Dance has long had a generous advocate in Richard Wakely, who as head of Belfast International Arts Festival has given the form prominent billing. As he prepares to leave his role, he has established a lasting legacy: Our Voice Together Now, a collaboration linking Belfast with partners in Egypt and Palestine.
“It builds upon two approaches that the festival has been taking,” Wakely says. “One, to place contemporary dance more at the heart of our annual programming. And, secondly, to promote the benefits of cultural diversity through international exchange and collaboration.”
Our Voice Together Now sees three new commissions touring between Belfast International Arts Festival, Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival and, in Cairo, Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival. A Palestinian choreographer works with Irish dancers; an Irish choreographer with Egyptians; and an Egyptian with Palestinians. And, according to Wakely, the link between Egypt and Palestine is as important as those between Belfast and Cairo and Belfast and Ramallah.
“One of the things I discovered was just how difficult it is for Palestinian artists to collaborate, to travel, to visit their colleagues in the rest of the Arab world,” he says. He traces the project back to 2014, when he travelled to Cairo to first visit the Downtown festival, which is run by Ahmed El Attar.
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“It was shortly after the Arab Spring, and the tanks were still out around Tahrir Square,” Wakely says. “Growing up in Belfast, I knew how to deal with barbed wire and tanks and the army on the street, so that didn’t bother me. But what should have been a big international delegation actually was only 16 of us from around the world. Since then Ahmed and I have become really good friends and great artistic partners.”
His friendship with Khaled Elayyan, director of the Ramallah festival, began when Elayyan invited him to give a talk on freedom of speech, art and the body. After subsequent visits, Wakely began to programme Palestinian artists in his own festival. Coming together, Wakely, Elayyan and El Attar decided to explore ways to collaborate. This, for Wakely, was both an artistic and a moral decision.
“I suppose in the background there is always the political context,” he says. Belfast International Arts Festival “was looking at ways of not just promoting cultural diversity and celebrating contemporary Arab culture in our own country but also showing solidarity with artists across the Arab region, particularly in Palestine.”
Our Voice Together Now is the result of logistical perseverance as well as artistic ambition. It secured funding through an international collaboration grant from the British Council, one of only 26 successful projects out of nearly 1,200 applications. “I have to give credit to the British Council,” Wakely says. “They could have decided not to confront the challenges of an artistic exchange with Palestine at this time. But they didn’t.” He singles out the council’s Occupied Palestinian Territories office for its crucial role in supporting the project.
Each of the three festivals then nominated a shortlist of local choreographers, from which Wakely, Elayyan and El Attar selected one from each country.
Michael McEvoy, who is based in Belfast, has created Tá Brón Orm – its name means “grief is upon me” – for the Palestinian dancers Ahmen Ghareeb, Shady Abdelrahman and Sara Gabr, all of whom auditioned. “I wasn’t looking for three people who could dance in perfect unison,” McEvoy says. “What I chose were three dancers who had a very clear identity movement wise.”
Based on a short story that McEvoy wrote, and using music by the Irish band Øxn, the piece began as a meditation on the end of the Irish language, then evolved through collaboration with the Egyptian dancers. “From day one I told them that I wasn’t trying to create something that was culturally theirs. I don’t have that knowledge, experience or understanding of Egyptian culture and society,” he says. “But what I could do is bring to them something that is very specifically culturally mine. They can then take that and find something in it that is theirs.”
That process brought to the surface surprising parallels between Ireland’s linguistic politics and Egypt’s tensions with Arabic, English and French, as well as “rituals around religion in funerals and around the burial of the dead”.
The Palestinian choreographer Salma Ataya, who now lives in Ireland, took a similar approach in choosing her Belfast dancers, Martha Tribe, Sarah Flavelle and Séan O’Neill. “I wasn’t necessarily looking out for just technique but noticed small moments or subtle connections,” she says. “It could have been something tiny, like a gesture or how someone responded to another dancer.”
Her work, Everynothing, explores the paradox of seeking stillness amid perpetual motion. “Life doesn’t stop,” she says. “We’re always in motion, sometimes by our own choice, and other times we move because we must or are forced to. The title came from me trying to appreciate and define the in-between moments while in constant motion.”
Shaymaa Shoukry has created The Light Within for the Palestinian dancers Besan Ja’ara, Hanin Tarik and Nibal AbuDan. The Egyptian choreographer appeared at Belfast International Arts Festival in 2022; she describes the two duets she performed then, Fighting and The Resilience of the Body, as yang in nature.
“Recently I’ve been trying to explore resilience from the yin polarity, from the softness, from the under, from playing with the light that comes in the darkness,” she says. “I feel that The Light Within is coming from this space.”
Shoukry also draws inspiration from dabkeh, the traditional Palestinian line dance that has become a symbol of resistance.
“I’m interested in how it, as a dance, is the form of expression for some of the dancers and one of the tools they use to express themselves,” she says. “Also, the relationship between the dabkeh and the land and how that can be a political statement, or a statement of existence. The dabkeh is a collective, grounded expression of being here now, present, stamping our feet on the ground and claiming existence. And, I would say, it’s done in an empowered, resilient, light and powerful kind of way.”
Our Voice Together Now will be staged in Belfast and Cairo this year, with hopes for performances in Ramallah in 2026. “The project is clearly fraught with problems when you look at the Palestinian end, but that didn’t stop us,” Wakely says. “We knew this was going to be the case.”
For Ataya, the reciprocal performances are particularly important for Ramallah. The city “usually has a vibrant arts scene, despite the limitations occupation imposes”, she says. “But the past two years have been especially challenging in bringing international performances to the city and Palestine in general.”
The return, she adds, will carry personal meaning: “Bringing Our Voice Together Now there, and to nearby Egypt, will be special for me, as it is to bring it to my second home in Ireland.”
Ataya’s connection to Ireland began years ago through Ursula Laeubli, the late codirector of Derry’s Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company. “Ursula visited Palestine many years ago, and it was influential for me,” Ataya says. “So it feels full circle for me to be choreographing in Belfast.”
Wakely sees the project rippling out beyond the three cities in future years. “We hope there’s a life across the greater Arab world and elsewhere as well,” he says. Fittingly, his final festival is bookended by dance – Luail performed Emma Martin’s Dancehall on October 15th, and Jo Fong and George Orange will perform The Rest of Our Lives on November 8th.
As he prepares to step down, Our Voice Together Now feels like a fitting coda. “I’m really delighted to be going out on this note,” he says, “because it encompasses a lot of my own personal beliefs and values.”
The Light Within premiered at the Falaki Theatre, in Cairo, on October 19th; Tá Brón Orm premieres at the Rawabet Art Space on Friday, October 24th; both are part of Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival. Everynothing is at Crescent Arts Centre on Friday, October 31st, and Saturday, November 1st, as part of Belfast International Arts Festival
