Badke(remix)

VOICES OF THE ARAB WORLD

With a deliberate inversion of the word dabke, the traditional communal dance that has travelled across centuries – from ancient fertility rites to contemporary wedding celebrations, and even to the defiant gatherings of civilians amid the ruins of Gaza – appears here as both rhythm and act of resistance. On stage, the creators, together with ten performers, transform dabke into a field of assertion and self-actualisation: a charged physical language that draws on contemporary dance, hip hop, capoeira, and circus, reshaped into Badke(remix).

A reimagining of the dance piece originally created in 2013 by Koen Augustijnen, Rosalba Torres, and Hildegard De Vuyst, and toured internationally between 2013 and 2016, Badke(remix) by Palestinian artists Amir Sabra and Ata Khatab revisits the language of tradition and gives it a new turn, attuned to the urgencies of the present. Beyond the rigid lines of borders – geographical and cultural – it sends out signals to any willing receiver, advocating for a shared, transnational sense of belonging. The devastation of populations during recent hostilities, and its global mediation, has often fostered the impression that being Palestinian constitutes a monolithic, homogeneous identity, devoid of internal differences or tensions. This performance sets out to unsettle this misconception: individuals of distinct social backgrounds – classes, communities, regions, educational and professional trajectories – join hands and follow the familiar steps, only to immediately break, distort, and rework them. A gesture of almost “profane” devotion to tradition, pushing it to accommodate the new desires and frictions of living bodies.

At the helm of a “wedding band” in the West Bank, Nasser Al Fares constructs an ambivalent sonic landscape where joy and ache coexist. Between musical passages, he addresses members of the audience he recognises, greeting them and making casual announcements. Throughout the unfolding “celebration,” sirens, drones, and children’s cries intermittently pierce the air. Are these documentary traces, or echoes drawn from the dancers’ memory? A fusion of festivity and war – two realities sharing a common musical root – insists on its message:

We're not going to let anyone tell us what to do.

We will dance until we drop.