The body politic

Young Palestinian dancers are pursuing their professional dreams and fighting for recognition.

By ANDREAS RACKL
The body politic (photo credit: SAREYYET RAMALLAH)
The body politic
(photo credit: SAREYYET RAMALLAH)
When 21-year-old Palestinian Amal Khatib moves her body across the dance floor, she not only expresses her passion for contemporary dance, she also challenges the society she grew up in.
For several years, she and other young contemporary dancers have been fighting against taboos and prejudice in the West Bank. In a society where being a dancer is not an acceptable profession, tenacity has proved to be the only way forward.
“In Palestinian society much is hidden behind rules, often at the expense of personal freedom. The female body is seen here as a tool. But when I dance, I show that this body belongs to me,” Khatib says during a rehearsal of her group, the Ramallah Contemporary Dance Troupe, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The troupe staged several shows in Palestinian cities in the West Bank during the recent Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival, which featured performances from both Palestinian and international artists.
In the run-up to the festival, the dancers trained for several hours a day in a small gym inside the Sareyyet sports compound in Ramallah, coached by the Palestinian-American choreographer Samar King.
“You have to be organic together,” King instructs as Khatib and her partner Heba sit on the parquet floor of the gym with their legs stretched towards each other.
“You need to feel each other’s breath.” The choreographer walks over to the stereo and puts on a Hip Hop tune. Amal and Heba start to move again. King is currently the only professional choreographer at Sareyyet Ramallah, a cultural group that organized the festival and also runs contemporary and traditional dance classes.
King directs her own dance company in New York, but recently her energies have been totally absorbed by writing the first ever dance curriculum for Sareyyet, trying to combine traditional Palestinian dance with more contemporary forms.
“We don’t try to rewrite the Bible, but it should become a good curriculum that leaves space for innovation,” she says.
Innovation and talent are not lacking on the Palestinian dance scene. What it lacks is social acceptance and professional resources. King says that dancing is barely seen as a profession in Palestinian society.
“We face a special reality. Many of our young students come from remote villages.
If we don’t adapt the curriculum to society and culture, many parents simply won’t let their children come,” she explains. Some female dancers have been prevented from joining classes by their families, who see dance as a dingy business. Conservative voices from Islamists and traditionalists have also voiced criticism and even threatened organizers. In April, the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas denounced the dance festival. Ezat Risheq, a leading Hamas official, criticized the Palestinian Authority for providing funding.
“Holding dance festivals in Ramallah at the same time that our prisoners are on a hunger strike violates the traditions and culture of our Palestinian people,” said Risheq.
Mustafa Sawaf, vice-minister of culture in Gaza’s Hamas government, also voiced criticism. “These kinds of festivals are completely rejected by our people and are not consistent with our peoples’ values and morals,” Sawaf said. Such statements have cast a shadow over Palestinian dancers’ professional dreams. But contemporary dance is also a force that helps to counter such views.
“Dance is a statement to society,” says Khatib. “In Palestine, dancing is not a profession. If I say I am a dancer as a woman, everyone thinks about belly-dancing, which is associated with prostitution. And if a man says he is a dancer, people think he is gay.” The desire of young Palestinians to become professional dancers is not always understood by their families. However, the same performances that enrage traditionalists have also made dance more acceptable for others.
“There are many stories of young dancers who were prevented from participating by their parents. But the dance festival also helped to make their appearance more acceptable to society,” says King.
Vegetable market
One breakthrough has occurred with a decision by some contemporary dancers to begin performing in public places. Twentythree-year-old Majd Hajjaj starred in a short movie screened during the festival that showed her dancing in public on the streets of Ramallah. “I didn’t know that I was courageous enough to perform on the street, in places like the vegetable market, which is the heart of the city,” says Hajjaj.
One man stopped her in the middle of one street performance and said, “What are you doing here? We don’t have such things in Palestine.”
“Well, now you do,” she responded.
By taking dance to the streets, Hajjaj says she also discovered potential for change.
“Personally, I want to see myself reach a point where I initiate change, to see a Ramallah where people accept each other for what they do, without criticizing it all the time,” she says.
“What I did was provocative, though it wasn’t striptease or anything.” Before taking Hajjaj played basketball, co-founded a Palestinian circus school and also acted.
During the day, she was a financial analyst at the Jawwal mobile phone company.
“I quit because I hated this job. I thought, I have other options,” she says. Despite the support of her parents, she also is not spared from society’s moral reminders.
“My friends or my mother sometimes say I should stop jumping around like a monkey and get myself a job and a groom instead.”
At the same time that the constraints of conservative society sometimes limit the acceptance of young Palestinian dancers, a lack of resources and professional support hinders their professional development.
“All of us still need a lot of education and training. We are reaching a stage where we can’t help ourselves anymore. The only solution is to go abroad,” Khatib says.
Many of the young Palestinians gathered recently at a dance conference in Ramallah to hear Farooq Chaudhry, a Pakistan-born British producer from the Akram Khan Dance Company in London, now one of the world’s most successful dance groups with 1,000 performers appearing in 150 countries.
Chaudhry inspired the audience by telling them about the financial risks he undertook to get his company off the ground. “Here in Palestine, risk is around the corner all the time anyway,” he said.
“But how can we do something like that in Palestine? How can we have success while finding our own style and identity in contemporary dance?” asked one of the young dancers. “Some of the most important styles have come out of small countries.
When you are small and insignificant, you often have much more to say. The need to show one’s identity is an excellent driving force,” Chaudhry responded.
But for many of the local dancers, there are more basic issues that need to be addressed.
“For us, the pressing question is how we can live from dancing. We have done so much with passion and volunteering. But all of us need other jobs to survive,” says Amal Khatib.
And then there is the question of politics, which is never far from any issue of artistic expression in Palestine.
The story behind the most recent show of the contemporary dance troupe is a conversation between an old Palestinian couple telling their daughter about history, experiences of love, but also of Israeli occupation. Such narratives of resisting Israel and its occupation are a recurring topic in Palestinian dance.
However, Khaled Elayyan, director of Sareyyet Ramallah, cautions about always politicizing their work.
“Sometimes we say that dance is part of Palestinian resistance. But we have to distance ourselves from that,” says Elayyan. “We need to break out from using the political situation in any kind of work we do.”