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Paper short abstract

This talk explores Arabeska, a dance work navigating Western-Arab binaries in Palestine/Israel. I examine how the piece choreographs relational possibilities that resist cultural erasure, cultivate community, and foreground the vitality of performing bodies in times of violence and polarization.

Paper long abstract

Arabeska is a dance work by choreographer and dancer Nur Garabli, created and performed in Palestine/Israel amid the violent events of 2024–2025. The work’s title invokes the French‑Orientalist gaze toward Arab‑Muslim culture (“arabesque,” meaning “in the Arabic style”), and the piece engages both with this gaze and with the cultural appropriation of “Arabness” within Western colonial formations.

In this talk, I explore Arabeska as a situated performance practice through which Garabli negotiates categories that often operate as polarizing and exclusionary mechanisms (Western–Arab, classical ballet–folk dance), choreographing a kinesthetics that exposes and entangles these imposed binaries.

Performed by five Palestinian women, Arabeska takes viewers on a journey that bridges past and present, imagines possible futures, resists persistent cultural and historical erasure, and refuses the denial of present-day events. The work foregrounds steadfastness and presents women’s dancing bodies as a source for connection and community building in a fractured political landscape.

I read Arabeska through two analytic concepts: (1) sovereignty in art, where alongside acknowledging the visual sovereignty embodied in Indigenous art (Rickard 2017), I propose thinking through kinesthetic sovereignty in dance; and (2) political timing-specific art (Bruguera 2020), art that emerges from a particular historical moment and seeks to intervene in it, resist it, or transform it. Together, these concepts illuminate how performance practices cultivate embodied vitality in times of intensifying violence and polarization.