buzur

Buzur is an interdisciplinary dance-research project initiated in 2024 by Chanel Cheiban and Rayanne Fawaz. It began with an urgent need to return to something familiar, yet made distant by years of training within Western contemporary dance frameworks: their heritage, and the dances that carry it.

Their research led them to dabke. To its many forms, its variations, its stories. From one country to another, one village to the next, and from one body to another, dabke shifts. It travels with people. It crosses borders, survives displacement, and carries the marks of war, migration, and separation.

Eight dancers and two percussionists take the stage, moving away from the nationalist and folkloric narratives that have often confined dabke to an imagined past. Buzur makes room for dabke as it exists today, in all its complexity and incarnated by the histories of those who have carried it forward. Urbanization, war, immigration, the loss of community, and social media have all left their imprint, giving rise to many dabkes, each with its own memories, contradictions, histories, and truths.

Buzur asks what might become possible when a dance is allowed to keep moving. To change. To remember on its own terms.