purpose

Body Watani* Dance is a project both specific and spacious – a container to research the notion of ‘home/land’ in the body. The research in process and practice activates by digging into embodied memories somatically, improvisationally, and aesthetically to contemplate our present and future relation to place; land, waters, nation, migration, diaspora, displacement, settler colonial violences, indigenous aliveness.

As Palestinian Americans, the specificity of how the practice was and is developed forms a personal, cultural, political, and ancestral compass for collaborative and communal engagement through workshops, creative process, and performance. While improvisation guides our work, Body Watani Dance is also committed to studies and experimentations with movement that roots inside of Arabic & SWANA** folk, and social dance forms and rhythmic influences of Arabic music, instruments, poetry and language with particular attention to Palestine and Bilad el Sham.

Note: Our work is not a new or original idea. We honor extensively the vast lineages of movement, teachers, mentors, lived experiences, and artistic influences that are engraved within us. It is inevitable that we gather and reconceptualize the ‘dances’ we know in our bodies to search for ways to offer something unique to us, now, yet rooted in webs of our histories.

*Watani indicates my homeland in Arabic. In this project, we engage this word as it often occurs in the context of Palestinian poetry – invoking the land before borders and colonization that is deeply known in the body.

**SWANA: South West Asia North Africa; a phrase that reorients a broad region of shared & different cultural connections to gather in an identity more accurate than the ‘Middle East’ or ‘The Arab World’. 

Image above + images on homepage by Erika Ticknor