When professional bellydancer Rebecca Vasile was 4 years old, she began following her father - who was a construction worker by day - to his night-time dance classes.
“My dad was a dancer,” explained Vasile, “and took up jazz, modern and ballet in the evenings.”
That's when her own love of dancing began.
Together, they attended festivals and events where dancing of different kinds was featured - the Celtic Festival, the Renaissance Fair, and others. Vasile was 11 when, at the Renaissance Faire, she saw live bellydancing at the Faire's exotic Middle Eastern Bazaar.
It was love at first shake.
“I just fell in love with bellydance,” recalled Vasile, now 33. “I begged my parents to take me to Sebastopol to take bellydance lessons. And I've been doing it ever since.”
A graduate of Occidental College with a degree in Anthropology, Vasile - born in Santa Monica - has lived in Petaluma since she was 4. At the age of 15, having studied bellydance for four years, she began performing professionally, at the Renaissance Fair and various clubs and restaurants in San Francisco. Soon after, she joined Gregangelo and the Velocity Circus, with whom she performed and traveled until she was 18.
In 2010, shortly after graduating from college, she joined the Bellydance Superstars - around 10 world-class belly dancers who toured the world, regularly performing for crowds of thousands.
“It's like the bellydance version of Riverdance,” Vasile said. “You take a dance that's normally in a smaller space and create it into a giant production on a big stage.”
Vasile went on to direct the World Bellydance Awards, a televised competition in China. She did that for two years, working for a company called Bellydance China.
Then, in August of 2016 - wanting to give back to the community she grew up in - Vasile opened Petaluma's The Body Loom (bodyloom.com) - a studio that focuses on fitness through Pilates, yoga and bellydance. Located inside The Burdell Building on East D Street, the studio was established to help different types of people feel better in their own bodies. She specializes in pre and postnatal movement and bellydancing.
Her clients don't need to be a yogi or a hardcore Pilates person to take a class with her, she explained. Her clientele includes a number of people with injuries, who discover that bellydancing can help them feel better. Vasile's favorite class is called Belly, Hips and Bones, in which clients get a cardio workout from bellydancing, toning from Pilates and stretching from yoga.
When asked if men can bellydance, she said that while men do bellydance, she's had very few men take classes with her throughout the years.
Vasile's approach to teaching bellydance is unique, she explained. Rather than a follow-the-leader type of dance class, she starts people out on the floor with Pilates movements, to learn how to isolate their body. Then they can stand up and perform them.
“One of the health benefits of bellydancing is that it moves your spine in every direction,” she said. “Bellydancing is great because it's low impact on your joints but you still get the benefits of cardio and moving.”
Primarily, Vasile allowed, her mission in life is to help empower women by guiding them to feel better in their bodies, so that then they can have more self-confidence, power and pride in who they are.
Asked what her own most memorable bellydance moment is, she described a night in August of 2012, when she performed with Aerosmith at the Oakland Coliseum, during the band's Global Warming Tour.
Vasile's appearance was meant as a surprise for Steven Tyler.
In front of about 30,000 people she improvised a bellydance - to a song she didn't know - for a minute or two during a Joe Perry guitar solo. The moment was memorably captured in a YouTube video, in which she is seen both dancing on the stage, and projected onto a massive screen over the heads of the band.
“I was, like, shaking before,” she recalled.
Eventually, Steven Tyler noticed her dancing there on the side of the stage.
“They brought me back to behind the stage, where there's just millions of guitars lined up,” she said. “I'm sitting next to this mesh thing waiting for the next cue to be told to go on, and Steven Tyler literally left the stage and walks back to me and sings right in my face.”
On the YouTube video, although it's hard to hear, Tyler does mention Vasile's performance, immediately after she leaves the stage at the end of the song.
“Who the hell was that?” Tyler says.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: