 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 Comments are closed.
|
Archive TALES
|
RSS Feed