FEDORA - Dance People

FEDORA
VAN CLEEF & ARPELS
Dance Prize 2025
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Dance People

France
Maqamat & Omar Rajeh

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DANCE PEOPLE, is a title that directly represents itself. It highlights the values of community at the heart of creativity, claiming its presence through sharing the space with citizens and allowing new formats of ‘being together’ to emerge.

In a world moving towards intelligent algorithms, data-driven minds, and AI, It seems that some of the most urgent questions today are those related to meetings, gatherings and living together. What kind of relationships, which political systems, and on which basis. To ‘come together’ is the courage to cultivate ‘doing together’, and the readiness to sharing spaces of diversity, richness, generosity, and respect.

About the Project

DANCE PEOPLE is a choreographic creation that weaves its composition out of the intimate stories of its audience and the creative diversity of its artists. A question of the purpose of space and how its distribution defines the nature of our relationships and our concepts of equality and hierarchy.

Omar Rajeh and Mia Habis, invite several artists, coming from different cultural and artistic backgrounds, to join them in a collective creative process. The aim is to create an interactive performance evening that open the possibilities of sharing the space with an audience.

It is a meeting of Worlds at the heart of a multidisciplinary artistic force. An approach that brings choreographers, composers, architects, writers, activists, and other professionals to create together, while at the same time involving the audience as active participants, in addition to inviting local artists to join the performance, in each city where it is presented.

Space, is the central artistic concept of this creation. The distribution of space defines the nature of relationships and it equally defines its purpose. The performance reflects on its own gathering in order to comment on what it conveys or proposes as a value.

What is the space of a democracy? a dictatorship? The space of culture? identity? Sharing space, opening the space, protecting the space, and occupying space, is what this performance explores with the artists and citizens. How to belong to the space of the other and how to allow the other to belong to your space? Space as a medium of presence is also a constructed medium that reflects our inner concepts and understandings of equality, participation, hierarchy and supremacy.

DANCE PEOPLE is a festive, joyful artistic event but it is also a critical approach to the structures of power and supremacy. It weaves its composition out of the intimate stories of its audience and the creative diversity of its artists.

Why should you support us?

Dance People is a non-conventional performance gathering, with an innovative and deeply engaging artistic approach. It brings a diverse group of artists, creative entrepreneurs, and citizens from across Europe and the Mediterranean to connect, create, and engage in a shared journey of dance, ideas, images, and inspirations. It touches on urgent artistic and cultural matters, while exploring the immediate questions of a world in transition.

Through supporting Dance People, you will participate in bringing this performance to a different and diverse public. Your contributions will go towards covering technical and production expenses, artistic residencies, and ensuring that the artists, creative team, and local participants are all properly compensated. Together, we can make Dance People a transformative experience that challenges the way we think about the purpose of space within our human aspirations and relationships.

Who are we?

Our personal and professional journey of more than twenty years of artistic and cultural work in Beirut was not much different than a quest to make meaning. A commitment to the profession as it is also, to the cultural and social context. We believe that we succeeded because we were not alone. We were together with the city, the artists, the people, our professional international network of artists, programmers, and friends.

We established our career in a country with no cultural infrastructure and no presence for dance as a profession. We had to develop the infrastructure to be able to just walk into a rehearsal room and create. We had to build the walls of our theater ourselves to inscribe our artistic vision and respond through art to our cultural and social environment. Things did not happen by chance. They were shaped by a deep motivation and a strong will, but also by many dreams.

This is not romanticism it is a reality and we believe that our strongest achievement was establishing BIPOD, Beirut international platform of dance (2004), that grew from a simple three days gathering into one of the main cultural events in the country. What made the name of BIPOD was definitely the local context, however, the festival was equally recognized on an international level when it managed to play a role in co-founding other festivals in Ramallah (2006), Amman (2007), and Damascus (2008). Together with the regional partners, and through Masahat dance network that is still active until today, we managed to bring the four festivals into the international dance scene and networks.

We look at Dance people as a statement of hope and free expression. A necessity, in our times, to look forward to a better future anchored with values of openness, creativity, diversity, inclusion, festivity, and solidarity. As Orhan Pamuk writes in his novel ‘the new life’, ‘accidents are [new] departures’, we also see difficulties as new opportunities, as experiences to enrich ourselves, and as a new beginning, not a mere end.

If we also look back into our journey we do not see difficulties, we see richness and experiences. It’s a spirit of hope that keeps us ready and motivated to overcome yet another challenge, and a call for action, that is for togetherness, in order to do the simple act of creating meaning.