Tag: El-Funoun

Curfew shot from show

Curfew & Love in the Time of Apartheid by El-Funoun Palestinian Dance Troupe & Hawiyya Dance Company

Available to watch online until the 31st October 2022

After a wonderful evening at Unity Theatre on Saturday 15th July during this year’s festival, we’re pleased to announce that both performances are available to watch online:

About Curfew:

Curfew was devised in 2018 and, after two sellout shows at Rich Mix in London and one night in ramallah, it was due to travel to Liverpool in 2020 but was delayed due to the pandemic.

The dance performance’s omnipresent themes of time – past and present – information, introspection, frustration and rebellion, lead us to face existential questions, whilst living and understanding concepts of opportunity, privilege, responsibility and duty. To challenge helplessness and to facilitate action to change, to become better world citizens, we have a duty and responsibility to channel important messages to the wider world.

The production does not give an answer, rather it questions the public and encourages us (the audience) to find our own answers by expiring and reflecting on our positions and our actions towards oppression, injustice and complexity.

About Love in the Time of Apartheid:

Love in the Time of Apartheid premiered at Liverpool Arab Arts Festival and presents the start of internal conflict of an individual torn between the love for his homeland and the love for his partner. Through a rollercoaster of insomnia, stress, torment, and defiance, the dancer draws on his own personal story to represent that of thousands of Palestinians who struggle for family reunification.

Performances sponsored by the Arts Council, British Council, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival and Interpal.

How to Watch:

Curfew & Love in the Time of Apartheid will be available to watch on Unity Online until the 31st October 2022.

Watch this film for £6: You can watch the show through Vimeo for just £6, by clicking the Watch Now button. Once you have purchased your individual film you will be able to watch it as many times as you like in the three-month watch period.

Watch the whole playlist for just £25: Unity Online will drop a new playlist of  at least 6 productions every three months (August, November, February & May). You can watch each production individually for £6, or save money by purchasing all films in the drop for just £25.

Watch everything for free as a Member: Unity Circle Members receive access to each playlist drop for free as part of their membership. Sign up for a Unity Circle Membership today from just £2.50 a month / £30 a year, and access our on-demand content whenever you want.

https://www.unitytheatreliverpool.co.uk/unity-online/curfew-love-in-the-time-of-apartheid/

Credits

Curfew:

Produced by: El-Funoun Palestinian Dance Troupe & Hawiyya Dance Company

Artistic Director: Sharaf DarZaid

Producer: Jamila Boughelaf

Dancers: Serena Spadoni, Jamila Boughelaf, Farah Haddad, Sylvia Ferreira, Mohammed Altayeh, Loor Ghadir, Mohammed Safadi, Sharaf DarZaid

Music Composers: Popular Art Centre, Joseph Karam, Nai Barghouti, Hussein Zahawy, Didier Malherbe

Photography and website: José Farinha

Videography: ASH Pro Production

Website: https://www.curfewdance.com/

 

Love in the time of Apartheid:

“Love in the Time of Apartheid”

Dancer and Choreographer: Sharaf DarZaid

Music composition: Jacob Hammodeh, Ehab Haniyah

Percussions: Maen El Ghoul

Nay: Mohammad Khamayseh

Special thanks to El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe, Popular Art Centre, Ramallah Municipality

Photography and Videography: ASH Pro Production

The online Dabke classes by Hawiyya Dance Company & El-Funoun Palestinian Dance Troupe are still available to watch. You can also explore their conversations about the importance of Dabke to contemporary dance.

These digital workshops and conversations form part of our 2020 festival programme. In March, the LAAF festival team were finalising details for our festival programme. Our events programme would have taken place, as usual, across Liverpool’s key cultural venues. As the global situation around COVID-19 became more prominent in March, the LAAF team/Board made the difficult decision to move the festival online for the first time in its history.

We held honest discussions with our festival artists, partners and venues about our move online. Our key concern was to ensure that any transition online would challenge the artist and audience equally, while not artistically jeopardising the integrity of the work. While moving online has opened many new doors, not every event works digitally. How can you recreate the atmosphere of theatre or relationship between viewer and artwork? You often can’t through a screen.

Regrettably, many original festival performances had to be either cancelled or postponed until a later date.

In an alternative timeline, today, Friday 17 July 2020, would have seen Curfew performed live in Liverpool during the festival. Curfew would also have been performed in London in partnership with MARSM UK.

While Curfew isn’t happening tonight, we are working closely with Hawiyya, El-Funoun and MARSM UK to bring it to Liverpool as soon as we can.

Instead, a wider conversation began around dabke, its continuing importance to contemporary dance and how it form the foundation of Curfew.

You can watch these conversations below.

I

Members of Hawiyya Dance Company and El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe held a recent series of discussions on issues related to contemporary dabke and their current collaboration ‘Curfew’, which LAAF will be bringing to Liverpool in partnership with MARSM UK in the near future. We are pleased to host these discussions as part of this year’s festival:

1) What does Dabke mean to us?

2) Why is it important to fuse Dabke with contemporary dance?

3) What does ‘Curfew’ mean to us?

Participants

From Hawiyya: Shahd Abusalama, Sylvia Ferreira, Serena Spadoni, Nadia Sibany, Jamila Boughelaf, Miriam Ozanne

El-Funoun: Sharaf DarZeid, Mohammad Altayeh, Lure Sadeq, Khaled Abueram

About

Hawiyya Dance Company was founded in 2017 as an all-women’s collective, based in London, who explore identity, culture and resistance through dance. The group uses folk dance ‘Dabke’ and contemporary dance to create narrative works that explore themes such as resistance, oppression, displacement, social justice, individual and cultural identity.

The members of Hawiyya are from diverse backgrounds and nationalities, and have experience in different forms and styles of dance training. The dancers unite in their commitment to anti-racism and anti-imperialism in all they do. The aims of the company is to empower people especially women, to build community, to raise awareness of human rights and to demonstrate solidarity to the causes they support through dance and culture.

In their short time Hawiyya have achieved much success with their own productions, such as full-stage production ‘Curfew’ in collaboration with El-Funoun PDT, performed over a two sell-out nights at Rich Mix London, and one in Ramallah, or full-stage production ‘Safar: Journey’, co-created and performed with refugee and migrant women at the Shakespeare’s Globe and V&A Museum. To date, Hawiyya have showcased their artistic work at major events, such as Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, Migration Matters Festival, GreenBelt festival, Palestine International Festival, and partnered with leading artists.

www.facebook.com/HawiyyaDabke

www.instagram.com/hawiyyadabke

www.curfewdance.com

El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe is an independent, non-profit artistic organization that is virtually entirely volunteer-based. El-Funoun was established in 1979 by a small number of enthusiastic, talented and committed artists. Since then, El-Funoun has been crowned as the lead Palestinian dance company in Palestine, as well as among Palestinians in exile. It holds an impressive track record of over one thousand performances locally and internationally. It also produced 15 productions and over ten dance scenes. El -Funoun has won several commendation certificates and awards over the years.

Since its inception, El-Funoun has aimed at expressing the spirit of Arab-Palestinian folklore and contemporary culture through unique combinations of traditional and stylized dance and music. The Troupe’s repertoire comprises folkloric dance forms, called “dabke”, in addition to more elaborate choreographed forms that embody El-Funoun’s own unique vision of Palestinian dance. El-Funoun is widely recognized as the cultural entity that has played the most significant role in reviving and reinvigorating Palestinian dance and music folklore.

www.el-funoun.org

Supported by Arts Council England.

Curfew logos

We’re thrilled to be this week’s guests for The Arab British Centre’s excellent Friday Hangout series.

Sign up for the session via the Arab British Centre website. 

Arab British Centre - Friday Hangout

Join us at our fifth Friday Hangout, this time co-hosted by Liverpool Arab Arts Festival!

Our Friday Hangout series brings together people interested in Arab culture for an online chat over their lunch breaks, wherever they may be currently ‘locked down’. Five weeks in, we’re delighted that so many people have taken part in our informal sessions, all inspired by our team missing our lunch-time conversations whilst working from home.

This Friday, we’ll be joined by some of the wonderful people behind Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (LAAF), who this week announced that they will be moving their annual festival online in light of the Covid-19 crisis. We’ll be chatting to Festival Manager Jack Welsh, who is leading their online transition, as well as dancer Jamila Boughelaf, dancer and co-founder of Hawiyya Dance Company, whose Dabke-inspired performance Curfew is one of the festival’s key events this year.

LAAF has been at the vanguard of Arab cultural programming in the UK for nearly 2 decades. Established in 2002, every July the festival brings a thrilling celebration of Arab culture to venues across Liverpool, showcasing a packed programme of visual art, music, dance, film, theatre, literature and special events.

Hawiyya Dance Company is an all-women’s collective who explore identity, culture and resistance through dance. The culturally diverse group uses folk dance ‘Dabke’ and contemporary dance to create narrative works that explore themes such as resistance, oppression, displacement, social justice, individual and cultural identity.

Join us on Friday as we chat to Jack and Jamila about the unique challenges festivals and collectives are facing in the current circumstances, what ‘going digital’ actually means for large-scale creative programming, and more about Curfew and the work that the Hawiyya Dance Company is doing with the local community in Liverpool.