Carolena Nericcio

Carolena Nericcio created the group improvisational dance system now known as FatChanceBellyDance Style, or FCBD Style. She began studying belly dance in the 1970s and founded FatChanceBellyDance in San Francisco in 1987. The system uses a shared movement vocabulary, formations and visual cues to allow dancers to improvise together as an ensemble. Its posture, costuming and group structure became globally influential and later contributed to the development of Tribal Fusion. Nericcio's work is therefore important not simply as a performance style but as one of the most widely disseminated codified systems in modern global belly dance.