 In my years working in archives, I’ve had the privilege to learn from records of labor struggles over the years. As a student worker in the film preservation lab of Bobst Library, I saw footage of union and Communist Party demonstrations in New York, fighting for higher wages, benefits, and rights for blue collar people. In my current work with Third World Newsreel, I’ve seen boots-on-the-ground footage of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Black people fighting in and alongside the Young Lords and Black Panther Parties. This footage not only includes protests and demonstration actions, but a lot of captivating scenes of creativity and artistic expression. Whether through the lens of a play performed outside a 1969 abortion rally or traditional Puerto Rican songs and provocative new poetry being performed in a community space, turning protest, action, and labor into a creative practice has been done throughout time. In my work with Arab.AMP, I’ve seen even clearer examples of creative expression as resistance, especially in the materials from the Al-Juthoor dabke troupe.  (Al-Juthoor performing at a Not Another Bomb demonstration on August 18, 2024. Hage, left, has been a member of Al-Juthoor for 8 years. Credit: Isaac Kopecky) Wassim Hage (he/they) has been a member of Al-Juthoor for eight years. Hage noted that he grew up athletic and knew about dabke from his own lived experience as a Lebanese person, and he started learning dabke as an undergraduate student. They noted some of the history of dabke and its interconnectedness with labor. “There is a popular history of dabke that suggests that the dance had its origins in group contexts of labor where communities needed to tamp down the ground ahead of planting or tamp down roofing in order to keep mud or various kinds of brick or ancient shingles together through stomping of the feet,” Hage said. “Then that eventually had a musical component, as so often labor will have some kind of tempo or a rhythmic component. Then that evolved into a dance, which then became a cultural piece.” View - Al-Juthoor performing at an outdoor event, circa 2023. Courtesy Al-Juthoor Hage noted that in Palestine post-Nakba, various political factions had their own dabke teams, including factions that represented workers and working people. “The throughline of dabke and labor is the way that dance and art dignifies labor fundamentally,” Hage said. “For me, the ability to do art, to pursue the limits of my physical capabilities and to connect with people in my community, is all what life is about. It's what being liberated from the need to labor would be about. It's what a good working life would be about if that's the life that we had.” View - Al-Juthoor performing at a Not Another Bomb demonstration on August 18, 2024. Credit: Isaac Kopecky While dabke and similar folk dances are practiced throughout the SWANA region, Hage noted that various countries and localities bring their own unique steps or approaches to the dance, or to similar line dances. “Even the same steps, whether you lead with your left or right foot, will vary from town to town in Palestine, in Lebanon, and into Syria,” Hage said. “You also have a lot of dabke in Jordan and the popular line dance style throughout the whole region. There's various Kurdish dances. There's Iraqi Chobi, which is also a line dance. There's line dances going into North Africa. So there's a huge range of different kinds of things that are dabke-like.” They noted that “incredible” teams exist throughout Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon in particular, and called the El-Funoun troupe the “north star” for Al-Juthoor. Additionally, the age of the Internet has seen dabke dancers fuse the traditional steps of dabke with hip hop or Latin swagger. Hage elaborated that at this point, Al-Juthoor’s choreography is mostly based on Palestinian dabke, but also they “don’t exactly just do dabke. I would describe it as modern Arab dance. A lot of the dances we're working with and ideas we're playing with are identifiably dabke steps.” View - Yasmeen Odeh and Wassim Hage of Al-Juthoor performing at a graduation event in 2023. Courtesy Al-Juthoor When asked what makes Al-Juthoor unique, Hage touched on their existence in the United States and how the group embraces art as resistance in their performances. He also touched on the fact that Zionist groups claim dabke and similar line dances as their own, actively appropriating as “they take the land” and “erase the culture because the culture is one of the things that undergirds people's relationship to the land when they are not able to actually have that direct sovereignty over their land.” “We have a very particular orientation of dabke and of Arab dance as an art form and also something that is extremely tied to political resistance against Zionism, imperialism, and occupation of our homelands,” Hage said. “We have a project of training dancers over years towards expressing a particular Arab dance form in service of our people's movements for liberation and resistance to occupation and colonialism. In that way, there's not a lot of teams like us in the US where you have that explicit political message along with the intention to take Arab dance, to take dabke and expand it into an art form to perform not at traditionally Arab cultural spaces like weddings, but to perform on the stage, to perform at schools, at events, at protests in order to promote Arab, Palestinian culture and resistance.” View - Al-Juthoor performing at Árabe Mahrajan: A Community Gathering in front of the Sumud mural in Oakland on July 12, 2025. Credit: Isaac Kopecky Hage works for the Arab Resource and Organizing Center as a case manager and community outreach coordinator, and they described the group’s broad mandate as “[serving] and [organizing] the Bay Area Arab and Muslim community, [building] power in that community and against the forces of imperialism, the rising forces of so-called fascism, and also resisting the violence of our homelands by Zionism [and] the Zionist entity of Israel.” Hage has led dabke workshops through AROC’s youth program, finding that through dance, he can help build up leadership and political engagement with youth. “Through that lens of resistance to occupation, pride in one's heritage, and pride in one's homeland, we're going to teach these kids dabke. We're going to get their hearts beating, their legs moving, and then engage them in politics at the same time.”  (Al-Juthoor performing at Árabe Mahrajan: A Community Gathering in front of the Sumud mural in Oakland on July 12, 2025. Credit: Lenny Gonzalez) In turn, this creates a ripple effect out to the children’s parents, who are AROC members. “Their parents are people who we rely on to get the word out about our events, about our Know Your Rights work, about our legal services. And so it is just one straight line for me. My place of work recognizes the value and being able that art and that dance have in organizing a community, in bringing people into your politics, into building safety and trust. So for me, they're one and the same.”  (Members of Al-Juthoor and the community dancing at a Not Another Bomb rally on August 18, 2024. Credit: Isaac Kopecky)
Bringing the political into the conversation is paramount, because as Hage pointed out, in the midst of injustice, “you don’t want to just dance.” “People in Palestine, Lebanon, throughout our region are experiencing mass murder and genocide at an absolutely mind-numbing scale. If you're just going to dance, you're just going to celebrate without that political edge, it loses a lot of its relevance and its importance. It almost becomes kind of cruel or ironic or strange to be able to feel joy. But when you tie that sort of athleticism, that joy, that movement of the body, which I think is very important by the way, for just human flourishing to the political and to the goals of resisting and ending the occupation of our homelands, then it makes sense. It falls into place and it becomes part of a tapestry of resistance and of art and of culture rather than something that feels tone-deaf or strange.” View - Members of Al-Juthoor and the community dancing at a Not Another Bomb rally on August 18, 2024. Credit: Isaac Kopecky Lead photo: Al-Juthoor performing as part of the Take Me to Palestine event on April 26, 2026. Credit: Ramsey and Charlie El-Qare I’ve been thinking about the first two themes of the new Sparks series, and how relevant they are to my work in audiovisual archives. Until I started my current graduate program, I hadn’t even heard of noise within film, video, and audio, and I thought about material in only the most basic sense of the term, not thinking about the extraordinary confluence of actions that bring videos to us. Noise can manifest both in the picture and audio of a film. When talking about analog film made on a cellulose base, noise is really grain, where silver halide particles provide a texture to the image. However, most contemporary films are made digitally, which also introduces noise to the final image. High ISO and/or low light on the camera can often manifest in more noise in the image, which shows up as discolored pixels against the rest of the object, subject, or scene. Seeing a side-by-side of an image with noise and the same image cleaned up in post-production really clarifies the concept.  A fairly “noisy” shot seen on the left, and how it would be edited for clarity and readability in post-production on the right. (Premium Beat) Noise in film translates to hearing hisses, hums, the sounds of HVAC in the background, etc. Too much distorts speaking voices and clutters ambient sound, though an ambient sound of the room is necessary. This room tone is recorded in most shoots for 30-60 seconds, so that the default, natural sound of the room is captured and can be layered on to the resulting video. This clip highlights how the noise of cars driving by on the street typically overwhelm human voices, making them unintelligible. What immediately strikes me is that noise is seen as unwanted, artifacts of the process that are usually edited out for clarity. Sound editors can’t completely edit out all non-dialogue or non-music sounds, or else an audio recording will come across as artificial, exposing the dreaded “dead air.” This is a good reminder: without some noise, our AV comes across as over-polished, unreal, artificial. I think this applies outside of the realm of film and video; without the “noise” of reality, we live in a pie-in-the-sky, blissfully unaware headspace made manifest at the cost of understanding what is around us. Noise can help us see the world differently and in a more realistic way, bringing perspective to our own observations that can gently challenge or correct us as needed. Some movies have used noise intentionally to great effect, including Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Below is an image from the movie, with the top showing raw camera footage and the bottom showing the digital noise added in along with color correction.  Top: raw camera footage from Lady Bird. Bottom: edited shot with digital noise and color grading. (Indiewire) When I think of noise in the context of the growing Arab.AMP archive, there are so many artists who use experimental sound to provocative, heightened effect. I think of the performance of La Macacoa, whose setup using multiple mics, involved hardware, and movement heightens their take on Afro-Caribbean and Taino influences. I think of the many artists who reinterpret classical instruments—especially Mike Khoury, Thea Farhadian, and Doga Cavdir—to bring noise into that which is typically peaceful. I see their vastly different interpretations as commentaries on the world around us, a jarring start back to reality and a call to arms through audio. I think of Alia Taqieddin and her Sonic Love Letter, blending melodic sounds like beach waves, humming, singing, and music with discordant sounds of scraping metal, sirens, and the panicked shuffling of people trying to escape imminent danger. The Arab.AMP archive is rich in experimentations and thought-provoking interpretations on sound, and I encourage you to browse our past Folktales offerings on our website to see even more of these interpretations. Materials seem to be a discussion at a more basic level, but that process can be involved in any artistic expression. Learning about the chemical processes that result in celluloid film production, for example, is nothing short of extraordinary. I recently had the chance to see The Story Behind Film and Film und Faser (Film and Fiber) at a symposium, the latter of which you can read about here. While neither video is available online that I can find, you can see this video to get a sense of how involved the process for making celluloid film for filmmaking and photography has been throughout the decades. I think of materials beyond the film and cameras themselves too, into what’s included in shots as props and set pieces, in concerts and performances, and how they all add up to a collective of materials adding to the ultimate artwork created. Many of the Arab.AMP artists and folks depicted in the community spotlight portion of Folktales use materials in unique ways, directly and indirectly. One of the first things I think of is the SUMUD mural, and how it communicates through murals of various sizes and from a diverse body of artists and community organizers a shared set of stories, values, dreams, and aspirations. I think of Joseph Bohigian, whose Stone Dreams draws sound out from what is typically seen as a hard and unmoving substance, calling on listeners to think about what joy, pain, and memory is stored in every material we encounter. I think of Jennifer Jajeh’s piece Aggression Intervention, which includes voiceover of thoughts and reflections while she lets loose in a rage room type of setting. The absence of most of the breaking sound is especially strange, and encourages the reader to really pay great attention to the visual and audio materials, especially due to their seemingly mismatched dialogue with each other. One of the perks of being the Arab.AMP archivist is seeing how the collection stays the same and changes over time, and how it organically grows with each contribution. Thinking about these various aspects of multifaceted audiovisual pieces allows me to have greater appreciation for the media, the craft, and the messages conveyed in each artwork. I truly can’t wait to see how artists continue to expand their own use of noise and materials in their pieces, and how us viewers and listeners in turn will learn and be inspired by their stories.
However, I also made it clear that this work mattered to me: as a queer person of color who grew up in a place where I was shielded from a lot of my Mexican culture, I have always been seeking the art and stories of people who experience barriers to accessing their heritage through materials. I have always been a curious lifelong learner, and feel as though the most enriching, inspiring learning experiences I had were done outside of theory-heavy lecture halls. I’m currently writing my thesis, and came across a podcast about an institution I want to highlight, Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. The speaker noted that he had grown up not being taught about local music and culture, and hearing from the world via harmful stereotypes that people in Appalachia are worthless and unimportant. When he started interacting with Appalshop’s archival materials and creating films for them, he came to know and appreciate that culture and understand that he was a contributing member to that ongoing legacy. One quote resonates with me still: “A community becomes dangerous when they understand their culture. 'Cause then you have something to fight for.” Not getting a seat at the proverbial table for so long makes a lot of people give up the fight and leads to identity challenges or confusions about oneself within their culture, feelings that don’t just disappear in a generation. Arab.AMP is making its own table, expressing themselves through captivating, provocative experimental art and preserving that art and culture in a time where so much is under threat. At the AMP Archives, we are growing our digital archival database of programming that reaches back to 2017, containing videos, flyers, and photos. This AMP.Archive Tales is intended to have the archive speak aloud, as we see recurring themes, catch up with past artists, and connect to what is going on around us now. Arab.AMP remains a platform for future-looking experimental art from members of the SWANA diaspora and allied communities, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider how that media can be seen in perpetuity. One striking thing in one of my first conversations with Leyya was her desire to save the Arab.AMP collection “so that it doesn’t go away.” I’m inspired by seeing each addition to Arab.AMP’s platform, and I can’t wait to check in here to tell you about my observations, trajectories, and archive-related advice.
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