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World rhythms right here at home Live or recorded, belly dance troupe Bellissimonde spices it up
Reprinted with permission from author Rebecca Ragain (c) (first appearing April 2007 in The Hollywood Star News) Whenever a performance looms near, housework is the last thing Monty Cowles and Patricia Scott are thinking about. In their home in the Cully neighborhood, belongings pile up and mail goes unopened. “We focus on performing and nothing else,” says Cowles, who gets so nervous leading up to a performance that she swears she has pterodactyls in her stomach, not butterflies. Cowles and Scott are founding members of Bellissimonde, a five-woman group that performs world music and dance. They, and Cowles’s long-time friend Sylvia Hackathorn, formed the group six years ago, as a way to make music and dance together. Cowles is a percussionist who’s traveled and recorded with various country-western, rock-and-roll, and rhythm-and-blues bands. Hackathorn, who specializes in Celtic and European folk music, plays the electric guitar, mandolin, Indian flute and penny whistle. Cowles fondly calls Hackathorn “the goddess of strings and winds.” As for Scott, six years ago she was returning to a passion she had first discovered in 1970. In an effort to become more physically active, Scott started taking belly dancing classes. Soon, Scott says, everything else fell by the wayside. “That was it,” she says. “There went the weight. There went the two-fisted eating. There went all my nights relaxing in front of the television set. It was nothing but class after class after class.” Scott even started sewing her own costumes, which overflow from her closet in a swirl of richly colored, luxurious-looking fabrics. The Middle Eastern beats to which Scott was constantly listening also piqued Cowles’s interest, and she started experimenting with the rhythms. Before long, Hackathorn was hooked, too. “It was our thing. We could all do it together,” says Scott. Even today, the group’s process is collaborative in nature. Someone brings in a tune they like, and Cowles and Hackathorn rearrange it. After all, many songs are intended to be played by a group of musicians, and Bellissimonde only has two instrumentalists, though they are as multi-talented as they come. For instance, Cowles plays the hand drums while simultaneously using her feet to play a drum kit, frequently in a different time signature. Hackathorn will commonly play more than one instrument during a song. She might start out with a flute, switch to a string instrument and end on the flute. “We try to make it sound very melodic and full,” says Cowles. After the musical magic has happened, Scott choreographs movements for the three dancers of Bellissimonde, Scott, Stashia Cabral and Kria Lacher. [Kria left the group to pursue her passion as Portland’s “green” realtor. Urbana (Kristin Yount) is the newest member of Bellissimonde.] When choreographing, Scott draws from dance genres such as American tribal belly dance and folk dances from Greece, Turkey, Africa and other areas. Scott explains that each song, depending on its origin, calls for different steps. “If it’s a Spanish tune,” she says, “you have to have Spanish attitude and dance movements.” That said, Bellissimonde doesn’t claim to accurately represent the art forms of the countries from which their music hails. The group’s dancers and musicians perform their own interpretation, based on “who we are and where we came from and how we feel,” says Scott. The end goal is to create a vibe reminiscent of the cultures of those faraway countries. It works. More than one foreign-born audience member has approached the group after a performance to say that the music made them homesick. The other sentiment often expressed by audience members is amazement at the number of countries represented in Bellissimonde’s performances. The same holds true of the group’s first CD. The self-titled album, which was released in October, has 12 tracks and includes Persian, French, Algerian, Turkish and Irish songs, to mention just a few. Producing a CD was no small matter. Recording went relatively smoothly, but it took nearly two years for Scott to track down the respective copyright holders in order to obtain permission to reproduce each song. Near the end of the process, Scott says that patience and enthusiasm were wearing thin. “We were wondering if it would actually happen,” she says. “Would we still be together? Would any of us still be alive, for that matter?” But she kept at it, because she wanted other people to share her delight in the musical skills of Cowles and Hackathorn. Scott adds: “The CD was done because I believe in the talent of my two musician friends, as well as in the music itself. They, and it, transport me as a dancer and as a human being. . . .”
[“Thanks, Rebecca, from Bellissimonde. It’s a lovely article!” Rebecca is a writer and she does marketing as well. Her website is: |
