ABSTRACT
Based on an ethnographic study, this chapter examines the practices, ideology and pedagogy of women Palestinian dance practitioners in Israel, arguing that through interweaving an art form recognized as Western or global with the local Arab-Palestinian culture and conditions, these women are creating and nurturing experiences that lead to a strengthened sense of collective national identity and ethnocultural solidarity among participants. Addressing dance as an act of “performing nationalism”, three separate modes through which this occurs and in which dance performances express a fusion of global and local Arab-Palestinian culture are presented: 1) the body in space, 2) the dancing body and music and 3) nationalism and gender between tradition and liberalism. The main argument is that dance, as a peripheral and nonverbal art form, allows an expansion and a reconceptualization of images and experiences typically associated with nationalism, such as warfare, suffering and scarifying on the one hand and motherhood or earth on the other. Borrowing from Rabinowitz and Abu Baker’s “stand-tall generation” of Palestinians in Israel (2002), the dance practitioners offer a “stand-tall view from the margins” of nationalism and its images and women’s building of a solidary community centering on the power and creativity of the dancing body.
