Breaking boundaries and borders of dance
The contemporary history of Palestine has been fraught with conflicts, tensions and unimaginable injustices (Pappe, 2006; Qumsiyeh, 2011; Said, 1992). The most prominent moments within the past decades have included the two Palestinian Intifadas1 and the more recent Israeli blockade and attacks on the Gaza Strip.2 Along with acts of violence and oppression there have been actions that have created a prison-like situation for those living in Palestine (Chomsky & Pappe, 2010; Levy, 2010; Pappe, 2006). The wall3 erected by Israel in the Occupied West Bank illustrates this incarceration (Backmann, 2010). While there are claims that the wall serves to protect the citizens of Israel from Palestinian violence, it annexes Palestinian land, severely impedes freedom of movement, separates families, inhibits access to resources and makes travel (even over short distances) impossible for many Palestinians (Backmann, 2010; Christison, 2011; Christison & Christison, 2009). Within the conditions those living in Palestine have endured and are currently enduring, it could be suggested that dancing in such a tempestuous context is ‘bizarre’ (Rowe, 2010, p.5). Despite the notion that dancing during war, conflict or occupation might be ‘frivolous’, dance permeates Palestine – as a form of resistance, expression, enjoyment and education (Rowe, 2009, 2010). I am reminded of this one afternoon I as walk through the streets of Ramallah.
‘Just dance in Ramallah.’ I came across these words faintly graffitied in purple on a wall in the suburb of Al-Tireh. This wall was on a main street I had walked along many times when going to the Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Studios or the Jasmine Café. Despite passing the wall almost daily I had never noticed the words until now, but they were too faded to be new – had they been covered? Had I just never spotted them? I took a photo of the writing and posted it on Instagram. My dancing friends in Ramallah commented that they had also never seen this before. A few weeks later I saw the same words written on the wall of a building in the older part of town, this time in light green spray paint – ‘Just dance in Ramallah!’, underlined and with an exclamation mark. Perhaps this was a coincidence? Perhaps there was a dance revolution brewing? Whatever the motivation behind the messily scribed words on the walls, they reminded me of how surprising Palestine can be.
Figure 10: The separation wall near the Qalandiya checkpoint in Ramallah, Palestine Image by Arnaud Stephenson (2014)
Figure 11: ‘Just dance in Ramallah’, a wall in Al-Tireh, Ramallah Image by Arnaud Stephenson (2014)
Ramallah was a city I was initially afraid of. I delayed visiting until I had been travelling the southern Mediterranean region for nearly a year. Perhaps part of my reluctance to visit was due to the images I had in my head of a warzone, full of chaos and danger. Despite spending much of my time in the region based in Amman, Jordan, less than an hour away from the Occupied West Bank, there were logistical issues that made visiting while also going to other locations in the region challenging.4 It could have been the stories I had heard from my PhD supervisor, Nicholas Rowe, who had lived there for a number of years, or perhaps the idea of venturing into a location that has an almost mythological history, but I was immensely nervous as I crossed the King Hussein Bridge for the first time into the Occupied West Bank. Arriving at the Inbound Tourist Hall I was greeted nonchalantly by a teenage girl dressed in an oversized Israeli army uniform, working on passport control. I noticed that the paper in front of her had doodles of flowers and hearts and that her fingernails were painted bright pink. She didn’t ask me why I was visiting; she barely looked at me. Instead, she just looked at my passport and said, ‘New Zealand – I really want to visit one day.’ While she scrawled on some small pocket-sized documents she told me that she was a fan of New Zealand’s landscape. She then stamped several papers and my passport, handed it back to me and wished me a pleasant visit. I tucked my passport away and noticed that she returned to her doodling of hearts and flowers before the next passport arrived on her counter.
Very quickly I realized that my preconceptions of Palestine as a frightening place were unfounded. While there were certainly elements of chaos and the occasional moment when I felt unsettled, as I met dancers, taught classes, watched performances and made myself at home in Ramallah I realized that this was a place of contrasts. There were enormous challenges and complications facing those who were engaged with dance, but there was also an abundance of creativity and tenacity in the dance practices that were occurring. There was something about Palestine that grabbed me, shook me up and compelled me to return over and over again.
During my first visit to Palestine there were several dancers I hoped to interview in Ramallah. I had been given the names of various dance practitioners by my supervisor, and knew of the few dance centers and groups that were active in the city. I had met one Palestinian dancer before my visit. I met Noora in Amsterdam at the 2009 Dancing on the Edge Festival, when she was dancing in a collaborative work called Waiting Forbidden. We chatted briefly between various performances and after some of the informal evening debates and presentations, but it was watching Noora perform in Waiting Forbidden that really caught my attention. This performance was about being Palestinian and being of Palestinian descent, and it aimed to investigate and question themes of displacement, fear and resistance, issues I was intrigued to know much more about. Talking to other dancers in the region I noticed how many mentioned the impact social and political issues had on their dance practices. Some expressed their frustrations with these conditions, while others explained the inspiration and creativity they found within their socio-cultural and political situations. For example, the Jordanian performance artist Lana Nasser posed the question, ‘Does censorship actually create more creative art, more innovative ways to say something? You just have to look at Iran5 as an example’ (personal communication, 10 December, 2011). Arriving in Palestine and witnessing the obscene separation wall erected by Israel and the treatment of Palestinians at border crossings, I wondered what impact this had on dancers and dance. Noora’s story started to reveal to me that the borders and walls Palestinians may be confined within, while unjust and illegal, are not debilitating to dance.
The first time I interviewed Noora she invited me to meet with her at the Popular Arts Centre in Al-Bireh, just a few minutes’ walk down a winding hill from where I was staying. I arrived a little early and took some time to absorb the mural on the wall of the hallway and up the staircase. The large colourful images of children and adults dancing and running beneath a crisp blue sky captivated me; some in the painting were wearing keffiyeh and there were Palestinian flags flying in the painted breeze. I followed the painting up the stairs. Noora warmly welcomed me into her office and introduced me to the many people that came in and out during the first interview we had together. The animated and excited squeals of children arriving for their dance classes in the early afternoon filled the reception area, and the muezzin giving the call to prayer rippled through the building from the mosque across the street as Noora and I talked. Between our interviews I would watch some of the children’s dance classes, where they were learning to stamp their feet rhythmically and count six stamps to the left, six stamps to the right.
Noora explained that she had started dance in classes just like the ones I spent my afternoons observing:
I was seven years old when I started dancing. I was very active, always moving and dancing, so my parents thought it would be good for me to come and dance. It was the beginning of the First Intifada, and my parents were very afraid for me – there was nothing for kids to do, the schools were closed, so they were concerned about my education. Then they heard about this group called El-Funoun that my cousin had joined. At this time it was only for boys – in 1986 – but in 1987 they let girls join, and I was one of them. I entered the Bara’em, the young group. I was very shy, I wanted to be at the back but I was always very short, so I always got pushed forward towards the front.
Noora recalled how she enjoyed the experience of learning and performing dance as a child; however, ‘becoming a dancer’ was not something she considered seriously until much later in life. Noora explained, ‘It was in my unconscious, it was not like I said to my parents, “I want to be a dancer” – there was no such thing.’ Noora’s experiences of dance were often intersected with recollections of trainers being arrested, memories of travel bans, or simply the words ‘occupation’ or ‘prison’. I felt that Noora never particularly dwelled on any of these experiences, but rather they made up the fabric of her life in Palestine. However, there was one story that she shared with me during the first interview we did together that left an impression on me, and was an experience that perhaps informed Noora’s future dance activities and practices:
Figure 12: Noora standing among the olive trees in Beitunia village, Palestine Image by Arnaud Stephenson (2014)
When I was nine years old it was my first performance. We didn’t have any costumes, but we had t-shirts with the image of Ghassan Kanafani,6 a Palestinian writer. It was banned by Israel at that time to dance and still my parents kept me in this group. Often the dancers would be arrested and the audience would be too – by the Israelis. This performance was in Jerusalem in Al Hakawati Theatre. I remember that day very clearly. I was supposed to go on stage and I was very excited, but also at the same time very afraid to go on stage in front of an audience.
But before we got on stage the Israeli army came and raided the place. I remember Khalid, my teacher, he literally held us all, he grabbed the kids – as many as he could – and threw us in this very small room, to protect us from what was happening. In the very tiny room there was a small window, and I remember my sister opening it and I looked out. I saw the soldiers hitting my mother, and then my sister, and then my father, and then my other sister, and then taking them away. Then a soldier doing this must have seen us, so he threw a tear gas bomb at the window so we had to close the window. I then just remember crying.
My whole family was arrested then, along with many other people. After that experience I wasn’t afraid of dancing – even though you’d think after something like that happening you’d say, ‘I never want to dance again’ – but no, it was not an option. I was afraid of the Israelis but that was it. All I had in mind then was that I wanted to dance.
Not long after this I went on stage again. The moment I was on stage I didn’t feel shy, I didn’t feel afraid, it was just like it was my own world. It was a place where I could be happy. It was very clear to me that this was where I wanted to be. And it wasn’t about the audience, because I still remember from that first performance it wasn’t about the audience. There were lights in my eyes and it was black, but it felt good – it wasn’t about a Palestinian cause or anything. Slowly I realized that this was my place, that this is what I wanted to do.
Over time Noora moved from the Bara’em group to the El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe where she danced and later began choreographing. Noora explained that her initial experiences of dance from abroad were at the Popular Art Centre, where teachers from Europe often visited for short residencies. Noora explained her first experiences of training from abroad and going abroad to train in the following narrative:
My first time with training from abroad was here actually – El-Funoun used to bring some trainers from abroad and we would train with them. By the time I was about 14 El-Funoun started to travel – the travel bans on members and restrictions started to loosen up in particular areas, and not so many dancers were being put in prison. The prison itself became within Palestine, within the country itself. It is a different reality – we can travel but I cannot go to Gaza or I cannot go to Nablus at times – it’s a worse situation, but it’s a different prison. It became in a way easier for me to travel abroad than travel within Palestine, which is quite an odd situation.
Noora shared how she felt that dancing during her teenage years had brought particular challenges. She explained that while some members of her immediate family were supportive of her dancing, she felt some pressure from her father and extended family to stop performing:
I had a lot of people telling me that I shouldn’t dance – my family as well, not my mother, but my father at many points and my aunts and my uncles. When I hit puberty they were like, ‘Ok, that’s enough.’ They would ask me, ‘Why are you still dancing?’ For my father, it wasn’t about being conservative – he really thinks that I need to build a future and this is not the way to do it, so it was not because he thought it was promiscuous or anything. I come from a very liberal family; however, my extended family, it was more because of the conservative views, so it was like why is she still on stage – get her off – and there was a lot of pressure for me not to dance. But I think with that, it was like when the Israelis came to the first performance I did – it made me want to stay as a performer even more.
Noora spoke of how the group she was dancing with, El-Funoun, played an instrumental role in negotiating the dance practices and performances with her family:
I think that El-Funoun dealt with it [dancing through the teenage years] beautifully. They visited my family many times, speaking with them about how important it was that I was there [in the group]. I had curfews from my parents, and I understand why, because society here does not accept a girl coming home at 12 at night when they are 14. It doesn’t fit with our society, and my parents didn’t accept it. They were like, ‘I can’t have you coming home at one o’clock in the morning on a school night, what are people going to say?’ – I understand it. It was like, ‘Ok, maybe I shouldn’t challenge them anymore and get a boyfriend and go to parties – all I have to fight for is El-Funoun.’
During her late teens Noora began to travel frequently to England, America and France, taking part in classes, workshops and residencies for varying lengths of time. These experiences of engaging with dance in different cultural contexts led Noora to reflect on her own motivations for dancing. She explained this in the following narrative:
I went to different training and workshops abroad, and I realized that many of the young dancers that I interacted with and met abroad, when I was maybe 16 or 17, had this very bitter experience with dance because they were technically trained very well, and they wanted to make it, to become dancers, but they didn’t really know why. I realized that it [dance] was always related to something so beautiful and so pure. It was never something forced on me, not as a technique or anything, never; it was always free will, and whether that was good or bad I don’t know.
Engaging with these different cultural contexts for learning and performing dance Noora shared how she began to question the role of ‘technique’ and how, as someone who was not schooled in Western technical dance training, she fitted in when dancing abroad:
Maybe it’s just a different approach. I started thinking about the content and the actual presentation of dances – you start seeing other choreographers from abroad and I sometimes think, well, they’re restricted in terms of technique, in terms of the discipline of the technique, but at the same time it gives them more freedom with bodies on stage, but then at the same time on the content level, how much do you have when you have all this freedom?
Noora also spoke of how she has always been drawn to choreography, and how the use of dabke elements influences her work:
As long as I remember I’ve wanted to change people’s choreographies. I just want to do my own work, and because of this I think choreography was often my focus when training abroad. So then I started exploring more and I started trying things out – you have these ideas of what you want to do, and the past maybe five years here [Ramallah] I’ve been very interested in women’s movement here and how women dancers move here – in El-Funoun – and you know we move, the bodies move – because in dabke the woman can do her movement plus the men’s movement, so to me they are very well rounded in terms of really using their upper bodies, their eyes, their hair, all their senses, and it’s interesting. I feel sometimes that I want to push that a bit forward and see where I can push that movement, and I’ve been trying to do that – but to make choreography about this outside of a Palestinian context might just seem confusing or conflicting.
Noora expressed how she felt that her practice as a choreographer had developed through her experiences abroad, which in turn fostered her creative work within El-Funoun. Noora explained that her experiences abroad enabled her to view how various environments and locations might influence her choreographic practices:
When I started choreographing for El-Funoun I started questioning: ‘Do the restrictions I have here [in Palestine] give me more freedom, more ways to think, or don’t they? Are these borders making me more creative? Because I’ve worked within boundaries here all my life and this is what creates my work and inspires me, do I want to get rid of them or do I want to keep them?’
Noora also expressed how what she needed and wanted from dance education abroad changed over time:
I would go for the summer to London and would dance there. I applied for residencies in Paris and I had a lot of valuable experiences doing this, but over time my interests changed. Like, when I was 17 all I wanted to do was take classes and dance, dance, dance, and then at age 21 I wanted to do residencies, that sort of thing. At age 26 I wanted have my own experiences and work with other people.
Noora’s work with El-Funoun, as a dancer, choreographer and trainer of the group, as well as her involvement with CACTUS Performance Art Collective7 and independent productions, has enabled her to travel abroad on a regular basis to gather diverse dance experiences and training. When I met Noora in October 2010 she had recently returned from performing with El-Funoun as part of the Shanghai Expo 2010. Meeting with Noora and some of the other El-Funoun dancers at a local café one evening, they recounted their journeys to and from Shanghai for me. They explained that while they had enjoyed the experience of visiting China, they were frustrated with the difficulties of travelling with Palestinian travel documents. One of the men in the group told me that it had taken him three extra days to get home to Ramallah, explaining that he had been stranded in airport transit lounges and waiting rooms as visa issues were dealt with. Noora rolled her eyes and chuckled, saying that this is what made staying abroad a very appealing option. Although this was said as a joke, I felt that there was some honesty within her statement. Returning home between these frequent experiences abroad raised issues for Noora about negotiating the term ‘contemporary dance’ in her home context. She also spoke of how, having experienced dance in Western cultural contexts, she would like to resist applying Western modes of dance teaching and learning in her home environment. She explained this in the following statement:
I feel that over many years we’ve been a bit trapped in that because for years we’ve been like, ‘we don’t want to be like the West’, and it has been an issue – so sometimes I just drop it. I don’t care what you want to call it, if it’s strong and expresses what I want to express, you can call it folklore, you can call it contemporary, I don’t care. The contemporary work allows the space to express and there are less boundaries, so dabke is a tool and it doesn’t negate the idea of having contemporary dance, but it [dabke] is also a tool and can be put in a contemporary setting. There are so many people, especially in the Arab world, working with the development of the body in different ways, working with a body that is not trained technically, and how the body can tell a story, and this is very interesting for me. Like, if I want to work with dancers, I want to work with dancers in Palestine and there are not technically trained dancers here, and if I want to work within the Arab world there are many dancers who are technically trained in the wrong way, and this is the worst – I would not want to work with them. So I’m really interested in working with people who do not have a dance background, or working with dancers like in El-Funoun who have a dance background, but not in the sense of being Western dancers.
The resistance towards being ‘like the West’ was an issue raised when discussing the development of dance in her home environment:
We need to work more technically on the body and not necessarily in the European sense. I don’t know, maybe we need to research it more, but if we want to work with bodies we need them to be strong; we need to have strong physical bodies, to get the maximum out of them. So we need to develop stronger bodies so that we can really reach the maximum.
While learning from her experiences abroad Noora explained that she is sometimes reluctant to work with artists who may be drawing on colonial ideals and promoting Eurocentric dance paradigms. She explained this in the following statement:
I choose not to work with some European artists, not because they are European, but because I don’t like their ideas and they have very colonial views, for instance. If you like it then fine, but I’m working, doing my work, and if you like it and are interested then you are welcome to come. I want people who are interested in my work to come, and not just interested in my history or in changing my future. I don’t want people coming in and saying what’s best for me, and this is very much happening. People dictate mostly – European minds, dictating what they want – and I don’t want to generalize and it’s usually not with artists […] but it’s not black and white. I’ve done some co-productions [that are cross-cultural and internationally collaborative] and people have come and said, ‘How can you let this happen, how can you let them [foreign artists, groups and organizations] do this here, to us?’ This makes me cautious now, cautious not to let colonial perspectives override the culture here, the strong identity we have as dancers.
As someone who is actively involved in the dance community in Occupied Palestine, Noora shared how she feels certain social responsibilities in her home environment and how training abroad might have challenged her artistic directions in her home environment:
There is a lot of responsibility in this tiny little country [Occupied Palestine]. I feel this huge responsibility, and then I leave and it’s like a weight has been lifted – I can go get drunk and have fun. But the more you see [abroad] the more you question your work at home. It’s very easy to be just in this bubble here, and I have been for many years, in my own bubble thinking that I am the world’s greatest – at times. Probably between the ages of 19 and 23 I was in that box, that bubble – where you think you own the world, and you’re a dancer and everyone loves you, but then what? The bubble bursts and you’re quickly back to reality. I’ve learnt that it’s good to go abroad – because you have to come back and give. My belief is that if people give back to their community, the community itself will be more involved.
I asked Noora if the next generation of dancers from Occupied Palestine might engage with dance training abroad, and if so, does she feel that they will return? And if they return, how does she think they will approach dance? She cited specific issues that she feels dancers will face, particularly when returning to their home environment:
It is very difficult, because say they go abroad, when they come back will there be this opportunity for them to continue the work they were doing abroad here? Will we be able to contain them? There are no jobs here. Things need to come together, so when they come back [to Palestine] they cannot only depend on El-Funoun. I want to be ready for when a young dancer comes to me and says, ‘I want to go and study abroad,’ and I will be able to say ‘Go’ – with confidence. We need to create opportunities for young people to have the chance to go and study dance professionally and have their own experiences and come home to opportunities.
Noora explained in detail that she perceives her self-identity to be something inherently informed by both her experiences abroad and in Palestine. She shared that she feels this comes through within her artistic work, regardless of the location where she is performing:
The word ‘identity’ for me is tricky because it can also trap you, in one place or another. I think me being on stage, being Noora, the way I look, I carry my history and identity in my flesh and blood. This doesn’t go away when I’m in a different location; I don’t have to say anything more. If I’m there people will ask why – it’s presence. It could be that in my work, yes, it might reflect who I am and my reality, and it could carry, it will probably carry something political or social because this is who I am.
An example of Noora carrying her history and identity through into her creative work was evident to me when I watched her perform in Waiting Forbidden, a co-production between El-Funoun, Le Grand Cru, Al-Balad Theatre and the Dancing on the Edge Festival (2009). The small black-box theatre was full to overflowing, and as the lights dimmed the hum of the audience became a still silence. The relationship with oppression, the motion of time and the dancers’ personal stories were focal points of the work, layered through a rhythmic dabke pulse and movement stemming from what seemed to be a common vocabulary that morphed into frenetic flurries of movement, skimming the floor, the walls and each other. At one point Noora stood motionless under a shadowy light filtering across the stage. I felt that watching her perform, her identity appeared to be clear, as a woman, as a dancer, and as a Palestinian.
Noora’s more recent work has continued to explore issues that connect implicitly with the context of Palestine. In the work Sensored (2012), which she devised with CACTUS collective members Thais Mennsitieri and Dafne Louzioti, Noora and Thais play on the words ‘censored’ and ‘sensored’. They investigate the query: how can we play nicely when some of us have louder voices than others? In a surreal performance space created with lights, sound and movement, Noora and Thais engage in a series of power games. Using a movement language of gestures derived from political speeches the women explore themes of power, control, oppression and voicelessness. Thais and Noora enter the stage to the recorded sound of cheering. Both are wearing identical black and white striped suit jackets and black pants. A power play ensues and the gestures turn more physical – clapping, stamping, slapping. The idea is that Noora and Thais are trying to censor each other, their voices each trying to drown out the other. Noora feels that the work speaks to the moments of censorship ‘where being seen and heard is all that matters’. Her narrative reveals further insight into the work and its relationship to her location of Occupied Palestine:
We took political speeches as the first inspiration, and the gestures used in the speeches. This is not a new idea, but it was a good starting point. Sensored began with the idea of voicelessness, a universal issue. But if you bring the idea of being voiceless to a Palestinian context it has a certain meaning, it is about power and control – so if you apply it here [in Palestine] it has a certain meaning, but Sensored did not set out to be a performance specifically about Palestine.
Noora went on to explain the process of developing the work with her collaborators from CACTUS, and how Palestine acted as inspiration:
As we were making the work we started to go in circles. We were not making any progress. We wanted to perform Sensored in public spaces in London, but quickly we realized that it is nearly impossible to get permission to use any public space for a performance. So just before we started to go through the process of applying for permission to access spaces, Thais came to talk to Dafne and I. She said, ‘I cannot get my mind off the borders coming in to Palestine.’ The thing was, they had an experience where Israeli intelligence took them to one side. Israeli intelligence started to question Thais, asking her why she was visiting, and she just told them, ‘Oh, I’m going to Jerusalem […]’. I told her to tell any Israeli the Jerusalem story. The woman questioning her said, ‘So what is in Jerusalem?’ and Thais froze. She said, ‘The Dead Sea’ [laughs]. The woman said, ‘You’re going to Ramallah, aren’t you?’ and they were like, ‘No, no, no […]’. But after the questioning the intelligence officer let them through, so they were lucky. It was the first time they had to go through this and I think it was a shock to both of them. I mean, you go through this arbitrary questioning process, you see the separation wall for the first time and it is all so absurd. People study surrealism in university, and we quote all these great surrealist artists, but you just need to visit Palestine and walk around and see the wall and things like that, and it is surreal, it is unbelievable.
So thinking about this experience of coming to Palestine for the first time, Thais said, ‘I think of a small space, concrete, interrogation, the light, the sound.’ We said, ‘Okay, let’s be in a closed space’, and then we thought about occupation and we thought, ‘Bingo! Let’s talk about occupation!’ I got all excited, and then they both stopped me. They said, ‘We are not talking about the Israeli occupation, and we will not talk directly about it like that. People see it, they know it, we are here to shed light on an issue perhaps or just bring up questions. We want to work in a way that can challenge us artistically with this theme in mind.’ So I said, ‘Yes, that is what we are doing,’ and I had to think beyond my immediate thoughts and experiences of occupation. We started to think about what it meant to occupy a space and we researched things like the Occupy movement.8 We decided to look at the concept of occupation from social and political perspectives as well as the more general meaning of the word. I see it to generally mean ‘to come and take a space’. So we came from this idea and developed the work from there.
We wanted to make a work that would easily tour to other countries. In each location we would take up a space that no one lives in – an empty building, a stairwell in an office block, these sorts of things – and that is where Sensored would be performed. We would present the work but also have discussions about what it means to occupy – not only in a political sense, but to occupy, to take space, be in space.
As we devised the work we started to realize that it was not a site-responsive piece; rather, it was just taking that space, whatever that space might be. We also knew that the audience were important to the performance. We decided that the work has to be informed by the people in it – including those watching. Along with the idea of occupation we thought we would work with the idea of choice – particularly choice for the audience.
Of course we had no money when we did the performance in London, but the University [Goldsmiths, University of London] gave us some space. We occupied that space and we found chairs. We invited an audience of ten people, and each audience member was given a chair, except for the last person who came into the room – they did not get a chair – so there was one person without a chair. The funny thing is that the first audience that came kept standing, holding the chair they had been given, not even sitting down. The second audience that came put the chair down and sat on it, leaving one person standing without a chair.
At one point we bring out bread and we give everyone a piece of bread, except for one person who gets no bread. So one person is not sitting, one person is not eating. Then we do Chinese whispers and someone is left out. The three of us then speak in our own languages – Arabic, Greek and Portuguese – so not everyone understands what we are saying. At other points of the performance we separate people from each other, we move them around the space, we tell them to sit or stand. The audience go along with what we encourage them to do, but they also have some choice about how they respond to our requests and actions.
We had discussions after the performances and there were often arguments between audience members. People were reflecting on some of the things that had occurred in the performance, saying, ‘You had a choice about doing that,’ then someone else saying, ‘No, you didn’t have a choice at all.’ In all of this we didn’t even talk about occupation or censorship. What I noticed is that we have that argument ourselves here in Palestine. I mean, is there really always a choice, or do you not have a choice about what happens to us at various times? When an Israeli checkpoint closes, what is your choice? Your two obvious choices are to turn around and walk away, or try to get through. If you try to get through your choice might mean you will die.
Figure 13: Photo shoot in Beitunia Village Image by Amber Hunt (2014)
The context of checkpoints, barriers, borders and restrictions engulfs the West Bank, and it is clear why these themes in Noora’s creative work resonate strongly with the Palestinian situation. In late January 2014 Noora invited Amber and Arnaud, my two photographer friends, and I to dinner at the home she shared with her mother in Beitunia village. After dinner we drove from the narrow winding streets of Beitunia towards the vast rolling hills dotted with olive trees and encroaching Israeli settlements. As we drove Noora told us a little about the area, what it used to be like a decade or two ago and the new developments that were impeding access to the roads, towns and land. Soon thick, high concrete walls barricaded either side of the road, blocking our view of what might be on the other side and creating a claustrophobic tunnel-like sensation, with the road only wide enough to accommodate two lanes of traffic and nothing more. Noora told us how the walls that cut the West Bank into awkward and illogical segments not only separated urban areas of Beitunia from more than half of the town’s land, but also were there to hide the encroaching settlement building and sustain the façade that those on the ‘other side’ were not there.
Returning back to the village and finding a part of the village where the olive trees were still abundant, we decided to take some photographs. As Noora posed with the sun setting behind her, capturing the shadows of the trees and illuminating her curls, a few children came out of a nearby house to see what was going on. Soon their mother, father and older siblings joined them. The girls stood back shyly, and some of the boys started jumping and mimicking the poses that Arnaud was making as he took photographs of Noora. One boy used the small radio he was carrying as a makeshift camera, sneaking up behind Arnaud and clicking away taking imaginary images. We realized we had caused quite a stir and the family wanted their pictures taken. Arnaud obliged and Noora briefly explained to them what we were doing there. The mother stood next to me, wrapping her light-pink dressing gown a little tighter around her body. Had we made her uncomfortable? Was it time to leave? She turned to me and said in a mixture of Arabic and English, ‘Dancing? Tayeb,9 okay […] good.’ Once again I was left feeling inspired and reminded of how surprising Palestine can be.