More About the Work

A Dancer on the Edge Of is a solo performance by Lebanese choreographer and filmmaker Rolly Dib. The work unfolds as a dance performance fabulation: an exploration marked by obstacles, tensions, and breakthroughs. The show embarks on a journey towards the making of a fictional cabaret shaped by the major eras of Raqs Sharqi and the women who transformed it. Rather than reconstructing a linear history, the performance moves through time as lived, remembered, and re-imagined, allowing past and present to coexist within the body.

At the core of the work, lineage is encountered through the body. Icons such as Tahya Carioca, Samia Gamal, Nadia Gamal, Nabaweya Mostafa, Suhair Zaki, Dina and Randa Kamel are celebrated through their styles, and movement qualities. These vocabularies become the language of the performance. The female dancer's body functions as an archive, carrying elegance and ferocity, discipline and excess, refusal and pleasure across generations.

Set to a score that combines archival Arabic film music with contemporary electronic music and soundscapes composed by Sary Moussa, the performance weaves dance, film, and video projection into a continuously shifting entanglement of memory and imagination. Music is central to the performance, helping to shape the artist's story with the Raqs Sharqi dance as well as her movement experimentations with various sounds, images, and rhythms. Archival footage also presents the role that cinema played in the stereotyping of Raqs Sharqi dancers.

As the performance unfolds, it raises questions that remain unresolved: Why does the dancing female body continue to provoke fascination and discomfort? Why is it so difficult for a woman to dance freely, without being controlled, judged, or reduced? What does the enduring ambiguity of the "belly dancer" figure reveal about collective anxieties around desire and power?

The choreographic process behind A Dancer on the Edge Of is grounded in long-term embodied research where the artist works through movement as a mode of inquiry. Over several years, the artist closely studied dancers from different eras of Raqs Sharqi through film archives and learned movements through the body. Choreographies were practiced, gestures repeated, rhythms absorbed, not to be reproduced, but to understand how each movement emerged, what context shaped it, and what remains of it today. With this process, styles became tools. Movement vocabularies became languages. The work moves between collective memory and bodily memory, negotiating what is remembered, what is transformed, and what refuses to remain faithful to its image.

It is from this process that Cabaret Loulou emerges.

Cabaret Loulou is an imaginary space born from the need and desire to dance freely. The cabaret appears as a liminal and ephemeral zone: a threshold where Loulou, an alter-ego cabaret dancer, can exist, create, inhabit, dream, and dance.

Historically, the cabaret was more than a site of entertainment. It was a space where dancers negotiated visibility and sovereignty, where agency could be exercised within, and against, patriarchal and colonial forces. A Dancer on the Edge Of reclaims this space, not by recreating it, but by reimagining it as a site of resistance, experimentation, and freedom.

Through Cabaret Loulou, the performance confronts the gaze (colonial, Orientalist, and patriarchal) and its role in shaping both the evolution of Raqs Sharqi and its stigmatization. While Baladi and Raqs Sharqi have been widely appropriated and fetishized globally, they have also been marginalized, censored and policed within their own cultural contexts. The work interrogates this schism, asking how a dance form so deeply embedded in Arab histories came to be simultaneously celebrated and constrained.

Loulou inhabits spaces the artist could not, or was not allowed to. Through her, the performance explores both personal and universal experiences shared by dancers across a century: the violence enacted on women's bodies, the pressure to perform femininity within very narrow frames, and the ongoing struggle to claim pleasure and autonomy through movement.

In this imagined world, women's bodies are free.
Free from the male gaze.
Free from Orientalist expectation.
Free from perfection and containment in youth.

A Dancer on the Edge Of does not seek to purify or preserve a fixed tradition. It is an experiment in form, music, movement and aesthetics to open new possibilities for Baladi dance to exist in the present. By shedding light on obscured histories and refusing stereotypical representations, the work insists on dance as a living and continually re-generative practice.

Cabaret Loulou is not a destination.
It is a condition for dancing to remain possible.