On a Thursday evening in October, the basement of Crescent Moon Studio on Beaverdale's east end fills with the clink of copper zils and the low thrum of a doumbek. Twenty-three dancers gather for Zahra Malak's beginner American Tribal Style class, arranging themselves in a loose circle before the mirrors. Some wear full skirts and heavy kuchi belts; others show up in leggings and T-shirts. By the end of the hour, they'll be improvising together—no choreography, just a shared vocabulary of movements and the unspoken conversation of watching each other's torsos for cues.
This is belly dance in Beaverdale in 2024: less about solo spotlight performances and more about collective experimentation. Less about preserving a fixed tradition and more about asking what happens when you borrow from hip-hop, Butoh, and Balkan brass bands. And, perhaps most surprisingly, it's drawing dancers from across the Midwest to a city better known for its craft breweries and insurance headquarters.
From California Roots to Iowa Soil
American Tribal Style (ATS) began in San Francisco in the 1980s, pioneered by Carolena Nericcio as a distinctly group-focused alternative to solo cabaret belly dance. The form spread slowly through the coastal United States before finding pockets of devoted practitioners in unexpected places—including Des Moines's Beaverdale neighborhood, where a small but committed community has spent the last decade building something singular.
"ATS changed how I think about ensemble work," says Malak, who founded the local troupe Stone Thread Collective in 2019. "We're not matching each other choreographed step for step. We're having a conversation with our bodies. That appeals to people who maybe felt isolated in other dance forms or who wanted collaboration without competition."
Malak's six-week beginner sessions cost $90, a price she acknowledges can be a barrier. She reserves two scholarship spots each term, funded by a small performance revenue pool, and estimates about 30 percent of her long-term students started on reduced tuition. Her Thursday classes now regularly fill a waitlist, up from half-capacity enrollment in 2022.
What "Fusion" Actually Means Here
If ATS emphasizes group improvisation and a codified movement vocabulary, fusion belly dance in Beaverdale is defined by its refusal of fixed definitions. Local performers have incorporated contact improv, vogueing, and even aerial silks into pieces that still identify—contentiously or proudly, depending on who you ask—as belly dance.
At the Beaverdale Arts Festival in September, Stone Thread Collective shared a bill with Tempest Rose, a soloist who performed a piece set to glitch electronica that combined isolated abdominal locks with breakdance floor work. The audience of roughly 150 people—an eclectic mix of grey-haired neighborhood regulars and twenty-somethings in resin earrings—reacted with the slightly stunned enthusiasm of people who had not expected to see either of those things in a converted hardware store.
"We're not trying to replace traditional forms," says Janelle Okonkwo, who teaches a monthly fusion workshop at the Beaverdale Neighborhood Association's community room. "We're asking what this movement vocabulary can do in 2024, in the Midwest, with dancers who come from ballet backgrounds or West African dance or no formal training at all."
That expansiveness attracts newcomers but also invites skepticism. Both Malak and Okonkwo say they field regular questions—sometimes from audience members, sometimes from visiting dancers—about whether their work constitutes "real" belly dance. "I used to get defensive," Okonkwo admits. "Now I say: come to a class. We'll talk about the lineage, and then we'll mess with it."
The Community's Complicated Questions
For all its talk of inclusivity, Beaverdale's belly dance community faces the same tensions that have shaped the form nationally. The scene remains predominantly white, raising persistent questions about cultural appropriation that instructors here address with varying directness.
Malak requires her students to read an essay by scholar Sunaina Maira on Arab American representations in belly dance, and she dedicates one session per beginner series to what she calls " lineage and accountability " —discussing the Middle Eastern, North African, and Turkish regional roots of the movements they practice, and the difference between appreciation and extraction. Okonkwo, who is Nigerian American, says her fusion classes explicitly name the African and Black diasporic influences that shaped both traditional and American belly dance, elements she finds routinely erased in mainstream instruction.
"When you call something 'tribal,' you inherit a history," Okonkwo says. "I think Beaverdale dancers are starting to take that seriously in ways I didn't see five years ago."
Venues, Festivals, and the Work of Staying Visible
The community's visibility depends on a fragile network of local spaces. Crescent Moon Studio, where Malak teaches, operates on a month-to-month lease that its owner says could end if the building
