Country without a state

There is the Shiite militia, allied with Syria, backed by Iran, and at war with Israel, and there is the right-wing Christian party that came out on top in the last elections in 2020 but failed to form a government. As the saying goes: “I’m not going to become a minister to get myself shot.” It’s amazing to experience a country that no one governs – not even caretaker Prime Minister Nadjib Mikati. He is the kind of politician who can sign a billion-dollar EU treaty to keep refugees out of the EU. However, this businessman with strong ties to the Syrian government and a not insignificant figure in the offshore shell company business, according to the Panama Papers, is unlikely to get much money to the refugees from Syria and Palestine themselves. They make up a good third of the population, and almost half of all people in Lebanon do not have enough to eat.

You might also notice that the devastating explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate at 6:08 p.m. on August 4, 2020, destroyed not just the port but also all of the surrounding urban areas. More striking, however, is the vast number of new buildings, each at least 20 stories high, as if this country wanted to show every satellite: we continue to grow, even with the world’s fastest-declining gross domestic product, even with a Lebanese pound that keeps begging children busy for hours on end counting what appears to be small change that was once worth one euro and is now worth 5 cents at most. They are collecting the remaining wealth of an entire generation, stolen from them by “those up there.” Lebanon is watchful; it is awake and alert. It is a country without a state. That is why nothing is delegated – certainly no responsibility is delegated to any of the people whom well-behaved Europeans usually assume to be in the “upper echelons.” On the upper floors of the capital, Beirut, there is usually a penthouse. If the lights are on there, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is light on the floors below. And if there is no light upstairs, the family may have has just gone to Station Beirut – the old station serving a long-defunct railroad. Next to it, surrounded by skyscrapers, a modern, moderately low building has gone up: an arts club where Moe Khansa, a star on the Beirut scene, is performing tonight.

A black limousine pulls up and the driver politely asks in French for valet parking, which is just as politely refused by Station Beirut. Wealth does not entitle one to the kind of valet parking that is available elsewhere in this city. Nevertheless, the well-heeled climb out of their cars and gather on the second floor, on the open upper deck of this art venue, for a drink before the doors open. They have paid $25 to see a dancer – a belly dancer at that – who advertises himself on small posters all over the city with Arab electropop, a genre that no one suspects of any impertinence. In real life, Moe Khansa is a very reserved and friendly man. He hides his delicacy under everyday clothes that are not particularly form-fitting. On stage this evening, of course, he hides nothing.

He doesn’t live in a bubble that protects him. As a result, he is a much more open and direct defender of his culture, which, as he says on another occasion, suffers greatly from what the media has made of belly dancing. “The media has put this image of belly dancing in our heads, I get that.” But what does that mean? For him? He is a male belly dancer, and any association that promises a seductive appeal between breasts and buttocks is a betrayal of Arab culture, of his beauty, of his magic. “I want to celebrate my culture,” he says, and even the traditionalists he is addressing – and not just a scene that at best wants to do the same – understand this. He says quite openly: “I feel so masculine when I belly dance. I feel like a real man, a brave man.” This resonates in a masculine society whose sexuality is in many religiously sanctified hands. He even threatens this society when he recounts how his own mother celebrated belly dancing and how he was fascinated as a child “by the ornaments she created with her body.” Anyone who wants to insult this magical, ancient Arab culture is insulting his mother. In the Arab world, this is probably quite an effective gesture to silence others.

So on this evening at Arab Electro Sound, he proudly celebrates a “dancer as God’s athlete,” as an indomitable master who otherwise likes to slip out of his pants, under which he wears a dervish skirt, which he drops to reveal the typical belly dance tulle skirt with its dancing coin belt, like a pop star who is able to create dreams, or more beautifully in his words: “We are dancers, we create the dreams.”

Moe Khansa is currently a top star in a relatively long genealogy of Lebanese men who have discovered belly dancing for themselves, starting with Alexandre Paulikevitch with his magnificent curls in a feminine outfit, and continuing with the Zoukak free theater community on a noisy arterial road not far from the exploded silo, where the queer community, which also organizes “Pride Beirut” – and which celebrates, among others, Dima Mikhayel Matta, an openly lesbian star of the scene. Of course, Beirut is a cultural center for the vast Arab world, between the Levant in the west and the Persian Gulf in the east – not only for those whose sexuality would be considered deviant in Islamic and Christian interpretations; above all, Beirut is a center for the arts. Does the one have anything to do with the other? Honi soit qui mal y pense. In a country without a state, it’s nobody’s business.

This engines-roaring reality, this shisha-smoking relaxation in Lebanon is not easy to bear. For a long time, Bassam Abou Diab has danced dabke, the folk dance of the eastern Mediterranean region, which led him to contemporary dance and physical theater as a member of Omar Rajeh and Mia Habis’ Maqamat Dance Theatre, an internationally renowned company from Beirut. Omar Rajeh and Mia Habis now live in Lyon with their school-age son. But they always come back. In 2004, they founded the “Bipod” (“two feet” or: Beirut International Platform of Dance) dance festival here. Twenty years later, it is still going strong. In 2006, the two also founded the Masahat Network together with a number of similar dance companies from the region – the El Founon company from Ramallah (the then company of choreographer Mey Sefan from Damascus) and another from Jordan. In the wake of the Arab Spring, this grew into a dance platform for the entire Arab region under the name “Moultaqa Leymoun” – all amidst the turmoil of Lebanese politics. There has never been a Ministry of Culture in the strictest sense in Lebanon; there was a cultural authority that was housed in the Ministry of Agriculture until shortly before the country went bankrupt. No joke – it was called the Ministry of Culture and Agriculture and was headed by a businessman who speculated in diesel. “All over the world, theatrical structures are a reflection of society,” says Omar Rajeh. And laughs. Lebanon’s theaters were poorly-maintained properties that artists had to rent in order to perform. “We used to fix chairs and the stage instead of rehearsing,” says Rajeh, “These theater managers in Beirut were like our politicians: they collected and controlled, but they did nothing.”

To finally escape the desolation of Beirut’s theaters, dancer Mia Habis and her husband, Omar Rajeh, had a gigantic mobile theater dome built out of simple elements: the Citerne. It was a miracle of mobile theater architecture that had to be dismantled immediately after the 2017 Bipod Festival, because the couple refused to ask the governor of Beirut for patronage. He, too, is no longer in office, having spent years managing a national library that contained no books, just as he managed “The Egg,” an old Brutalist-style cinema in Martyrs’ Square. On October 17, 2019, this vacancy was ended by demonstrators with the same determination as the vacancy of the former opera house a few meters away – both are still in an appalling state. The demonstrations against the government, the protests against the emptying of the state coffers, against the theft of one’s own money by the bank, against massive corruption, in short, against the state as such, have had an effect. The Citerne is now stored at the top of Mount Lebanon, the mountain range overlooking Beirut that serves as a retreat for the Lebanese during the hot summer months. Only some of the technical equipment has been unpacked – sound equipment and spotlights – in order to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Bipod Festival as a “feast,” as Omar Rajeh emphasizes. For a long time, they doubted the practicality of an international dance festival on Beirut soil. They could no more imagine a parade through the city like that which the Biennale de Lyon organizes in its new home than they could picture a showcase of dance stars whose performances are so popular that audiences fight for tickets months in advance. This is not Beirut. Beirut is a community that drew closer together after the state’s bankruptcy, after Covid and its most visible warning sign: the silo explosion that almost completely leveled entire neighborhoods in eastern Beirut, including the Central District, Mar Mikhael, Al Hikme, and Karantina, and also severely damaged more distant but elevated places such as Mar Mitr, with its famous Sursock Museum.

There, in the museum, the shock of August 4, 2020 is now carefully preserved. Surveillance camera footage of the old building, now carefully restored, has reached the value of works of art that still only hint at the full force of the blast. At the time, the museum itself had just opened an exhibition with the unsuspecting title: “At the still point of the turning world, there is the dance.”

At the center of the exhibition is now a video produced in a Parisian process called “Iconem” by the company of the same name: Beirut, reconstructed from 30,000 individual images from the past and present, in order to preserve the memory of this city in three dimensions in the aerial image, in all its layers, which it carries within itself as a constantly-mutating and growing, destroyed or collapsing entity.

Next door, Hadifé opened a restaurant called, somewhat self-deprecatingly, Marks Union. You can find it on Google, but you won’t find the factory. For Hadifé, it is like Beirut itself: a surprising space that this hedonist with an art background has given to the festival in exchange for a handsome rent.

Here, the idea of how a festival could become a celebration – as a free space that does not chase the audience from performance to performance, but allows them to glide from one dance event to the next – could grow. In the morning, the factory serves as a venue for workshops; at lunchtime, Marks Union becomes a setting for discussions with the artists; and in the evening, the halls, divided by glass panes, are subjected to a choreography by the audience. That was the plan, and that’s how it is done.

Charlie Prince, a composer who found his way to dance through conducting and a self-proclaimed “archaeologist of dance,” is performing in one of the halls. He steps onto the bare stage, turns on the lone spotlight, and immediately the power goes out. No one is startled. When the light burns down again on the music and sound mixing instruments spread out on the left, one feels an alien force in his body, nestled against the space, driving and guiding him, pulling him up from his four-legged crab walk in his heavy lace-up shoes, as if his shadow under the spotlight were steering him, weakening his knees and making his shoulders bend far back. When tombak virtuoso Joss Turnbull joins him, crouching in front of the instruments and firing little electronic explosions into the room with the tombak again and again, adding pitch after pitch, Prince reaches out with scooping arm movements. Suddenly, he clamps his hands to his chest, either in pain or defiance. His body tries to escape itself, moving up, down, sideways.

They accompany Omar Rajeh almost incessantly on the back wall, alluding to the demonstrations against the government, to the physical presence of people in existential distress, to their street battles with the tear gas-spraying state security forces, to the hopelessness of these bodies that they have thrown at their own representatives. Omar Rajeh finds all of this in his body, in pulsating micro-movements that seem to arise from the impotence of no longer being able to act – in the involuntary movements, as if to escape, to protect himself from the traumas that he and others have suffered in these moments of political and economic decline, as others have caught the virus at the same time.

At the end of the performance, the audience, richly gifted with basil, moves out of his venue, past dance video screens, and up to the fourth floor of the factory. Here, they encounter Daliah Khalife, a dance artist who normally works as a set designer, a scenographer who has created a hyper-realistic avatar of herself and uses her own dance movements to control it.

This improvisation flows seamlessly into a tango performed by Mazen Kiwan and his students. Not far from here, however, right next to the Bourj Hammoud district near the port in Karantina, this next generation is also exposed to a very real reality, without shelter or theater.

He remembers his grief the first night after his father’s death, his body trembling on the two square meters left for him to move on. It shakes him. In the background, we see the widow, his mother, waiting patiently in the kitchen for her son to complete his ritual, holding a tray on which she will later serve coffee. Yara Boustany and Ratha Baroud are the guides to this intimacy, and they lead the guests through it, back out of the poor village into the surrounding small workshops, many of which have not been rebuilt, which have lost their roofs and their meaning, and now look like natural open-air stages.

This is where Alexandre Habre, Ratha Baroud’s protégé, appears – a tall, frail man holding a doll, an avatar, on his own body. In “L’autre,” he tries to breathe life into this other being as an attempt to relearn love, responsibility, affection, the bond that he seems to lack so much in this world that one wants to be moved by this lonely solo with a doll that remains wonderfully lifeless amid the ambience of a ruined city.

“There is no ministry that can say ‘no’ or impose conditions. Of course, you have to make at least forty percent at the box office and spend the rest of the day canvassing international cultural organizations. For our twentieth anniversary, we were lucky enough to find many private donors and patrons, and now we can continue. Next year, in 2025, we will try to revive the old station, which is still intact. No trains have run there for decades, but there is still a manager on duty, there are employees, and they are happy that they no longer have to manage an empty station where people would wait in vain for a train to come and take them to a better life.”