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.
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.