Omar Rajeh's Dance Is Not for Us: Grief, Protest, Choreography — SkimNews
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- Omar Rajeh performs solo piece "Dance Is Not for Us" at this year's Dance Umbrella festival, combining sustained dancing with on-screen text that exposes his choreographic vacillations and U-turns.
- Citerne Beirut, the theatre and cultural centre Rajeh founded in Lebanon, was dismantled by order of the local government in 2019 to make way for an incinerator on the site.
- Rajeh is now based in Lyon, France — a relocation the review describes as "a major loss to Lebanon's creative life."
- The piece frames dance as inherently political, with Rajeh recounting street protests and fights between men as his first "choreographies."
- On stage, Rajeh sits and taps at a keyboard while his thoughts appear on screen, laying bare the inspirations and decisions behind creating a performance.
Why it matters: Rajeh's relocation to Lyon represents a concrete cultural loss for Lebanon, as the choreographer who turned protest into dance is now creating work abroad. His solo reframes choreography as collective political action — bodies organising in space — rather than purely aesthetic movement, giving audiences an unusually transparent window into how a performance is built.
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