The history of Four Hundred Roses.

Our original experiments were inspired by earlier work Chris had done with local musicians and work she had done while teaching Tribal Style bellydance in regular classes and at workshops. in the UK. From these initial experimental sessions the Four Hundred Roses was formed to develop a performance piece for the Jewel of Yorkshire festival in March 2006.

We have an existing relationship with Stephen Wood (aka Woody), a professional drummer who has worked for several years with the Yorkshire Dance Centre and Leeds Contemporary Dance as well as with the local bellydance community. He created the track used in our debut performance using a mix of traditional UK music, Middle Eastern drumming and other elements.

Four Hundred Roses debut performance was very well received by the festival audience, which included some of the top UK professional bellydancers and Paulette Rees-Denis a leading US teacher of Tribal bellydance. This has led to the group being invited to perform at the Raqs Britannia festival to be held in Manchester in June 2006 alongside top UK and international bellydancers. Since then we have taken part in a number of events but have been concentrating on developing our fusion style.

The First Bloom project.

In 2006 Four Hundred Roses were lucky to be granted funding by the Arts Council. This, we hope, will allow us to develop our style and take our dance performances to a higher level. We plan to invite experts in the fields of the various UK national dance forms, Morris and other traditional dance styles to hold workshop sessions with us. The aim would be to increase our understanding of the traditional forms and to go on from there in our own sessions to develop further ideas to bring into the TribalUK fusion.

Four Hundred Roses plan to commission further specifically created music tracks from Woody that will reflect the influences from various UK traditions we have been working with and fuse these with more traditional bellydance music forms. These can then be used to create dance performances and as part of workshop exercises.

FourHundredRoses are always looking for further opportunities to present our dance to audiences and will be arranging workshops towards the end of the project to share what we have learned with others in the bellydance community. We hope to present TribalUK as a new fusion style that can be seen to blend diverse cultural elements from the UK and world-wide sources.