Ballet might not be the first thing you think of for war-ravaged civilians trying to get over their trauma, but Australian Nicholas Rowe would beg to differ. He's taught dance in some of the world's most troubled regions, from Bosnia to the West Bank, to Ghana, and he's passionate about its healing powers. Dateline's David Brill caught up with Nicholas on a recent trip to the Middle East to see what a difference a dance can make.
REPORTER: David Brill
NICHOLAS ROWE, BALLET DANCER: We better move.
REPORTER: So, where are we going?
NICHOLAS ROWE: This is the Burj Barajneh camp, situated in the centre of Beirut. As you will see, there is fairly rough infrastructure. There are about 20,000 – 30,000 people living in this camp, descendents of Palestinians and Palestinians who came in 1948.
This refugee camp is an unlikely place to find an Australian ballet dancer and choreographer. And this alley way is an unusual place to find a dance movement workshop.
NICHOLAS ROWE: This is quite an interesting location we’ve got.
Nicholas Rowe is leading a group of international dancers and Palestinian teenagers into a different sort of dance space.
NICHOLAS ROWE: They are coming out here to explore how they can do movement in these types of locations. It’s about reclaiming space, it’s about – this can feel like very oppressive conditions and they are but by adding an aesthetic quality to it we can dance here, we can make movement here. It gives a whole new meaning and a whole new sense as to what this place is.
Nicholas has worked in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon for the past 11 years. Today he’s here with his dance colleagues for a movement class with disabled children from the camp. For these children, who have suffered so much, it’s a rare chance for a physical and artistic experience.
NICHOLAS ROWE: It’s just so amazing. You walk into a room with a group of people who are in a refugee camp who are also in a pretty sedate place in terms of physically. And then see them 10 minutes later, making up movement, being creative, aware and alive and having aesthetic experiences with movement, it’s just so exciting. It’s just beautiful.
It is also a chance for some of these dancers who are working with the festival to come in and see how they can interact with other people with mixed abilities and to find creative ways of working with them.
CARLA PETERSON, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: It opens my heart. It is a very human-to-human kind of connection on a very elemental way, in a way all of us can understand, no matter what.
Carla Peterson is an artistic director from New York. This is her first visit to Lebanon.
CARLA PETERSON: It is a way of working within the arts that is very intimately connected with the community, and he brings a special gift, I think, to what he does here, because through both his own intelligence, in terms of how he works with the children and the youth, but also the fact that he brings great joy to it is really sensed by everyone that he is working with.
Nicholas believes dance has many uses, especially with the Middle East going through dramatic political and social transformations.
NICHOLAS ROWE: I think dance can function on many levels in a society during a time of change, trauma and upheaval. One is at the performing end through festivals like here and Ramallah in which artists get to provide an alternate vision of how the world could be or might be.
One of the great things about dance is that it is a great place to express ideas but it’s also a great place to realize ideas.
This is Ramallah, in the West Bank. Nicholas lived here for eight years when he set up the Palestinian Territories’ first contemporary dance company.
NICHOLAS ROWE: In 1998, I came here to teach a workshop at the popular Arts Centre. I didn’t really know what to expect. There is a very lively, dynamic group of dancers in the studio in such desperate circumstances outside the studio. To get there, I had to go through an Israeli blockade with tear gas, so the last thing you expect after going through that is people using their bodies, trying to find ways of expressing ideas through their bodies.
Nicholas’s work and the challenges he faced were documented by fellow Australian Ballet School graduate Josef Brown.
JOSEF BROWN: So the army is surrounding Blatar refugee camp and the moment and they have got 80 kids there in the kindergarten who are meant to be here. They are not able to get home and five of the teachers are there, so we are going to start the workshop with six of the teachers, and when they come – hopefully they will be able to join us.
NICHOLAS ROWE: I think the thing that always inspires people in any culture really, is relevance. When they see something that really pertains to them, on stage or a live experience, it’s so invigorating. You can’t divorce dance from its context, and if the context is a highly political one, then you can’t divorce dance from politics. You can say art’s for arts sake, but art doesn’t exist in a bubble.
Today he’s back in the studio for a dance workshop with former students.
You’ve been coming here now for 13 years. You had to live pretty rough when you first came here. You were with the Australian ballet, the Sydney Dance Company - glamorous job supposedly - but you’ve been doing this, this hard stuff. Why?
NICHOLAS ROWE: It’s funny when I think back to the Australian Ballet, I remember in my first year at the Australian Ballet a teacher saying, “Get your leg up high or you’ll end up in community dance!“ And that whole notion of doing dance that isn’t somewhere with the peak professionals of ballet would be somehow very unfullfilling, and it’s been such an opposite experience.
And yet I found when working with people who are struggling against adversity and they are very much here, struggling just to find a location which to gather together to dance and to share those dances, the passion that comes with that is so inspiring and it’s just like a magnet.
I don’t know how dance has helped in the sense that the work that I do with dance isn’t about healing, it’s not about treating people as traumatized people, but it is about trying to see how can people be empowered through movement.
Nicholas believes movement can help people negotiate their way through life’s ordeals.
NICHOLAS ROWE: To find ways of moving with people can move together cooperatively, creatively, support each other, lift each other hold each other nurture each other in movement. It doesn’t do it in the same direct way that maybe words do as you go to try and console someone, but it does it on another level. So I think that dance, whether it’s being experienced in a class by children or watched as an event on stage by children. Seeing those more positively, images what the body can do, provides an alternative vision of how the world can be.
At the Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival, now in its fifth year, we can see just how dance is transforming lives.
GIRL: Because of Nicholas, I knew how much I liked dance and I knew how messages can be given to the audience. Tonight we will be in a diverse cultural dialogue.
This work is collaboration between a traditional dance group and Japanese performers.
NICHOLAS ROWE: It is a very vibrant dance scene. So many are creative and so committed to discipline in the way they create their dance, their art and their movement. So it is so exciting to see this going on.
DANCER: It was great dealing with you guys. Yes, it was. It is the first time to have something here in Ramallah like this - with Japanese. Yes, it is good to bring culture together. Woo!
Reporter/Camera
DAVID BRILL
Producer
MELANIE MORRISON
Editor
NICK O’BRIEN
Translations/Subtitling
DALIA MATAR
Original Music composed by
VICKI HANSEN
Additional footage courtesy of Josef Brown