Michele Imad
In Beirut on the eastern Mediterranean, nothing confronts you with reality as much as the dance, the Arab body, the unadorned, which after years of horror has shed its ornamental dress and speaks directly to you.
They warned about this trip to Lebanon. To the north and east is war-torn Syria, to the south are Hezbollah fighters, engaged against Israel in the war with Palestine. If something were to happen, there is not even a sea route to the West, because Europe fears it would be used by refugees. The only way to get in and out of Beirut is by air – and if that route is closed, you are caught up in this explosive mix of biblical space. We hadn’t yet made it in; the airspace was closed. And when it reopened, we entered this beautiful city of Beirut. Beautiful not because the legendary “Paris of the East” is still visible, but because it is a city that relentlessly shows its scars and is unwilling to apply enough make-up to paint over its own history, even in its most beautiful places – even in the luxury bazaar of the Central District. Not even the never-ending construction boom, the evidence of which juts into the sky like exclamation marks, can cover up the wounds of a society traumatized by war and civil war.
Beirut
After the blast in August 2020
Instead, it dances as if it were breathing a sigh of relief for this moment, when no state is in power, no government is forming, no enemy is attacking, only threatening. Here, people have been dancing to avoid the beginning of a new era, ushered in by the world-shattering explosion of a silo in the port in the summer of 2020. Elsewhere, people count the time before, during and after Covid. Here people say: the time before and after the blast and also mean the time after the government and after the currency devaluation. It is a time of hope, when the old structures and infrastructures are on the ground and the next generation has the opportunity to do something more than just lick its wounds and talk about yesterday, when dancing still had to meet a decent standard.
Beirut is the place in the Arab world to allow a tolerance that does not exist elsewhere and attracts people like a magnet, enabling them to escape religiously based norms without provoking the radicals among the die-hards, who also exist in Beirut. You are not among your own kind, not in a dance scene that, with Omar Rajeh and Mia Habis, has long been internationally networked and has just celebrated its Bipod Festival. It is existing for exactly twenty years as the most visible expression of a dance movement behind the scenes of which the Arab body is negotiated. Its pride above all. It feels good to be in Beirut, under different circumstances, to see how bodies maltreated by religion, politics, poverty, fear, and hunger are rising again, pulling back the curtain and inviting us to forget all the clichés that surround the Arab world.
In images and texts, this piece creates a panorama of Beirut’s dance scene that cannot be experienced anywhere else as a document of the times and as an adventure tale that can only be told through dance.
Where there are no structures to make art possible, art throws itself a party. It does not need any structures; it creates its own in Beirut, in a deeply shaken city where everything has gone back to square one and anything seems possible again.
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