Omar Rajeh's Defiant Solo Lands at Dance Umbrella — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Omar Rajeh stars in Dance Is Not for Us, a solo featured in this year's Dance Umbrella festival, described as a "danced stream of consciousness" exposing the workings of choreography.
- Citerne Beirut, the theatre and cultural centre Rajeh founded in Lebanon, was forcibly closed by order of the local government in August 2019, with an incinerator planned for the land.
- Rajeh came of age at the end of the Lebanese civil war and says dance was always "the most revolutionary thing" he could do — a thread that runs through the solo's meditations on protest and physical organisation.
- During the performance, Rajeh sits at a keyboard typing thoughts that appear on screen, layering the percussive, sweat-soaked dance with the written decisions, inspirations and U-turns of making a piece.
- Rajeh now lives in Lyon, a relocation the review calls "a major loss to Lebanon's creative life."
- The piece frames its core message as "a heartfelt appeal to gather, to witness, to share our pain and loss — to look and to listen."
Why it matters: The solo is grounded in a concrete act of cultural displacement — a government-ordered shutdown of Rajeh's Beirut venue so an incinerator could be built on the site — and the review explicitly frames his relocation to Lyon as a loss to Lebanon's creative life, making the performance a document of erasure as much as choreography.
Ask SkimNews
