Ancestral Echoes

in collaboration with Solidarity in Motion

creation Samer Zaher e Bassam Abu Diab
performer Samer Zaher
production Beirut Physical Lab
duration 20 minutes

This work emerges from the body – as archive, as memory, as rupture. It begins not with answers, but with absence: an orphaned body, a name detached from meaning, a face read through the lens of otherness.
Through dance, I explore how systems of power seek to define, confine, and classify identity – through gender, nationality, race, and language. My movement practice resists these structures by returning to the raw physicality of the body, using it as a space to reimagine selfhood beyond imposed labels.
The work draws from a hybrid vocabulary of Dabke, Bollywood, Voguing, Baladi, Dancehall, contemporary dance, and physical theatre. These forms are not reproduced as cultural representations, but rather deconstructed and recomposed – treated as unstable fragments through which the body speaks in its own terms. By distorting these traditions, I question the audience on what they might see from first impression, also i question the very idea of authenticity and cultural purity.
The performance embraces multiplicity, fragmentation, and contradiction – not as sources of confusion, but as sites of radical possibility. In rejecting fixed narratives of identity, the work proposes ambiguity as a political stance: a refusal of binaries, borders, and the demand for clarity.

Samer Zaher