elc team
What happens when a traditional folk dance becomes a vehicle for contemporary expression? In Badke(remix), the Palestinian dabke is reimagined through the lenses of contemporary dance, hip hop, capoeira, and circus arts. The result is a dynamic performance that honours its roots while opening a conversation about community, freedom, and cultural transformation.
As part of the twentieth-anniversary celebrations of Pireos 260 and the festival’s “Voices of the Arab World” programme, Palestinian artists Amir Sabra and Ata Khatab bring their acclaimed Badke(remix) to Greece for the first time. The production revisits the internationally celebrated Badke, originally created by Koen Augustijnen, Rosalba Torres Guerrero, and Hildegard De Vuyst, which toured extensively around the world between 2013 and 2016.
At its core lies the dabke itself, a dance inseparable from the idea of community. Together with ten performers, Sabra and Khatab reinterpret its familiar steps through the physical vocabularies of contemporary dance, hip hop, capoeira, and circus arts. Tradition is not preserved as a static relic but activated as a living force capable of embracing new desires, identities, and forms of expression.
The performance also challenges simplified perceptions of Palestinian identity. Rather than presenting a single, unified narrative, it brings together performers from different social, educational, and cultural backgrounds. They join hands to perform the well-known choreography, only to break away from it moments later, reshaping inherited forms through personal and collective experience.
Music plays a central role in this exploration. Led by Nasser Al-Fares, a renowned wedding musician from the West Bank, the soundtrack creates an atmosphere where joy and sorrow coexist. Traditional celebratory rhythms are punctuated by sirens, drones, and the sound of children crying, blurring the line between memory and lived reality, between festivity and conflict.
More than a dance performance, Badke(remix) is a statement about belonging. Through rhythm, movement, and collective presence, it proposes a vision of identity that remains open, fluid, and interconnected, transcending geographical and cultural borders while affirming the enduring power of community.
