Join us for a two-hour open level dabkeh workshop led by local dance group Canadabkeh! We will learn the fundamentals of dabkeh footwork and a short choreographic phrase. No previous experience needed! Come dance in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and learn more about Palestinian cultural resistance through dabkeh.

Canadabkeh was founded by Haytham and Zaid Alhamaydeh, two Palestinian brothers from Nablus. When they arrived in Vancouver, they found that dabke culture was not active here and so they decided “to look for passionate individuals who would share and pursue the vision of bringing joy to the community through zaffe chants and loud dabke footwork.” The group is “passionate about spreading the Arabic culture and connecting people."

Accessibility

This is a masked event and extra masks will be available on site should you need one. We ask that if you are sick, please take care and refrain from coming to the workshop.

Dabke is a standing, footwork-focused dance that includes stomping, jumping, close proximity and hand holding.

Full details on access to the Vines Den may be found here. Please note that the venue has a portable ramp, and we welcome advance notice to avoid any delays making the space accessible for you. The washroom is wheelchair accessible but is quite small - more details are available in the linked document.

Harm reduction supplies are available onsite.

Please contact the event organizers at drivinginpalestine@gmail.com to let us know how we can make this event more accessible to you, or with any questions.

About the Freedom School and Driving in Palestine

Held in conjunction with Driving in Palestine, Freedom School rides the wake of the Freedom Flotilla as we come together to assert that from Salish Seas to Palestine, occupation is a crime. Freedom School engages liberation praxis and community building in support of a free Palestine and all who advocate for justice in the face of settler colonialism, militarism, state violence and oppression in our shared and interconnected worlds.

In the free school tradition, we embrace education as critical, political, and liberational for ourselves and our community. Education as a practice of freedom must take place in community, which means that it is free, open, and accessible to all community members. This is the context in which we seek to activate and renew community solidarity, to bring attention to ongoing atrocities perpetrated by Israel in the West Bank, to bring an end to the genocide and weaponized starvation in in Gaza, and to centre Indigenous solidarity movements for justice in the face of settler colonial regimes of violence, apartheid, and genocide, more broadly.

Here and now, we amplify and insist on what Sarah Ihmoud describes as decolonial love in the face of colonial oppression where, “to practice feminism in the midst of bearing witness to genocide is to embrace love as a radical consciousness, as a radical decolonial politic of fighting for life.” We do this work together, in community because we know that it is through community that we will achieve collective liberation. Only we will save us.

For, as Nada Elia reminds us, “Today, more than ever, there is growing consciousness that our struggles are not parallel—a term which suggests that they will never meet—but intersectional, coming together at various nodes. Our hope is that the enactment of reciprocal solidarity is a long-term movement, not a ‘moment’.”