Introduction

March 2015 satellite reports: at night, Syria is 83 percent darker than it was in March 2011. Aleppo is 97 percent darker. An entire country is running on minimal electricity and Aleppo is almost out of power. No light, no water, little communication internally or with the outside world. Syria is being driven back into the pre-Edison era. How did this happen? In mid-March 2011, many Syrians rose up against the authoritarian Asad regime that had ruled them with an iron fist for forty years. Initial successes were quickly quashed and the revolution seemed to devolve into a civil war, pitting the government against its citizens and extremist mercenaries. By winter 2016, almost 350,000 Syrians had been killedthe majority civilians. Over half of a total population of twenty-three million was homeless. Nine million people were internally displaced and over four million were wandering the world, many on foot or in leaky boats. Countless numbers had been disappeared, many into Bashar Asad’s prisons. These shocking statistics and the unstoppable violence notwithstanding, the people’s revolution goes on. The story of the attempted crushing of the revolution is known. Less well covered has been the role of artists and activists, what I call “artist-activists,” in representing to the world and to their people the resilience of revolutionary resistance and defiance. The collapse of artist and activist into this single identity emphasizes the inextricability of poetics and politics in Syrian revolutionary practice. Artist-activists “trespass to make meaning” writes Nato Thompson. “[They] enter into fields of society outside the arts and use the entire spectrum of forms available to them . . . The task of socially engaged artists is the

deployment of cultural forms and the production of political change” (Thompson 2015: 20, 52). For artists inside or outside Syria, art is a form of social engagement. Dancing in Damascus is about the first years of the Syrian revolution and artist-activists’ creative responses to physical and emotional violence. In this look back over the first four years, I am not concerned with a chronology of political events, tracing the decline from revolutionary effervescence through cruel repression to international intervention that has turned Syria into the center of a new regional dynamic. Rather, I am interested in how these early years shaped the experiences of the Syrian people and how artist-activists have burnished their experiences, fears, and hopes into extraordinary works of art.