September 23, 2015

Granoff Center

An interactive dance piece on artists role in society and politics.

Farah Saleh is a Palestinian Choreographer and dancer active in Palestine and Europe. She has studied languages in Italy and in parallel continued her studies in contemporary dance. Saleh was a Visiting Scholar in TAPS, MES, and at the Pembroke Center and was in residence at Brown until Spring 2016. She presented a series of workshops and performances in the fall and taught a full course in the spring. This performance was sponsored by the Mellon Dance Studies Colloquium.

The piece was a continuation of Saleh’s research on art production as a form of daily protest in Palestine. She says, “during its creation I looked for interaction with ordinary people, to investigate my relationship – as an artist- with the society I live in. I went to the streets of Ramallah, Vienna and Budapest with a ‘Free Advice’ sign to open a dialogue and exchange advice with passersby. These dialogues made me understand that the people concerns were collective, but seemed to them quite individual.”  Saleh used these collective concerns and transformed them into an interactive dance performance, to continue the dialogue started on the streets, in the performative space.