17:00 – 23:00 (doors open at 16:30 & 19:00)
Today’s program includes a simple warm meal.
Each festival day is programmed as one continuous performance: local and international artists share the stage. Stories, performance, dance, music and food gestures overlap.
You will be welcomed into a ritualized, collective space.
Share, taste, listen, move, be with us…
A sourdough starter passes from hand to hand, place to place, is shaped and reshaped. A question arises: what does it mean to belong, when one is forever being displaced? In Restless by Giath Taha and Mazen Al Ashkar, the hands engage with a living, breathing material that holds the weight of time, memory, temporality, and identity politics: bread dough. The performance reflects on the carried traces, the forms one inhabits, and the restless feeling of dislocated identity through the continuous motion of the resting and rising of the dough.
In Ritual under Occupation, Anastasis Sarakatsanos shares a story from one of his early visits to Occupied Palestine, of how he began to see the resourcefulness of the communities with whom he was a guest. The story reveals the social and political significance of ritual under occupation, where celebration becomes a quiet act of resistance and connection.
19:30 start evening program
A musical invitation. Anastasis Sarakatsanos and Esmail Bnaoe greet us with an intimate soundscape, inviting us to arrive fully—physically, emotionally, together—as we tune in to each other and the space around us.
In Three Songs to Re-member: A Tree, A Fruit, A Seed, Lina Issa moves through landscapes of memory and loss, of grief and joy, exploring what it means:
To inherit a tree that you can never touch, to pass on a trauma to your child, and to conserve seeds of people that are being exterminated.
This project hosts the practice, contributions and beautiful souls of Vivien Sansour, CurAmuní, Marlies Winkelmeier, Zohra Jaber Issa, and Luna Venezia Issa.
How can we shine on in dark times? Who are we when we narrate our stories through plant spirits? A performance ritual to close the festival. It is a collective, participative event. This evening is the second public Legacy & Seeds performance ritual, this time including the practice of Shaymaa Shoukry and Ahmed Saleh, as shared and developed in the Festival Labs, and building on and in collaboration with the ground work that Fazle Shairmahomed laid with artists-in-community Anima Jhagroe-Ruissen and Farah Rahman, plant spirits and all the people who participated in the Labs. Artistic practices, developed in an open, participative process, come together this evening. You will be guided through the ritual by Shaymaa Shoukry, Fazle Shairmahomed, Ahmed Saleh, plant spirits, and other space holders.
Releasing, falling, exhaustion, rest, (beyond) grief, body and land. How to offer mutual support, be in community? How can we be in solidarity? Exploring inner light, using light sources to explore seeing and the role of witnessing. Shaymaa Shoukry shares a practice of releasing the voice and engaging the pelvis and the core to release the body. Working together with Ahmed Saleh whose compositions treat sound as an intangible body, a being that envelops the voices and bodies of all in the space.
With Fazle Shairmahomed, we connect with plant spirits through dance and all our senses, asking the question: How can we be in solidarity? In a time where we are witnessing genocides and ecocides on our screens, it feels like we are failing as humanity. How did we arrive at a place where humans think of themselves as separated from nature? How come indigenous people who nurture deep relations with land are still being uprooted today? While we resist, it is important to keep honouring life, to show up in solidarity when we both hold space for grief, and honour a sense of togetherness.
Join the Festival Labs here, in which Shaymaa Shoukry and Ahmed Saleh will share their collaborative practice, in preparation of the closing Legacy & Seeds performance ritual.
A film installation will be on show before the performance program and during the break.
Loving the Land, longing for it and anticipating the return, a film by Palestinian dancer/choreographer Ramz Siam.
Some Strings, an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures by filmmakers and artists around the world, made in resonance with the legacy of Palestinian poet and teacher Refaat Alareer.
Drinks, tunes & visuals after the program.
All our tickets are pay-what-you-can to offer everyone the possibility to join the festival. If you’re able to contribute more, your generosity helps making this possible.
A free option (accessible with a code provided on request by e-mail to DOTE) is available for those who cannot pay/cannot make a payment to Dancing on the Edge.
Photo by Farah Rahman
