As an art form, contemporary dance is mercifully free of constraints. Unlike theatre or poetry, it doesn’t depend on a particular language. Unlike music, it doesn’t utilise a particular form or structure based on scales or tempos. Dance has the chance to exist outside – or across – cultural conventions.
Perhaps that’s one reason why dance feels like a natural fit for the multicultural melting pot that is the UAE: the use of the body, positioning it in space, testing the logic of locomotion and exploring the possibilities in movement and stillness, can be a universal method of communication – or, at the very least, of shared experience.
All of which is by way of introduction to the nearest thing we’ve yet had to a dance festival in the UAE. Under the umbrella title ‘Frontiers’, Alserkal Avenue in Dubai will be seeing three performances, a workshop and a pair of talks. This programme is presented as a suitably broad collaboration between Alserkal Avenue, the Goethe-Institut Gulf Region, and Aerowaves Europe, with the support of ATER Fondazione, Sima Performing Arts, and the Italian Cultural Institute Abu Dhabi.
It’s usually the big-name dance companies that get the exposure, but contemporary dance is rich and diverse; there’s so much going on that doesn’t get the spotlight. That’s the thinking behind Frontiers; its focus is on emerging contemporary dance – artistically the most progressive but commercially the least viable, vibrant new work that audiences have had no chance to experience … yet.
Aerowaves is the interesting partner here, a sort of centralised hub source for new work in European dance. “We identify the most promising new work by emerging dance artists and then promote it through cross-border performances,” says the organisation, which prides itself on its unique role as a connector between choreographers, dance programmers and dance enthusiasts.
With funding from the European Union, Aerowaves works primarily through its partners; currently there are 34 of these in countries around Europe, mostly specialised production companies or performance spaces. Aerowaves essentially connects curators or producers with independent choreographers and dancers who can put new work before new audiences. There are more than 100 such cross-border presentations each year.
Aerowaves also has a podcast, a specialist dance writing ‘academy’ that produces the highly regarded Springback magazine, and a programme of workshops and seminars. There’s also the Spring Forward Festival – a three-day platform for some of Europe’s most promising choreographers to show their work to performing arts professionals and local audiences.
Those on show will usually come from the Aerowaves Twenty. Every October, the Aerowaves partners view video applications from choreographers and dance companies (more than 750 last time around) and select just 20 each year to promote. Many of the choreographers supported by Aerowaves in this way have built successful international careers. The system requires that each partner in the network presents at least three artists from the Aerowaves 20, and this guarantees that all works have a chance to be seen somewhere in Europe.
Hitherto Aerowaves has concentrated on Europe, working with a network of partners in 34 countries there. But it is building international links, including residencies in Japan and joint Taiwanese/European dance projects. It looks as though the Dubai connection could become another of these, initially giving Aerowaves’ artists the chance to bring new work to a new audience but possibly developing into two-way collaborations that could homegrown choreographers dancing for Aerowaves partners’ productions. So this week’s programme features works from the Aerwowaves pool; but Alserkal Avenue is also on board as a content partner as well as a venue provider, presenting Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King’s piece Losing it.
The Frontiers programme has been developed as an intercultural bridge, and the artists’ visits are intended as ‘residencies’ in the sense of activities and outcomes for the community. So each visit includes a performance but also a workshop, a talk, or some other community-related activity.
The intention is to run the Frontiers programme at least annually. In the meantime this inaugural event includes two performances by past Aerowaves 20 choreographer/performers, a solo work by the Palestinian dancer/choreographer Samaa Wakeem with a live soundscape by Samar Haddad King, a technique workshop and an immersive ‘performative walk’, and a pair of talks. Well worth checking out.
The festival
Performance Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi: Harleking
Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi, based between Berlin and Turin, have been working as a duo since 2008 with a style that merges dance, performance and visual art. Harleking is a choreographic work that was first seen in 2018 and has since been featured at several dance festivals; its subject is a harlequinade style of mannered gestures through jerky, robotic movements that manage to combine a courtly formality with a sense of danger and mistrust. There are obvious references to the Harlequin of the Commedia dell’Arte, a sly servant moved by an insatiable hunger, a trickster who ultimately derives from a devil character in medieval Passion Plays. Harleking‘s mode of communication has something of ancient wall decorations in which monstrous figures blend in with elegant ornament – figures which can evoke amusement without any joy.
13 December 8pm-8.50pm
14 December 7pm-7.50pm
@ Sima Performing Arts (Warehouse 38)
Performance Máté Mészáros: Mechanics of Distance
This piece for three different trained dancers – they come from backgrounds in classical ballet, folk dance and contemporary dance – has been performed several times since its 2019 premiere, but it is always different since it is always adapted to the specific the space provided. Mechanics of Distance is about positioning static and moving bodies, the dancers all interfering with one another’ s personal space, cramming matching and mismatched systems into them and examining the distance between the bodies; the choreography aims to ask how far the limits of dance can be extended, what potential there is in an open space waiting to be explored.
14 December 4.30-5.30pm
@ The Yard
Performative walk Mechanics of Distance
During the pandemic, Máté Mészáros came up with an alternative form of Mechanics of Distance that could still be shared and experienced while spaces were closed and gatherings prohibited. He developed a participative walk to enact nine stages of the choreography; participants can follow a route of printed pictograms, on their own or together, and can piece together the choreography of the performance. The result is that participants become quasi-performers themselves, gaining the physical sensation of the changing proximity of bodies in the space – in this case streets of Alserkal Avenue.
15 December 3.00-4.00pm
@ The Yard
Performance Samaa Wakim & Samar Haddad King: Losing It
Growing up in a war zone means living and breathing politics. The Palestinian choreographer and performer Samaa Wakim asks herself how these experiences impact her identity in this solo performance which explores how the trauma of previous generations manifests in her own body through movement and sound. The piece dives into her memories of growing up under occupation, exploring the various realities she lives in and the fantasies she’s created in order to survive. As fear overtakes her, her world begins to disintegrate: the floor becomes unstable, and the sounds begin to warp into a world where reality and fantasy blur …
Created in conversation with a live score by Samar Haddad King, the soundscape features field recordings taken throughout Palestine since 2010. Accompanied by Wakim’s vocals, the sounds of fear and safety come together to the point where past and present cloud the future.
14 December 4.30-5.30pm
@ The Yard
Workshop Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi: Moving Towards Grotesque
A workshop based on rhythmic exercises and the movement vocabulary from Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi’s Harleking. Drawing inspiration from the symmetric patterns in ancient grotesque statuary, participants will examine the muscular response to laughter – a kinaesthetic expression of Commedia dell’Arte figures.
14 December 1pm-3pm
@ Joint Space (Warehouse 83)
Conversation Interdisciplinarity in Dance: Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King
Samaa Wakim graduated from the faculty of Theatre at the University of Haifa and has since performed in numerous dance theatre productions; Samar Haddad King, the founding artistic director of Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre, has a BFA in choreography, has choreographed several productions, and co-authored a chapter on dance in the Arab World for the 2nd edition of Contemporary Choreography (Routledge, 2018). Their conversation will cover their past multi-modal collaborations and extend into a discussion of the future of the field. (They will be performing their piece Losing It on 18 December.)
15 December 4.30-5.30pm
@ The Yard
Conversation What is Dance? Beata Stankevič in conversation with Ginevra Panzetti & Enrico Ticconi
This talk explores the evolving definition of dance, challenging conventional ideas in choreography and examining how the concept of dance shifts across cultures and eras. Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi, who are performing in Frontiers, have been working together since 2008 with a style that interlaces dance, performance and visual art. Beata Stankevič, a cultural manager with a particular focus on contemporary dance, is the first independent locally contemporary dance programmer to be based locally; in 2020, she co-founded the HIBA Art Project initiative to further develop the dance scene in the UAE, and since 2023 she has been managing cultural programmes at the Goethe-Institut Gulf Region.
15 December 5.30-6.30pm
@ The Yard
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