Cie Omar Rajeh & Maqamat Dance is Not for Us Beirut (Lebanon), Lyon (France)

Omar Rajeh is a choreographer, festival director and cultural architect whose practice spans performance, participation and moving image. Dance is Not for Us marks a rare London appearance from the founder of Maqamat and BIPOD – Beirut International Platform of Dance, and recipient of France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Rajeh brings over two decades of choreographic practice to an intimate solo that is at once a personal memoir and a political act.

Alone onstage, he dances and speaks of a past that no longer exists – of Lebanon, of loss, of a world that froze before it could become a future. Raw, urgent and deeply human, this is a work that asks what it means to keep dancing when everything around you says stop.

Drawing on maqam – his practice of instant composition, Rajeh refuses the structures of power that would reduce dance to something safe or palatable. The dancing body, he insists, creates its own rules, its own logic, its own hope. Performance becomes a gathering, a space where artist and audience enter into a shared experience that pushes back against fear and normalisation.