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Halloween cabaret

Andrea Novoa says when she hears music she just wants to move. The 26-year-old belly dancer from Columbia grew up dancing.
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Dahab performs a dance routine at the Hunger V.5 cabaret on Saturday. (Jeff Labine, tbnewswatch.com)

Andrea Novoa says when she hears music she just wants to move.

The 26-year-old belly dancer from Columbia grew up dancing. She adopted the stage name Dahab and danced in Las Vegas for three years before she married and moved to Thunder Bay less than a year ago.

She said people don’t typically understand how much depth there is between the music and the actual dance.

"I find the music beautiful and very enchanting," Novoa said. "It’s very attractive and it makes you want to move. When I started belly dancing about five years ago I learned more about the topic and it is really complex."

Novoa joined about 40 other acts from drag shows to live bands at the Hunger V.5 Cabaret a fundraiser for Definitely Superior Art Gallery on Saturday night. The cabaret spread across four bars and pubs in downtown Port Arthur.

Novoa said she loves the work produced at Definitely Superior Art Gallery and often volunteers. When the opportunity came for her to help the artistic program, she jumped at the chance.

Despite dancing for years, she said she was nervous, happy and excited to show off her moves at the Halloween event.

Renée Terpstra, an organizer for Hunger V.5, said she expected more than 2,000 people to attend the event on Saturday. She said it is the biggest event for Definitely Superior Art Gallery and provides a significant amount of funding to their program, which supports about 900 local artists.

"It has been a very successful event," Terpstra said. "Last year we had 1,750 people attend, which was up from 1,600 people the year before. I guess after the first year, the audience all of a sudden just doubled in size. It just keeps growing."

Terpstra said these types of events are similar to other cultural festivals and it helps to make the downtown area feel more like a large urban centre. A large festival event like the cabaret has an additional affect of getting more residents interested in the downtown core.

"It is a massive Halloween event," she said. "The intent is to have an artistic fundraiser for the gallery. But the spin off affect is it gets people downtown and it contributes to the downtown revitalization. The gallery has an overall intent to present 40 per cent of our programming outside of a gallery space and most of it is presented in the downtown core."






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