Silvia Salamanca
Helping, healing, loving
By Tammye Nash
Silvia Salamanca was born to dance. Her love of dancing,
she said, is so deeply ingrained in her soul that she “truly
can’t [give a reason for it] that makes logical sense.”
“I know I could not stop moving when I heard music I
liked,” Silvia said of her childhood. “I remember being very
little and fascinated with any dancers [I saw], and trying to
imitate them, move like them.
“I am convinced that, for me, dance was — and is — life-
sustaining, life-nurturing, life-healing, life-transforming,”
she added. “And I thank the gods for that, [and for] both my
parents, who gave me the opportunity to water that seed.”
Silvia said her parents knew early on that she was
destined to dance. In fact, she said, her mother told her that
she had “danced before I could walk.” So, “by the tender age
of 5,” her mother had taken her to “start my ballet and my
flamenco lessons in the only place in Palma [de Mallorca,
Spain] that would take girls that young.
“I’ve never stopped taking classes, from there on,”
she declares.
A n education in dance — and more
In 1994, at the age of 19, Silvia graduated in classical dance
from the Conservatory of Dance and Music of the Baleáric
Isles, in Palma, after eight years of spending four hours a day
in ballet and an hour three times a week in flamenco.
But after graduating from the conservatory, Silvia
said she “gave up on the idea of becoming a professional
dancer” and enrolled in the University of Barcelona to
study biochemistry.
“I wanted to help people,” she said to explain why she
chose that course of study. “I thought at the time that going
into medical and pharmaceutical research was the best way
possible to help as much as I could. Find a new cure for a
disease, right?
“Biochemistry takes the approach of dissecting to
a molecular level what is going wrong in the body,” she
continues. “And the principle is that if we can alter that
wrongness at a molecular level, one shall get cured.”
But once she got to the university, dance called to Silvia
again when she discovered that the university offered a
program in modern dance that allowed students in any field
of study to enroll and earn free tuition.
“I auditioned, and I was chosen to be part of their
most advanced crew, performing in college festivals, with
the benefit of lots of free dance instruction and putting
together hour-long shows that would then travel Europe,”
she explains.
While modern dance was different from the classical
dance she had studied so far, Silvia said she was willing to
step into a new style because it was “a good opportunity for
growth at the time.” The company toured over the summer,
during summer vacation, and Silvia said she “enjoyed touring
for three consecutive seasons.”
After those three seasons, Silvia left the university
dance company. At age 24, she was looking for something
new and different. That’s when she discovered the world of
belly dance.
“It was absolutely random at the very first,” Silvia
recalls. “I was tired of the atmosphere I had to endure
from my professors, instructors and choreographers in
the western modalities of dance, and I wanted to try
something different.”
She found a community center in Barcelona that was
offering affordable belly dance classes, and she signed up.
F inding belly dance
“I took my first class not really knowing what to expect,
and that first class was one of the most transformative
experiences I’d ever had,” Silvia said. “I left the room in tears
of relief and joy. From the instructor — who was a goddess
that made all of us feel like little goddesses ourselves and
kept insisting our bodies were sacred, our movement was
sacred — to the women of all ages and sizes who were my
peers. I had never experienced before women supporting
women in such a way.
“I never wanted to leave the class!”
That instructor was Tasnim Melendres, and she was,
Silvia said, “falling in love profoundly with belly dance and
the belly dance community.”
Silvia studied with her for a year at the Barcelona
April 2019
The Belly Dance Chronicles
11