Dancing to Transgress: Palestinian Dancer Sahar Damoni's Politics of Pleasure

Abstract

As a woman Palestinian dancer and choreographer in Israel, Sahar Damoni performs within multiple contexts of cultural, gendered, and political oppression, employing her bodily art to challenge these structures, most poignantly through dances that express and evoke pleasure and sensual joy. Offering a detailed ethnography of three of Damoni's performances within one year in Israel/Palestine, I argue that an examination of her artistry provides unique insight into the intricate workings—and transgressions—of gender, ethnic, and national boundaries through the movement of the body in dance.

Rerooted and Reimagined: Dance, Palestinian Women, and the Reclamation of Urban Spaces

“…The female body, these writings demonstrate, becomes a site for performing the personal, the social, and the political as it engages with myriad themes, some of which clearly resonate in Abu Elasal's work: the prominence of place, memory, and cultural heritage in the making of individual and collective identity; visibility and being made invisible; strangeness and alienation; and the search for home and belonging. Joy and pleasure are also expressed in some of these performances (Nasrallah 2011;Ophir 2021), and though less common, the depiction of such once again challenges common notions of the victimized Arab woman or the ever-suffering Palestinian.…”

“…I also participated in conferences on Palestinian art and attended performances in the annual Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival. For a discussion of my position as a Jewish researcher of Palestinian dancers in Israel, see (Ophir 2021). Ibid.…”