Freedom inside and outside of dance
The long stretch of highway from Queen Alia International Airport to the city of Amman is a journey that I have been on many times. The landscape is beige and flat, the cars drive too fast for my liking and often I just hope that I will arrive in Amman alive. In April 2014 my regular driver, Sayel, collected me from the airport and I made this journey for what felt like the hundredth time. As we passed the few small sections of fields being tended I noticed that makeshift tents and haphazard shelters had been erected as temporary communities around the farmland. The scrappy plastic tarpaulins billowed in the breeze, while the ground around the dwellings was strewn with detritus. Sayel, noticing how I was fixated on the sight as we drove past, looked in the direction of the tents and said, ‘It is sad, it is a terrible situation for the Syrians. More are arriving each day.’ A huge number of Syrians had fled their country since the start of the Civil War. A vast number had moved to nearby countries – Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt – and there was a struggle to accommodate and provide basic resources for these refugees. I was aware that, like other countries in the region, Jordan had limited infrastructure for its own population, let alone for an influx of refugees. I asked Sayel for his thoughts on how he felt Jordan was coping, and he said, ‘Jordanians want to help our brothers and sisters from Syria, but I notice that people get angry because there is not enough to go around. When things go wrong the first people everyone blames are the refugees.’
Figure 14: Downtown Amman Image by Arnaud Stephenson (2014)
This mass influx of Syrians into Jordan was the third large wave of refugees the country had experienced since it gained independence in 1946. First there was the arrival of Palestinian refugees in 1948, and then again in 1967. A flood of Iraqi refugees arrived in 1991 and 2003. The latest stream of refugees from Syria was huge, and while the UNHCR estimates that there are approximately 640,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan (UNHCR, 2015), the actual number could be double this. With such vast numbers of people moving across the region, problems pervade refugee communities – human trafficking, abuse, underage marriage, illegal employment and mental health issues. Everyone had a story or opinion about the refugee situation. I was no exception.
A few weeks prior to this trip from the airport and the conversation with Sayel, I had been in Lebanon for the International Dance Day Festival at the Lebanese American University. Part of the festival involved a site-specific performance around the scenic waterfront of Byblos. I took several photographs in the late afternoon sun as the dancers moved intricately together over the rocks on a long pier leading out to the Mediterranean. I posted one of these images on Facebook that evening. Almost immediately
Figure 15: Dancers at the International Dance Day Festival Lebanon 2014 perform on the pier of the Byblos waterfront Image courtesy of International Dance Day Festival Lebanon (2014)
I received a Facebook message from Ahmed,1 a dancer I had met four years before in Damascus. He wrote, ‘I saw your picture! Are you in Lebanon? I am here!’ I had not heard from him since I last saw him in Syria, and had often thought about him as the events of the Syrian Civil War had unfolded.
I quickly replied and we arranged to meet in Beirut the next day. Meeting in Hamra Café, Ahmed told me that after fleeing Syria he had ended up in Beirut. Last time I met with him he was waiting with dread to begin his compulsory military service. By the time the Civil War broke out he knew it would not be long before he would have no choice and would have to join Assad’s army. He decided to try to leave Syria before this happened. Leaving his family behind in Damascus, he went to the south of Syria with the hope of crossing the border into Lebanon or Jordan. The situation in the south was volatile and Ahmed found that it was impossible to get to a neighbouring country easily. Ahmed decided to travel to the north of Syria. He crossed into Turkey and arrived in Istanbul a few months later. Explaining that the language and lifestyle in Turkey made it very difficult to adapt, Ahmed felt that he could not make this his new home. After struggling in Turkey for several months he decided to try to get to Lebanon as a legal refugee. This process involved months of waiting in Cyprus for papers to be approved. Ahmed had arrived in Beirut just two weeks before we met.
Reflecting on this arduous journey that had taken nearly two years, Ahmed said, ‘The things I saw in Syria were more terrible than anyone could imagine, but being a refugee is also terrible.’ Ahmed’s experience is one that millions of refugees from the region have endured.2 Time and time again I found myself having conversations with people in the southern Mediterranean region about the role dance might play within such geographical upheavals and humanitarian crises. When I talked with Rania, a Jordanian dance educator and choreographer, the refugee crisis in Jordan was at the forefront of her mind. While we spoke about her dance history and memorable dancing moments, the notion that dance had the potential to assist people during times of hardship and trauma was a topic that recurred as we talked. Rania said to me, ‘Arts are not a luxury […]. The arts have to be an integral part of developing the next generation and encompass and interfere with the lives of people. Arts have to mobilize people.’ I found myself nodding in agreement.
Rania and I played ‘interview tag’ for nearly a year before we finally managed to sit down and chat. I had known about Rania’s work in Amman for some time; I had met her and many of her students and had taught at her dance school. However, we had never quite managed to schedule an interview together. Times we had arranged to meet in person were cancelled due to travel commitments or hectic schedules. Times for Skype interviews were made and then remade as time zones and technology played havoc with our desire to talk. Finally, in January 2015, with looming pressure to submit the manuscript for this book, Rania and I agreed to Skype each other for an interview.
Figure 16: Rania Image courtesy of Rania’s personal collection
As the director of the dance programme of the National Center of Culture and Arts in Jordan, Rania could arguably be one of the most influential dance practitioners in the country. While the dance scene in Amman is growing at a steady pace, it is not as vibrant a location as Beirut or Ramallah. When people asked me about dance in Jordan I often found it hard to explain the attitude and atmosphere toward dance in a positive light. I felt that the ‘typical’ Jordanian attitude towards dance was well encapsulated in a short anecdote that Rania shared. She said:
I clearly remember an interview I did when I first came back to Jordan. It was at a school that was private, quite respectable. I went there because they wanted a ballet teacher. At the end of the interview the woman interviewing me asked, ‘Well, if we don’t get enough students for the ballet class, can you teach basketball?’ I thought, ‘What? Excuse me?’ I told her, ‘I will see the ball and run the other way.’ There is a problem with dance being considered a serious subject or activity here in Jordan.
In a cultural context where dance is not seen to be a particularly viable career option, I wondered about the journey Rania had been on to make dance her profession. I asked her to tell me a little about her background and her initial experiences of dance in Jordan:
I was born and grew up in Amman. I have a very large family, with eight siblings; my father was a cardiologist.
By chance my parents went to a reception at the British Embassy [in Jordan] and they met a British dance teacher. This dance teacher was married to a Jordanian doctor here. My mum came home from the reception and told me that this woman – her name was Betty Hijazi – was teaching some ballet classes at her home. So I attended my first ballet class. I remember being not dressed correctly for this first class. I was not in dance clothes; instead I put on this long dress and wanted to impress the teacher.
I trained with Betty Hijazi for a year, and then she talked with my parents. She said that she thought I could audition for dance schools abroad and that I could get somewhere in dance. I was 10.
I did the things for the auditions – the videos, the photos – because I couldn’t travel to the UK to do the auditions. I think that my parents probably thought that I wouldn’t get accepted. But I did get accepted. My parents and I had this huge discussion – did I really want to do this? Was it realistic? Was this what I really wanted to do?
Rania described how her parents’ views of dance contrasted from those held by many in Jordan. She explained:
My parents didn’t really have a problem with the dancing. They both thought that you couldn’t really excel in anything if you didn’t have passion for your chosen subject. They knew I had passion about dance. The only deal I had with my dad was that I would be studying at boarding school – Hammond School for Dance in Chester – for a year before making a final decision about pursuing dance seriously as a career – but remember, I was only 10!
So the agreement was made, my parents took me to the UK, settled me in and then left.
Arriving in the city of Chester, Rania shared how she felt ‘quite abandoned’. She explained that part of this isolation was due to her being ‘the only Arab in the school, and it was like they had never seen an Arab before’. Rania recalls being bullied during the first months of her time at the boarding school because she ‘looked different, and had a different accent’. She reflected on how she was called names like Scheherazade and Paki, and remembers that ‘for the first three months I cried every morning and I was miserable’. However, these feelings of alienation did not last. Rania explained how she adapted to life in the UK and her new education and dance setting:
By the time it got to Christmas I had decided that this was not what I wanted to do. I came back home and begged my father not to make me return to Chester. But he insisted that a deal is a deal and I had to finish the year, so he sent me back. By April I was fine, I had acclimatized, I was getting the hang of things, I was working hard, I had a few friends around and that made it a bit easier. It gave me a lot of strength of character. I was in the UK for about 10 years, quite a long time, so of course I got used to it.
After finishing her studies at boarding school, Rania remained in England to complete a three-year teacher-training course with the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD). This training was focused predominantly on ballet, but it included other dance practices and theoretical components such as anatomy for dance and dance history. After graduation Rania was assisted by the RAD to gain a teaching position at a dance studio in Portugal. Rania describes this experience:
I went to a little ballet school in the north of Portugal, in the city of Guimarães. The challenge was that no one in Guimarães spoke much English. I remember sitting on the plane; everyone was speaking Portuguese and I was thinking, ‘What am I doing, going to this place?’
I started teaching my ballet classes in Guimarães with a list of words that translated basic things like ‘hands’, ‘feet’, ‘head’, ‘go there’, ‘come back’. Between demonstrating movements and this little list, this was how I was giving classes. I was labelled ‘Profesor Loca’, the crazy professor. I would say things in Portuguese like ‘go away’ when I meant ‘come here’, I would say ‘move your hands’ when I meant ‘move your feet’, these sorts of things. But after six months I was speaking quite fluently.
Rania explained that she was ‘supposed to come back to Jordan, at the request of my father, because he said that I should try to establish something here [in Jordan]’. However, Rania had set her sights on a position with the Centre de Danse de Lisboa. Without telling her parents she went to Lisbon for an interview and got a job as a teacher with the Centre de Danse de Lisboa. She said, ‘I then told my parents. I explained that I needed more time to hone my skills. They understood and I knew I had a little more time.’ Eventually Rania felt the need to return to Jordan; she said, ‘I wanted to stay [in Lisbon] but my dad said “no”. He said, “come back and just try to do something”. So I came back.’ The return to Amman after many years abroad brought mixed feelings for Rania. She reflected on the experience, saying:
Coming home was something I really did for my dad and for my family. I respected the fact that my family gave me the chance to do what I wanted, especially in a very conservative society where people were telling my father that he was mad for letting me do dance. I came home also because I thought I would come back and see what I could do and give it a shot. I actually got quite a culture shock coming home.
The culture shock Rania felt when returning to her home environment was illustrated within a narrative she shared, recounting an experience of an interview at the Royal Cultural Center in Amman. Rania said:
My first interview when I came back to Jordan was with the director at the Royal Cultural Center. We sat down and after polite introductions he said to me, ‘Hold on, just wait a bit,’ and he picked up the phone. He called my dad at his clinic. After their conversation he put down the phone and said to me, ‘Don’t worry, we will take care of you and look after you.’
With my UK background I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it. I said to him, ‘I never knew my dad could dance, are you interviewing him or me for this position?’
For a long time after my return to Jordan I was known as Dr Kamhawi’s daughter. As the years progressed my father and I joked that he became known as Rania Kamhawi’s father!
Settling back into Amman was challenging for Rania both professionally and personally. Rania cited one of the main difficulties as the fact that ‘everyone wanted to interfere a lot in everything I was doing. I didn’t like that’. Another frustration was that ‘dance was not taken so seriously’, yet everyone ‘had an opinion and wanted to be involved, without knowing anything about dance’. The perception that ‘West is best’ pervaded many people’s views of dance, as Rania explained:
There has often been the thought that foreigners could do this [teach dance], especially in the Arab world. When I first started teaching I would have Russian ladies who were living in Amman come to my studio and say, ‘Oh, I teach ballet and I trained at the Mariinsky Theatre.’ I would say, ‘Okay, great, I don’t take teachers until I have seen them in class.’ Then after class the story would change and it would be, ‘Oh, I actually trained more in acrobatics.’ They were not trained dancers at all.
Because of the frustrations of working in Amman, Rania contemplated moving abroad again, but an opportunity emerged that compelled her to stay in Jordan. She said:
The Director of the Haya Cultural Center called me. He said, ‘You can come to the Haya Cultural Center and set something up here. I have one studio, you can do what you want. I will not interfere.’
I felt that this was a chance to do something that was really my vision. I set up the dance school. I stayed there for 10 years and grew the school. When I started there were about 10 students with me at the school, and by the time I left I had 178 students. The audiences were growing for the performances the school would put on. As a result I think people started taking dance more seriously.
I only left the Haya Center because I got a Fulbright Scholarship to do a residency at the University of South Dakota in the States for one year and teach dance.
After her time in the United States of America, Rania returned to Jordan to join the National Center for Culture and Arts, with the intention of developing a dance programme. In 1998 the dance programme of the National Center for Culture and Arts opened, with Rania as director. The role of director encompasses the spheres of teaching and creating, as well as administration, production and funding organization, and community engagement and outreach. Emerging strongly from Rania’s narrative was the need to present creative work and activities that are of relevance to Jordanian audiences and sensitive to the national culture. She shared:
For me it is important to make things have relevance to the place and culture, and connectivity to the people here in Jordan right now. It has taken years to develop a dance audience here [in Jordan], and when I am working I have them in mind. One of the pieces where I think I managed to make this connection between audience and culture was when I took a piece of Umm Kulthoum’s music, the piece called Enta Omri (You are my life) and I choreographed a contemporary dance to it. It was 15 minutes long and at the end of a production I was doing. A lot of people were sceptical about this because Umm Kulthoum is a revered artist in the Middle East, and it is risky to ‘mess’ with a classic piece of music like this by combining it with contemporary dance. After the show people came backstage to me in tears because they thought this was the way to bring the music to life.
Along with the desire to connect with audiences in Jordan, Rania revealed some of the trials she felt within society as she sought to make dance more present within the social fabric. She explained that she has been ‘criticized a lot throughout my career here [in Jordan]’, and has been ‘mentioned by name in the [Jordanian] parliament for promoting dance and how it is inadmissible’. She shared the following thoughts:
The perception people have of dance and who should dance is so diverse in different places. In Jordan we have our own challenges with dance being accepted and considered ‘okay’. In my perspective, it is because society is becoming so conservative; I want people to feel that we are combating this conservative push in some way, providing another viewpoint.
One of the hardest things is to create performances that let the audience enjoy the movement and story of the dance, more than being fixated on the physical meaning of the ‘body’. Culturally here it is almost impossible to focus on this performing body, because in essence this is not accepted. I think the issue people have is more about the physical presence of someone on stage and moving and showing off their body, rather than the type of dance someone might be doing. Since I have returned to Jordan the society here has become more conservative. I had to transition with this. I had to find a way to present dances in a different way to get people to look beyond the body and see something else.
It is possible. For example, the recent performance of Coppélia that the National Center put on was something people loved. It had such great feedback. In part I think it was because it was comic, light and entertaining. I think people now, in the situation we live in, need some comic relief. I think it also helped that in this ballet there were no deeper meanings that the audience had to search for in the performance. Instead it took them away for one hour, away from the problems they are facing, because really it is very hard for people to get away from the horror of what the country is like, and what it is surrounded by.
There are some hard times where I go, ‘That’s it, I just can’t do it anymore!’ because it is just too much hard work. But some people say that it is your calling and you’re stuck with it [laughs]. I am hoping that what I’ve done is making a difference, even a ripple, and that is fine.
The current situation in Jordan, with the influx of refugees and the neighbouring countries fraught with conflicts, was something that Rania felt impacted on her work and influenced some of the creative decisions she made. She said:
It is very sad, the situation that we have here in Jordan, it is something that has no end in sight. I can tell you honestly over the past 10 years, since the Iraqi war and the first Iraqi refugees came to Jordan until now, there has been no end in sight, I can’t see it. I would love to tell you, ‘Oh, I think in 10 years things will be better’, but I don’t think so. I don’t think arts and culture are going to be on the agenda and in the top priority list in any country in the region. These countries are trying hard to just survive. The resources are strained, which makes us want to work even harder.
Last year at the Amman Contemporary Dance Festival people were asking me, ‘Is this a good time with the situation, the chaos, the misery?’ and I said, ‘Yes, every person deserves the right to enjoy life, to enjoy art and to take away at least one hour of relief.’ We can’t just sit and think ‘this is miserable’ and give up. The question of ‘should we be living while other people are dying?’ is something that we often get asked in the Middle East. From my perspective it is a responsibility to give people hope and lightness.
I have always felt strongly about using dance and arts for causes that I believed in, and I feel I have a responsibility to develop our community and offer a piece of art for people to enjoy. We have many little villages here [in Jordan] that have never ever seen anything like a dance performance. We did a performance in Petra, near Wadi Musa, and 3,000 people attended the performance. Before we did the performance a lot of people were saying to me, ‘Oh, but it is dance, do you think they will react well? Be careful.’ But the audience loved it.
I think until people are convinced that culture is important in raising good citizens, and an integral part of forming a civic society, the attitude towards dance will not change. Things will not change until the government believes in the power of giving artistic qualities – dance, theatre, visual arts, music – and experiences to individuals. From my perspective the arts are not a luxury, we cannot treat the arts as a luxury. The arts have to be an integral part of developing the next generation and encompass and interfere with the lives of people. Arts have to mobilize people.
The idea of mobilizing individuals through dance, which Rania spoke of, was something I became acutely aware of one cold winter’s evening after teaching a group of about 12 young adults at Rania’s studio. The group of students I had just taught piled on coats, scarves and hats to keep warm in the harsh conditions outside. They joked and laughed with each other, like a close-knit family. One of the quieter young women in the group came over to the corner of the studio where I was packing up and offered to drive me home. Given the looming threat of torrential rain I took her up on the kind offer. As we drove slowly through the stormy weather pelting down on the streets of Amman we had time to talk.
I asked her, ‘What are you studying at University?’
She replied, ‘Architecture, I’m in my last year.’
Interested to know more, the interviewer in me surfaced and I asked, ‘And how are you finding it?’
She hesitated for a moment, shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘It is […] well, okay, but you know how things here are pretty conservative […] The ideas I have are not always easily accepted by my professors.’
‘What sort of thing are you interested in?’ I asked.
‘In architecture and dance,’ she said. Pausing for a second, she then explained, ‘I’m interested in collaborations.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I replied, encouraging her to continue.
‘And […] I have ideas about how dancers and architects could collaborate in Amman, how there could be the opportunity to bring the city to life more and bring dance into people’s lives.’
Intrigued, I asked, ‘What exactly do you have in mind?’
With a smile beginning to stretch across her face she said, ‘A performance, site-specific, where dancers are responding to new architecture here, where dancers have worked with architects on developing ideas of the relationship between the building, the body and the city.’
‘Wow […]’ I said quietly, imagining the type of event she was describing.
The young woman went on, saying, ‘I imagine it being something that would be free for the public, and around different locations in Amman, to take performance to people, to make it accessible.’
I said, ‘It sounds like a fantastic idea.’ It really did.
Briefly looking over at me and then quickly back to the foggy, wet road in front of us, she said, ‘Thanks. I think we need things like this to help our community to care about the arts, or to at least see how dance might relate to their environment. I hope to do it, I am not sure how or when, but inshallah.’
‘Inshallah,’ I responded.