Beirut vibrates to uncertain rhythms, oscillating between tragedies and hopeful beginnings. These vibrations run through our streets, crack our walls, strengthen our souls, and affect our bodies. At every vibration, we respond: inhale, exhale, move, and dance. 

Beirut Choreography Encounters is a contemporary dance festival that invites you to move with the rhythms of Beirut, filling the city with art and movement. A diverse group of artists will create lasting vibrations by sharing their work and performances throughout the city’s streets.

Across three days — 31 October, 1 and 2 November 2025 — artists from Lebanon, Syria, Greece, Spain, Japan, and the USA will share performances, conduct workshops, and participate in panel discussions. 

Saturday 1 November 2025 

Workshops 

10:00 AM - 12:00 PM:  Nuance and Texture, with Manatsu Tanaka. 

This workshop will explore how to express different nuances and textures in dance. Nuance and texture can add so much more highlights and magnetism to performance. Score out the textural arc in your dancing, and let's expand our palettes in performance! 

12:00 PM - 2:00 PM, The Body as a Landscape, with Raquel Gualtero

In this course, we'll open up to the full range of our creative possibilities and delve into technique as a living territory, where silence, emotion, precision, and play intertwine. Through carefully designed exercises, each participant will have the opportunity to explore their own path, reconnecting with the body, intuition, and personal knowledge. The material we'll work with is dynamic, energetic, and precise, inviting each person to move with authenticity and presence. 

2:00PM - 4:00 PM, Can Movement Create Comedy? with Angela Paulima.  

In this workshop we will attempt to explore how playfulness and silliness can be choreographic tools to create stories. We will be experimenting with the musicality of the body, embracing failure within assemble work, using joy to create movement and reflection. We will be exploring ensemble movement inspired by the Greek chorus. At the end of the workshop there will be an opportunity to take part in a sharing. 

💰 Fees:
• $15 for one workshop
• $30 for all three
📞 For registration: WhatsApp or call +961 3 554 498.
💬 If you can’t afford the fee, reach out to us, money should not get in the way of learning.

Performances and Work-in-Progress

8:00PM 

Rose from the Cerebral Cortex, by Manatsu Tanaka. 

A contemporary dance piece, that examines the presumptions that the Western colonial ideologies have grown seeds into people. The piece interrogates how blindsided people are by colonial white lies: the white roses, and how we must pluck them out with our bare hands, even if the thorns bleed our fingers. 

We Who Remain, by AlSarab Dance Company. 

A work that confronts the weight of survival; the stillness after shock, the ache of loss, and the fragile persistence of life. It reflects on home both as a refuge and uncertainty: a place whose foundations have shifted, yet where life continues.

Ancestral Echoes, by Samer Zaher. 

A contemporary dance solo born from a history shaped by the absence and the search for belonging. The work explores the body as an archive that channels memories of its first encounters with different dance cultures -- Oriental, Dabke, Bollywood, Voguing, and Contemporary. 

A Hill and a Valley, by Leila Mire. 

Because you Deserve Love, by Pamela el Hayek.

A Physical Theater performance that explores the many faces of love and the stereotypes surrounding lovers. Who do we become when we love? How do our bodies behave, transform, and express this affection? Through a gallery of lover personas, the piece blends irony with research in psychoanalysis, poetry, fashion, and cultural ideas of romance, to reflect on the multifaceted nature of love. 

Concert Jam and Party, at Zico House. 

10:00 PM - 12:00 PM

 🎟️Tickets All performances are free and open to everyone.

💖 Donations: We deeply appreciate your support through our sliding scale system: $10–$100