Intimate solo dance work by Lebanese choreographer Omar Rajeh and his company Maqamat, a personal memoir and political act about loss and the urge to keep dancing.
Omar Rajeh brings Maqamat: Dance is Not for Us to The Pit at the Barbican on Friday 16 October, as part of the Dance Umbrella Festival. It's a solo performance that sits somewhere between a personal memoir and a political act, and it asks a pretty heavy question: what does it mean to keep dancing when everything around you is telling you to stop?
Rajeh is a Lebanese choreographer and cultural architect, and on stage he dances and speaks of a past that no longer exists — of Lebanon, of loss, and of a world that froze before it could ever become a future. The work is built around maqam, his practice of instant composition where the dancing body creates its own rules, its own logic, and its own hope, and refuses the structures of power that would reduce dance to something safe or palatable. There's also a sensory detail to it: live basil is used on stage.
To give you a sense of where he's coming from, Rajeh founded Maqamat and the Beirut International Platform of Dance (BIPOD), co-founded the Masahat network, initiated Takween, and established Citerne Beirut in 2017, which later became the digital platform Citerne.live. He's also a recipient of France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. After settling in Lebanon in 2002, he relocated to Lyon in 2020, and he's continued to create and tour between Lebanon, France, and internationally.
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The performance is an hour long with no interval, and it starts at 7.45pm. Tickets are £21.50 standard, £10 for Young Barbican (aged 16-29), and £11.50 for under 16s, with Barbican members getting 20% off and corporate members 25% off. You'll find it at The Pit, Barbican Centre, Level -2, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS.
