We are proud to sponsor this years workshops for Mediterranean Fantasy Festival July 15th & 16th 2011! Our guest teacher is the spectacular Sherri Wheatley aka
Cherchez La Femme bellydance.
Sherri has been a student of dance since the age of five with diverse experience ranging from ballet to gymnastics, jazz to modern and a large does of hip hop. Her passion for tribal bellydance began in 1999 when she began studying with the internationally celebrated Heather Stants, director of the influential Urban Tribal Dance Company. She soon became a full member performing with the company regularly at private events and dance festivals across the US.
Since then, Sherri has had the honor of working with many influential and critically acclaimed professional dance companies and performance groups. Among them are Desert Sin (www.desertsin.com) as a principal dancer and as a frequent featured guest performer with Atash Maya (www.myspace.com/atashmaya) of San Diego, Lucent Dossier of Los Angeles and Lucha Va Voom also of Los Angeles.
Primarily a tribal fusion dancer, Sherri is distinguishable in her unique serpentine stylization, an interpretation that embodies something close to bellydance infused with contortionism. She is also an extremely versatile dancer and can morph from one extreme physical state to the next in an instant. As a very diverse performer who enjoys continually challenging herself, Sherri finds that dance theatre, a place where choreography, music, staging and costuming come together to form something much greater than the sum of their parts, is where she derives the most professional satisfaction.
Prior to her (now healed) back injury, Sherri's latest professional coup was a coveted position as the newest tribal member of an internationally touring bellydance company. Sidelined from the tour in recovery, Sherri decided to start her own performance company and costuming line (coming soon), Cherchez La Femme (literal translation: “look to the woman” though the phrase is usually used in an infamous sense), a nickname given to her as a child by her late father.
Having relocated to Los Angeles in 2005, Sherri continues to study dance in various incarnations and teaches weekly tribal fusion dance classes at EION 2013 in Venice Beach. Sherri teaches and performs internationally and has been featured in several internationally distributed DVDs the latest of which are a tribal fusion performance DVD filmed in a theatrical venue in front of a live audience called Tales of Desire (release pending) and a performance DVD though IAMED called "Stars of Bellydance".
When she is not working on the latest Cher Chez La Femme or Desert Sin project, Sherri can be found performing as “Slither” with The Living Garden (www.thelivinggarden.com), or with the mini luchador wrestlers at Lucha Va Voom ( www.luchavavoom.com ).
