This is a translated version of a report I wrote to Finnish dance magazine liikekieli.fi

See the original text in Finnish: https://www.liikekieli.com/theres-no-human-rights-here/

Due to the changing situation in Palestine, as well as my ever-growing understanding of imperialism and colonialism, some of the thoughts in the text are outdated.

In the heart of the Palestinian city of Ramallah is a dance school called the Ramallah Ballet Centre. The school was founded by Shyrine Ziadeh, a cultural manager, dance enthusiast and dear friend of mine. Ziahed has spoken extensively about her ballet centre to media worldwide, from Reuters to the Irish Times, and from Middle Eastern press to TedX audiences around the world. A Google search for the school gives the picture of something born out of real need. Headlines such as ‘Finding freedom in Palestine through dance’ (Stance on dance 2017), ‘Seeking change through ballet’ (Bangkok Post 2014) and ‘Challenging conservative values’ (The New Arab 2014) celebrate the work of the school.

I met Ziadeh while studying for an International Masters in Dance Cultures, Intangible Cultural Heritage and Dance Anthropology. We both needed to explore new dimensions of dance: Ziadeh needed a wider support network and ideas for developing her dance school, and I had reached a point in my artistic career where I wanted to see the potential of dance art outside the conventional boundaries of the contemporary art field. Topics such as the liberating power of dance and critical pedagogy, as well as the desire to work with people who, for various reasons, have been deprived of their freedom of agency, brought us together. A development plan for the Ramallah Ballet Centre was the result of two years of living together.

Ziadeh had answers to some of the structural questions, but because of the ever-changing, complex situation, she felt she could not solve the challenges of the overall atmosphere and motivation in the area. She felt that I could help her with the challenges of the dance school with an outsider’s perspective. Personally, I was curious to get to know her home country, to help if possible, and to develop something significant in a region that had become important not only through dance but also through the friendship that had been formed. My own previous dance research had focused on prisons, on the potential of creative movement in a community of prisoners, and working in Palestine, described as an ‘open prison’ (Räsänen 2017), seemed a logical extension.

One of our main objectives was to explore the possibility of establishing a western equivalent of dance training in the Ramallah area, and to create a framework for cultural exchange. The aim was to create an interest in dance, to find young people who were interested in Western ‘art’ dance, and to find out what structures already existed.

To this end, Ziadeh and I drew up an action plan to raise the profile of the dance school and dreamed of collaborating with the CID (International Dance Council). We took the action plan to the Dance Council and to the Minister of Culture in Ramallah. In practice, Ziadeh handled the negotiations in Paris and in Palestine, and I took over the dance school, including teaching and organisation, for three months at the end of 2019. Although the above parties came forward to encourage us to join the discussions, we received support mainly in the form of empathy and a logo – the political challenges were overwhelming.

The political power relations in the region also structure the dance scene. The Israeli contemporary dance scene is vibrant and well known in the West. In the Palestinian territories, the scene is very marginalised, with local artists imprisoned and killed, performances blocked and border crossings made very difficult for foreign dance artists. In order to support the creation of the Israeli state, Palestinian cultural history and products have been given Israeli names, such as the Levantine folk dance dabkeh, which has been appropriated as an ‘Israeli folk tradition’. Almost every dancer in the famous El-Funoun folk dance group, regardless of gender, was imprisoned without charge for between two weeks and two years in the 1980s (Rowe 2010). The dances of the Dabkeh group were often political statements and representations of indigenous culture, which may have given the Israelis additional ammunition, although the real reason for the killing and imprisonment of Palestinians is still not given by the Israeli military regime today (Räsänen 2017, Rowe 2010, Harari 2019). My Finnish colleague, who has been working as a music teacher in the region for four years, is regularly subjected to psychological and physical violence when she crosses the border on business trips, despite having official papers and travel permits. She says she used to campaign for human rights, but after repeatedly hearing the phrase ‘there are no human rights here’ at border crossings, she has stopped trying. Through violence and intimidation, Western workers and visitors are discouraged from visiting Palestine and, at the same time, from intervening in the region.

Cooperation with the Israelis is impossible as long as the indigenous Palestinian population has no way of breaking out of the relationship of inequality and power. For this reason, they see it as the responsibility of artists on the Israeli side to enable democratic cooperation (Rowe 2010). This would require artists to be pro-Palestinian. But according to both dance scholar and artist Nicholas Rowe and Ziadeh’s account, Israeli artists are unwilling to swim against the tide with the Israeli authorities because the risks are too great. In my own experience, Palestine is a taboo subject among Israeli artists, and in the words of researcher and Palestine activist Syksy Räsänen, ‘even though Israeli Jews live so close to Palestinians, they don’t know what conditions they live in and how Israel treats them – or they know they don’t want to know more. For many, the occupation doesn’t even exist, and Palestinians are only noticed when they resist, otherwise they can be forgotten’ (2017:22). Although Ziadeh is happy to send her own visiting dance teachers to workshops on the Israeli side and welcomes those willing to come from beyond the checkpoints, there is no exchange.* For the Ramallah Ballet Centre, this means finding collaborators from further afield.

*Update 2024: The willingness for cooperation is no more emotionally, psychologically or practically viable.

Ziadeh’s love of ballet led her to found the Ramallah Ballet Centre. In the mid-20th century, the private St Joseph’s School for Girls in Ramallah began offering ballet classes to its students under the guidance of a Russian ballet teacher. A few private schools followed suit, and ballet became a new extracurricular activity for the children of wealthy families (Rowe 2010). This is how Ziadeh took her first dance steps in the 1990s, with a Russian ballet teacher in an after-school class at a Catholic girls’ school. She often says that she founded the Ramallah Ballet Centre to bring a sense of freedom to a country that had been denied it. For her, ballet has represented freedom and independence since childhood. The illusion of a ballet swan gliding gently across a pond provided a much-needed escapist contrast to the armoured car parked in the street at home, blocking her family’s shopping trips. At the same time, her teacher instilled in her the idea of ballet as the foundation of all dance forms.

The experiences and illusions of freedom and imprisonment have been at the heart of my own artistic work, so it was no coincidence that I embarked on this relatively utopian project with a dear friend. For me, the elements of power in classical dance, the colonialist aspects and the discipline required by the art form, were the factors I considered when planning what elements I would be willing to pass on to children whose futures would be marked by restrictions and constraints. For many dance scholars, classical ballet also contains harmful parasitic elements, such as the illusion of hyperfeminine lightness and themes of physical constraints and racial segregation. If a dance genre in which the traditional idealisation of the slender, tall, white body has remained a persistently essential part of the aesthetic seemed a problematic export element, how did I solve my problem?

I am a contemporary dancer, dance teacher and choreographer by training, but I grew up and studied in a time and space where ballet is still seen as “the foundation of all dance”. Involuntarily, as a slave to cultural influences, I adored the ballet body and never really stopped barre training. It was in Ramallah that I first began to think about how to share the aesthetics of ballet in a more individual-friendly, identity-affirming way. Something that has been talked about in Finland for a long time, but which I, as an expatriate Finn, have missed out on. I also did my best to promote contemporary dance, but only one local girl turned up for the classes. In contrast, the feeling of freedom that Ziadeh experienced as a child in a dance class called ‘ballet class’, which manifested itself in her dream of a dance school, could well be experienced by children in a dance class that we called ballet because of the mothers, but where I mostly mixed methods of free and creative dance and play.

The work in the studio was heavy in its simplicity, even though there were not many students. I spent a lot of time marketing and networking. I visited local schools to talk to children about ballet and organised open days. I sewed pea bags, scarves, a theatrical props and tutus with assistance of the church’s Traditional Handicrafts Association Melkite. The local Dabkeh folk dance group held full classes for all ages almost every day, but the concept of a dance studio was still alien to young dancers coming from rural areas. The mud and sand on the soles of their shoes was a hazard to the dance floor, which I patched with toilet paper. I spent an hour each day scrubbing the floor and cleaning the studio before my own classes, which were not well attended – sometimes none at all.

I looked forward to working closely with the dabkeh group. This internationally performing group, well known in Palestine, used the studio for their own rehearsals when the hall was free. Dabkeh is a form of folk dance that originated and spread in the Levant and is known to have a history of at least 4000 years. In the Palestinian context, the dance style is perceived as an essential part of the cultural heritage and identity of the people. It is seen as a symbol of the tenacity and perseverance of the Palestinian people, and the dances often have a highly political connotation. I received a warm welcome and an invitation to dance practice in the beginning, but a week later, when Ziadeh returned to Europe, the sound of the bell changed dramatically. I found the dabkeh group’s attitude towards Western dance styles and teachers contradictory and sometimes disrespectful.

My negotiation techniques were not working and I was unnecessarily taking the conflicts personally. In retrospect, I have begun to wonder how justified my own work at the Ramallah Ballet Center actually was. Although the person who asked for help was a good friend of mine from the area, I wonder whether I was at the same time destroying indigenous culture by promoting ballet to those who already dance the dabkeh or to others who had not yet discovered the discipline for themselves. If the classes of the revolutionary dabkeh group, which exudes energy and passion, attract so many young people that they need additional time slots and facilities to meet the demand, how necessary are a few European-style classes for a few students? The contrast between ballet and dabkeh is big, which in the light of the European view could be seen as a positive aspect as the different dance disciplines could complement each other. On the other hand, for populations that have collectively experienced widespread exclusion from their cultural heritage, such as the Palestinians, the sense of local cultural cohesion can feel very fragile (Rowe 2008) and external influences threatening.

Since the 1950s, ballet classes from Western teachers have been an elitist currency used to promote Westernisation (Rowe 2010), and being aware of this as a Western dance teacher in the Middle East created pressure. In retrospect, I wonder if I was playing a part in westernisation and the importation of parasitic Western products. On several occasions, Palestinian mothers verbalised the worn-out themes I have been struggling with in European concert dance culture. Over the course of three months, I was asked several times to answer questions reflecting the traditional values of ballet, such as “Is my child too fat for your classes?” and “How many months does my child have to dance to become a ballerina?

The outward export of international influences from the West is often easily interpreted as the cultural hegemony of the dominant nation. At worst, it leads to the alienation of the receiving individuals from their own cultural identity, their own community and its own human resources (Freire 1972; Said 1978, 1993). A number of Palestinian dance artists interviewed by Rowe also felt that the widespread practice of foreign dance techniques would shape their aesthetic decisions, thus diminishing the role of local dance culture. Moreover, local cultural autonomy would be undermined as dancers would be forced to submit to foreign expertise (Rowe 2008). The Ramallah Ballet Center’s agenda to steer students’ minds away from war and conflict through ballet and other dance disciplines seems important, but a cultural education project that relies solely on foreign assistance may inadvertently perpetuate cultural hegemony from abroad. On the other hand, a counter-hegemonic approach (Gramsci 1985), which tends to negate all cultural influences from outside, can be a major problem for cultural growth (Spivak 1990).

Hegemony and counter-hegemony have been countered by an anti-hegemonic theory that challenges the construction of both cultural imperialism and cultural polarisation. The aim is to create an autonomous and self-referential cultural environment in which myriad cultural systems can promote pluralism within cultural globalisation while remaining self-accepting – that is, not dependent on their similarities and differences in relation to a single dominant culture (Rowe 2008). This is what Ziadeh has been working towards, but it would require the willingness of all parties to cooperate and engage in dialogue and a shared goal of a plural cultural landscape. Curiosity about each other’s cultural resources should be mutual, but a community that has experienced a traumatic cultural history may understandably be reluctant to accept outside influences if its own cultural identity is already on the defensive.

Cooperation that has deprived the other party of agency and resources in their own cultural field must be on their terms. My own situation was one of navigating between two fires. The ideological conflict between Ziadeh’s ideal of ballet and the local folk dance community, as well as local mistrust, was an inherently impossible circumstance to resolve alone. However, I did not consider the constant stream of failures as a problem for my work, as the lessons I learned from my training reminded me of the usefulness of experience of all kinds. My English professor of dance anthropology used to tell me how, when entering a foreign culture, following the original plan is utopian and failure inevitable, but what matters is how to use the information you have for the future.

Ziadeh has repeatedly asked me to write about the situation in Palestine and to share my experiences and what I have seen. The recognition of Palestinian culture and history is increasingly being left to outside research as the indigenous voice is silenced under Israeli genocide.

As a European dance artist and dance researcher, navigating cross-cultural projects carries with it the hope of embodied dialogue, but in subjugated communities, collaboration and exchange of experiences can easily slip into a one-sided export of know-how, leaving the local voice unheard. Thus, identifying an anti-hegemonic goal per se will not go far if insidious hegemony intrudes into the project with colonised communities in circumstances where surrounding socio-political upheavals have seriously disrupted the mechanisms of reproduction of indigenous cultures (Rowe 2008).

The key to such projects would be strong practical resources, years of structural development work, financial support and the possibility of returning to the region. It is practically forbidden to be in Palestine and access has been made difficult for everyone. The Palestinians themselves are unable to move freely, even beyond the borders of the cities, and Ziadeh herself has not dared to return home for two years now, as there is no guarantee that she will be able to return to Europe to her French husband. Her husband is permanently banned from travelling to the region. A few years ago, the situation was a little better and our hopes were alive, but the ever-increasing power of Israel has so far made it impossible to continue the project.

Freire, P. 1972. Sorrettujen pedagogiikka. Into Kustannus: Helsinki.

Gramsci, A. 1985. Selections from cultural writings. Harvard University Press: New York.

Harari, Y. N. 2018. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Gray: New York

Räsänen, S. 2017. Israelin Apatheid. Into Kustannus: Helsinki.

Rowe, N. 2010. Raising dust: A cultural history of dance in Palestine. Bloomsbury Publishing: London

Rowe, N. 2008. Dance education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: hegemony, counter‐hegemony and anti‐hegemony. Lehdessä Research in Dance Education. Vol 9: 1. S. 3-20.

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism: Western concepts of the Orient. Pantheon: New York