharqi movement vocabulary base) and folkloric fusion styles.

IrinaXara has been studying bellydance forms for several years, but has been a student and performer of non-bellydance forms and other arts for almost a lifetime. Her training began at a young age with ballet, which she continued into her college years. During her teen years she studied tap, jazz and modern dance in addition to ballet. After completing her B.A. in English at Boston College, she returned to Southern California and began to pursue bellydance.

IrinaXara’s dance influences are multiple and distinct. While her proximity to the Middle Eastern community as a child and teen drew her to bellydance initially, her past in the punk and goth subcultures drew her to Orange County’s Sashi, teacher of Dark Tribal Fusion Bellydance, with whom she studied for several years. During this time she also began to expand her dance interests to Oriental styles of bellydance, both Egyptian and Turkish, American Tribal Style bellydance, Romany dance and Suhaila Salimpour technique. More recently she has incorporated Egyptian folkloric, Greek Tsiftitelli and Gothic Oriental stylizations. She is currently working to expand her knowledge of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Eastern European folkloric dance in order to educate others on their relationship to fusion bellydance.

IrinaXara is on a constant quest to synthesize and interpret her myriad influences, continually enriching herself with regular dance classes, workshops and different types of performances. She possesses a longstanding knowledge of basic yoga and personal fitness. While her longest-standing dance base is in modern, ballet and tribal fusion, she does not limit herself to performing one bellydance style, and therefore cultivates variety, growth and change in her dance. She is proficient at both choreography and improvisation and at dancing with a variety of props, particularly sword and veil. She is also skilled at playing a variety of zill patterns. She especially enjoys dancing to live music or DJing of varying genres, highly valuing the rapport formed during live performance.

Additionally, IrinaXara enjoys collaborating and performing with artists of other genres besides music: actors, burlesque performers, visual artists/designers, poets and performance artists.