Community Dance and Peace: Aesthetics of Resistance in Palestine

Objectives

• Provide a theoretical and practical glimpse into what is Community Dance and how it is related to the Philosophy for Peace

• Explore Community Dance as a form of Aesthetic Agency/Resistance in the context of the Palestinian Occupied Territories

Outline

• Yante Community Dance Project• Community Dance in general• My theoretical lenses: “Aesthetic Agency” of

US women of color• Dancing in Palestine• Discussion/Interaction• Dance!

The West Bank• Institutionalized racism – “Apartheid”• “A prison”• Dispossession of land• Direct Violence ++• OPPRESSION – Lives conditioned by

I CAN MOVE!

Community Dance

• “Community dance is a strand of participatory dance practice defined by particular values, intentions, qualities and methodologies.” (Amans, 2008: 4)

• “Community dance includes a broad range of practices and styles and is not dance style specific.” (Amans, 2008: 4)

• “Community dance is about artists working with people. It’s about people enjoying dancing, expressing themselves creatively, learning new things, and connecting to other cultures and to each other”

• “Creating opportunities for anyone…to participate in a group dance experience that is positive for them”

• “working with people using movement…it inspires and motivates…gets people moving who may not normally dance.”

• “Often community projects are tied to the personal expression of social issues and problems.”

• “It can be anything that we, the community, want it to be.”(Amans, 2008; Green, 2000)

New ways to see - US women of color

• Making Face, Making Soul. Haciendo caras (1990)

• Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul. Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom (2007)

• “When tongue and hand work together, they unite art and politics and attack the dominant ideology. For many of us the acts of writing, painting, performing and filming are acts of deliberate and desperate determination to subvert the status quo. Creative acts are forms of political activism employing definite aesthetic strategies for resisting dominant cultural norms and are not merely aesthetic exercises. We build culture as we inscribe in these various forms.” (Anzaldúa, 1990: xxiv)

• “By sending our voices, visuals and visions outward into the world, we alter the walls and make them a framework for new windows and doors. We transform the posos, apertures, barrancas, abismos that we are forced to speak from. Only then can we make a home out of the cracks.” (Anzaldúa, 1990: xxv)

• Aesthetic sensibility cultivates the senses, including that of sight: it nurtures a different way of seeing. For many of the authors here, such “seeing” grounds a different cognitive perspective, a different way of understanding the world, one’s place within it, and how the world might possibly be negotiated and reorganized. Thus, aesthetic agency is liberating in a broad sense to include the expansion not only of our capacity for joy but also our capacities to know, to judge, and to act.” (Acampora, 2007: 5)

• “The chapters here consider aesthetic agency as a way of dwelling in a sense that permeates ordinary lived experience and conditions the extraordinary sense of connection to others.” (Acampora, 2007: 7)

• Nashua: “I dance for my freedom” • . نشوة حريتي لتحقيق أرقص :أنا

• Jehad: “Dancing taught me a true sense of others.”• . جهاد باالخرين ً حقيقيا ً حسا منحني :الرقص

• Hala: “The butterfly effect cannot be seen. The butterfly effect will never fade away”.• , حال يزول ال الفراشة أثر يرى ال الفراشة :أثر

• Shahd: “When I dance, I feel as powerful as a soaring eagle.”• : . شهد النسر علو و بالرقصأحسبقوة

• Adnan: “Dancing makes me feel like a butterfly; so light, yet so graceful.”• . عدنان بجمالها و الفراشة بخفة أشعر :بالرقص

• Abed: “Dancing is not what I do, it is what I am. If you want to know me, watch me”• , . , أرقصعبد شاهدني معرفتي أردت إذا هويتي هو بل أفعل ليسما هو لي بالنسبة :الرقص

EXILE, 2011

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noJLj13tsfM (5’15)

Abed & Jehad