Farah Saleh (PS/SC) will share her ongoing artistic research The Archive of Gestures, investigating how individuals can contribute to change through exploring social and political memories, using bodily gestures as the main source and form of archive.
Participants will be invited to experiment with ways of archiving personal and alternative narratives, through reenacting, transforming and deforming the gestures present in these narratives in different creative ways. To begin with, Farah will invite participants to dig into their unique narratives, gestures and embodied knowledge through a series of group tasks, smaller group work and individual exercises. Then Farah and the participants will work together to develop this material into a collective choreography that can be performed in front of an audience, (5 – 6pm on the Sunday), in the form of a living archive that opens its doors during the performance and closes them right after.
This lab is open to all, those with and those without dance experience and/or training.
Four free bursary places are available to those with an asylum seeker and/or refugee background and those with experience of migration. You can register interest by emailing info@independentdance.co.uk. If more than four individuals register interest, the bursaries places will be offered via a lottery rather than by any form of selection process. The deadline for registering interest is 19 April.
This lab is in partnership with and supported by The Mosaic Rooms, and we invite ID audiences to explore their current exhibition which brings together archival materials, existing and newly commissioned works that connect peripheral geographies, here.
Farah Saleh is a Palestinian dancer and choreographer based in Scotland. She has studied linguistic and cultural mediation in Italy and in parallel continued her studies in contemporary dance. Since 2010 she has taken part in local and international projects with Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Company (Palestine), the Royal Flemish Theatre and Les Ballets C de la B (Belgium), Mancopy Dance Company (Denmark/Lebanon), Siljehom/Christophersen (Norway) and Candoco Dance Company (UK). Saleh has also been teaching dance, coordinating and curating artistic projects, including the Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Summer School, which she co-founded in 2016. In 2014 she won the third prize of the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) organized by A.M. Qattan Foundation in Palestine for her installation A Fidayee Son in Moscow and in 2016 she won the dance prize of Palest’In and Out Festival in Paris for the duet La Même. She was an Associate Artist at Dance Base in Edinburgh 2017-2021 and is currently finishing her practice-based PhD at Edinburgh College of Art, and touring with her latest performances, which are centered around themes of refugee hood and migration.
