Exclusive Interview With Internet Sensation Cassandra Fox

What made you start with all the social media and Instagram videos?

Impulsiveness mainly! I really fell in love with belly dance when I was in University. YouTube had just come out a couple of years earlier, and I had high speed internet access finally for the first time (I'm from a rural area, at the time we still only had dial up out there) and I saw a video of the Russian dancer Natalia Fadda (at the time she went by Natalia Strelchenko). I guess that started the YouTube obsession. Her videos were such a source of inspiration for me, and I always got so excited when I saw a new one posted. And I found other dancers that I loved watching and were big inspirations, like the Brazilian dancer Kahina, and made friends as well with fellow aspiring dancers. It was such a pool of visual inspiration and in a way, a sense of community.
The first video I ever posted, I posted on a whim, and it was really well received, luckily, and then a year or so later, there was a thread about it and Caribbean fusion on a belly dance forum. It was not so positive, but it was great food for thought and it helped me figure out which direction to go, so in hindsight I am very happy that it happened. So, I just kept going with it. INTERNET FOREVER!!!

You now have over 19k followers on Instagram and the same again for followers on YouTube. Did it take you a long time to build up all these followers?  

Yes. Nothing happens completely overnight, although the internet is strange and viral "rushes" can happen, where you can wake up, or look at your account randomly and all of a sudden there are these new followers or views. I've been fortunate and "gone viral" a couple of times, and that can really cause a big jump in followers quickly. But as with anything, you then have to work to maintain the new found followers and I like the challenge. I feel like Zoidberg from Futurama when that happens, "Hooray! I'm useful, I'm having a wonderful time."

How often do your videos go viral on YouTube?

Actually, more often my videos go viral on Facebook, not YouTube. My "Ragga Ragga" video was re-posted from YouTube onto a Caribbean Facebook page and it got over 1 million hits! In some ways I feel Facebook is the new YouTube. I have over 190K followers on Facebook. 

How do you feel with all this attention on social media, going viral and being so popular?

I'm not surprised it's been mostly positive! Your videos have a real feel good energy about them; you look like you really enjoy making them. Where do you film them?

 Thanks.  I always enjoy dancing. I truly love it! Even when I think I feel like I don't want to dance, once I start, I get right into it! I love the music and it just gives me this sense of freedom.  I used to be able to find someone to come to the occasional performance with me and film it, so I would just post those. However, time goes by, people get busier and have their own responsibilities and commitments and it is so hard to find someone and expect them to give up their free time to watch you work and film it. So, with gigging alone, most of my posted videos are filmed at my home, in my dance space.
I am a big believer in filming your dance practices. It's a great way to see what is actually going right, what is actually going wrong, what needs cleaning up, and tracking your progress and evolution. I guess I have a distrust of mirrors. 

I have to say I especially love your Caribbean / Dance Hall videos and also how you fuse the style with belly dance. I wish I could move like that!  I read that you're of Caribbean heritage ….

Thank you again. My parents are Jamaican, my grandparents and so on. I was born and raised in Canada, but my family always kept the Jamaican culture alive in the home. There is a lot of similarity in aspects of technique and movement vocabulary in Caribbean and belly dance, but the details are different, which makes it natural to fuse, musically and movement wise they just work together, to me anyway. 
 

Do you ever feel that you have to justify or explain why you do Caribbean / Dance Hall style?  (How does that make you feel? )

 I don't feel like I have to, but I sometimes choose to as it can get a little tiresome seeing or hearing, "She must have a black boyfriend!" or "She thinks she is black,"  blah blah blah. Some people seem to forget that Jamaica was colonized, and that the national motto of the island is, "Out of Many, One People."  
I do run into the issue even when the video is CLEARLY labelled and tagged, with someone saying, "This isn't belly dance!" as if they are telling you something that you don't already know, and you're trying to figure out who even said it was belly dance in the first place!  Occasionally people seem to neglect reading the details provided on the internet and there is this love of labeling and classifying. If people were first exposed to me as a belly dancer, it's seen as, "The belly dancer does dance-hall!"  If they were first exposed to me doing fusion or Caribbean, and then they see me belly dance the attitude is more along the lines of, "Oh, she belly dances too!" 

Often your videos are posted with a dance tip or feel good message, some quite empowering…. I have seen a lot of posts referring to not worrying about age, size and every other feature. What inspiration / experiences led you to make these feel good comments?

Talking to other dancers, overhearing comments from an audience member, comments I've seen on the videos of other dancers or my own, or just thoughts that I have been mulling around in my own head, particularly related to pressures and expectations that come with being female regardless of career choice or path taken. I never signed up for my job to be "being pretty"  or "being attractive to the male sex." I signed up to be a dancer. Hopefully, a good one. I think dance (and even society as a whole) would benefit from more emphasis on skill and less on a narrow beauty ideal. Everyone likes to look at something that they think is beautiful, everyone likes to feel beautiful to themselves and someone else. That's not the issue. The issue is expecting people to meet YOUR beauty ideals or society's imposed beauty ideals in order for you to respect their skills or humanity.  What could be better for dance, than more emphasis on the actual dancing? 

That is so true! Well, we at Zameena love all your videos and are great fans of yours on Instagram too! Have you got any tips to share with fellow dancers wanting to “make it” on social media?