I’m an ATS dancer. It’s the style I identify with most, the style that most interests me and the style I’ve always felt the most at home in. I came to it a few years after starting in American cabaret style belly dance.

The first time I saw ATS was at an SCA event in 1998. I had been dancing the weird sort of late-90s tribal-ish style that was popular in the SCA at the time, since about 1997. I saw a group at Estrella War, I couldn’t tell you who they were, or even what kingdom, since it was around 2am and I’d been out encampment-hopping and dancing around firepits for hours and had quite lost track of where I was, but I remember standing next to the drummers and watching these women dance, and being so completely stunned by it. I asked someone what that was, and they said, “Oh it’s Fat Chance Belly Dance style.” As soon as I got home from Estrella, I drove up to Salt Lake and went to the belly dance shop up there and asked what they knew about Fat Chance Belly Dance. Jason immediately showed me the tapes (yes, VHS tapes) and I bought volume 4, being a cocky intermediate dancer who didn’t think she needed to see any more beginning belly dance DVDs.

I tried to do the Egyptian Half Turn without knowing how to do a Basic Egyptian. And then I went back up to Jason and Yasmina’s and bought volume 1. And I watched Fat Chance perform on those videos, and I felt like the top of my head had come off. Like I’d looked up for the first time and seen there was a sky. It’s one of the few truly life-changing experiences I’ve had in my life.

So, I threw myself into ATS and never looked back. I even sold off my cabaret costumes to finance my ATS costuming and video purchasing. I bought everything Fat Chance had produced to that point, and studied it voraciously. There were no local ATS classes at that time, so I worked on it on my own to the best I could.

I’ve been at it ever since, and I still love it with the same vigor I started with. I still study every chance I can get, every source I can get. YouTube’s been wonderful with the array of ATS performances to watch. I am extremely grateful that Carolena put her style out there for the world to fall in love with. I won’t say it changed my life, because that isn’t exactly true. It changed me.