Hong Kong Arts Festival sets the stage to spotlight female empowerment, cultural history and politics of the Middle East through contemporary dance

Dance has been a part of Salem’s life since she was six. But before choosing it as a career, she was an occupational therapist for people with autism; she has a degree in psychology from the American University in Cairo. In 2011, she found her way to contemporary dance, which she feels has “more grounding, more expression and more diversity” compared to the folk and belly dances that she says people usually associate with Egyptian dancers. “There is always room for the dancer or artist to [explore] self-expression [by] moving in a contemporary fashion and at the same time [being] inspired by one’s roots or ties to the land.”

Her exploration of the artistic potential of the body doesn’t end there. Lately, she has been working with three practitioners of qigong, a system of coordinated body postures, movements, breathing and meditation, in an ongoing physical research project that aims to bridge dance and the discipline. “I was studying Traditional Chinese Energetics [a practice that focuses on the interaction between the body and nature] close to graduation to certify as an acupressure energy practitioner,” she says. When she met So Kwok-wan in Cairo in 2022 and later received his invitation to perform at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, she was excited about coming to the city for the first time. “I am very fond of [Chinese] culture.”

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In addition to Anchoring, Salem will be staging Resonance, a new duet created in collaboration with Hong Kong contemporary dancer Peggy Lam, who won the Hong Kong Dance Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Dancer last year. In this piece, the two dancers explore the self-healing power of the body. “In traditional Chinese energetics, the practice of qigong (“air martial arts”) consists of a combination of breath work, focus, movement and self-applied organ massage through twisting, turning, squeezing and stretching the liver and spleen,” explains Salem. “These movements have been proven to stimulate the body to rejuvenate the organ systems and to tune the body and mind into the right frequencies.” The pair hope to demonstrate how aesthetics and healing can be combined through dance.

Salem says Egypt is relatively fertile territory for performing arts development, in the sense that being an artist is a common career option today, an improvement from her younger years, when academic dance schools were a rarity. With more support from the government, she feels artists from Egypt can take their practice to the next level. As for herself, she wants to do her part by initiating more international collaborations. “Influences tend to stem from cultural exchange,” she says. “Resonance is my first collaboration with an Asian artist. From there, I would love to collaborate more [with artists from different cultures] in the future.”

In Untitled 14KM, shown in Hong Kong in mid-February, Moroccan contemporary dancer and visual artist Youness Atbane turned the Cultural Centre’s Studio Theatre into a fictional Museum of North Africa and Middle East for Contemporary Art. He portrayed a visual artist who attended the museum’s opening ceremony together with a curator, museum director, technician and a poet from the 12th century who had time-travelled. These characters, with their different cultural backgrounds and own agendas, were seen, through contemporary dance movements, debating the curation of artworks.

The title of his show denotes two things: “untitled” refers to how artists leave the stories of the subjects they portray a mystery; “14KM” is the distance between Morocco and Andalusia in southern Spain, the site of an ancient Muslim kingdom known for its artistic and cultural developments in the era before it fell to Catholic monarchs.

To Atbane, this distance also serves as a metaphor for the temporal and historical path his people have taken to absorb the different cultural and political influences over the years, as they experienced colonialism and the postcolonial era. “We lost this [Andalusian] land in the 12th century. There’s this [general sentiment of] regret, and everybody in Morocco has this idea of crossing the northern seas to [return to] this golden space of freedom,” he says. “I observe how in the community of art in my country, artists are constantly rethinking our identities and how we use our tools to explore different ways [of expressing them].”

His idea to set the Hong Kong production in a museum also addresses how seemingly neutral cultural institutions have been responsible for rewriting Arab identities. “When we read about stories of museums here, the National Museum of Lebanon [formerly a residential building] was used as a sniper station to shoot civilians during the Civil War [from 1975 to 1990]. In 2014, when Isis wanted to manifest their ideology, they went to Museum of Mosul [in northern Iraq] and destroyed all the artefacts. When the 42-country coalition and American aviation attacked Baghdad [in 2003], they destroyed all the national institutions of Baghdad except the museum because artefacts represented very valuable things to the Americans,” he says. “Museums are getting out of the natural position of what a museum [should be]: a place where we collect knowledge.”

Atbane felt this first-hand when he was involved in the inaugural curatorial work of the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, Morocco in 2014. “In the six months leading up to the opening, we had visits from powerful people from the international community and everybody had their own agendas. It was funny to see how they asked to move this art piece from this place to another room because of political reasons,” he says. “It was a concrete experience where I see that the museum isn’t a place where a story finishes—it’s the place where we create a story in the way we want it.”

Many of his other productions, based on events he has experienced, also deal with artists’ critical relationship with the art market. The Waterproofed Artist, which premiered in Cairo in October last year, is another “exhibition performance”. Set in the Venice Biennale of 2048—which would also mark the 100th year since the start of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—the story imagines Palestinians, Israelis and international artists surviving together in peace on the Global South Pavilion, a floating platform, in a sinking Venice. “Every country is trying showcase their best artists there. But many countries from the south are not present in this event,” he says. By setting the show in the future, Atbane encourages the audience to reflect on how we consider visual art and its power dynamics in the postcolonial period.

Atbane says, compared to the places he now works in, which include Berlin and Brussels, Morocco doesn’t have as many historical activists who write about the cultural and political events. “I took my performance as a way of archiving through fiction, to talk about problems I see in the art world,” he says.

He hopes to expand his audiences from the Middle East and Europe to Asia, beginning with Hong Kong and South Korea. “My background is Moroccan, and that’s where I get the urgency and feelings to create. But I’m also crafting works in the most neutral way possible—through narration in English, French and Arabic, humour and sliding very heavy things into my stories—to create availability for the international world.”

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