24 Husni Fareez Street
Jabal Al Weibdeh
Amman 11140
Jordan
- Arts
Studio 8 is a Jordanian not-for-profit performing arts theatre company. It was founded in 2014 by 3 young artists aiming to shape and humanize the dance art through innovation, experiment, development, exchange, education, and research. For the past 9 years, Studio 8 has collaborated with more than 600 people of 43 nationalities in creating 10 original dance productions, giving more than 60 performances, and organizing more than 160 classes and workshops. Studio 8 has also made dance videos and facilitated art incubations, artistic residencies, dance-inspired exhibitions, dance discussions, community art walks, and street art fairs. For the first 5 years, Studio 8 had little budget and in 2019, it partnered with Drosos Foundation, and Prince Claus Fund, and has an annual budget of 80,000 USD, mostly through proposal writing and international grants.
It is at the heart of the Studio’s mission to increase access to dance, to increase opportunities for cultural expression and awareness. In the past 10 years, the founders of Studio 8 have been working at different levels of dance performance and dance transmission and have witnessed the rapid disappearance of dance encounters of international, regional, and local dance performances and training, the struggle of local choreographers, performers, dance makers to sustain their individual or collaborative creativity. In direct response to feedback from dance artists who expressed a need for more in-depth support for the education, development, and dance professionalization of Amman, Studio 8 was born to tackle this creative crisis in the art of making dances. Besides producing thoughtful and ambitious dance productions for the international stage, organizing training programs in dance and theater, and running artistic residencies that celebrate and embrace many forms of diversity, Studio 8 also organizes a bi-annual international multi-disciplinary dance festival based in Amman, Jordan, with the aim of the festival to put Jordan in the global dance scene. It creates bonds between dance professionals from Jordan and abroad.
Generally, Studio 8 is an independent space trying to build an infrastructure for dance creation in Amman. It produces original dance works, and runs education projects for local emerging artists, together with a network of international and regional partners, serving as a platform for innovation, experimentation, and continuous development of dance culture in Jordan and beyond. It has also organizes an Amman-based biannual festival (https://ideajo.co/) Furthermore, since 2021, it started an artistic residency program that is capable of hosting 7 artists all year long to create new artworks that tell stories through movement and human body that are compelling and relevant to the land and the people, taking human themes further – embracing and collaborating with different cultures and disciplines.
We organize residencies, co-productions, training projects, and festivals and most of them focus on alternative narratives, diversity, inclusiveness, empathy, and exchange. For example, our festival started in 2019, and happens every two years in the Autumn of Jordan. Last year, the 3rd edition of the festival brought more than 50 artists from 25 different countries to Jordan with a carefully curated program that includes 22 events, such as live performances, artistic residencies, workshops, dance jam, open lab, and round-tables, with the consideration that our research, capacity-building, and international exchanges as essential as our own creative productions. In 2024, we plan to travel more and organize various exchange projects that bring more young voices together. One project we have is to have a creative lab in the desert of Jordan with a group of multi/interdisciplinary artists from the global south for 2 weeks at the beginning of May and another one is to travel to different parts of the world to tell our story inspired by our experience in Jordan during Covid pandemic through dance in festivals. We see ourselves contributing to the Network in many ways, in the short term and in the mid and longer terms, at the project level, partnership-building level, and perhaps policy-making level if we could be more connected to more partners at home and abroad.
We heard of ALF Network through our project partner, Al Balad Theater in Jordan a few years ago. We had always wondered how could we join the largest Network of civil society organizations involved in the promotion of intercultural dialogue across the Euro-Mediterranean region. It was our fault that we never took action till very recently when a festival shared the application form with us and encouraged us to apply. It is good that now we are taking the first step to apply! As an independent dance platform with its founders who are mostly children of refugees, we always feel we are quite alone on a journey for social change, for a more inclusive, free, and happy future. This is very sad. We often just want to dance with our eyes closed, to no audience at all, in a spacious room, listening to our heartbeats, following our internal rhythms. Yet that rarely happens. The reality is that we dance in Jordan where we are constantly reminded that art and advocacy rarely have a clean relationship. We do not want to leave Jordan. We do want to be alone. We ask ourselves why there are so few performing arts platforms, collectives or organizations from our part of the world who can tell their stories through their bodies in live experiences through the interaction between themselves, audience members, and the environment. Deep down, we always see ourselves as part of a bigger picture, part of generations of rebels who rallied, and continue to rally, to reclaim their body, land, and memories, to replace the system with reform, with change, with dreams of freedom, with demand of their essential rights, and despite the non-fulfillment, intimidation, and reprisals, one thing is clear: the energy of the people has still not yet waned and it is natural for people to stand up for their rights and freedoms. To be honest, we don’t know exactly what I seek in ALF Network. In core, we just seek a safe “space” or “network” to be connected with a group of people, perhaps in some way just like us, and search for solidarity and exchange stories and share recourses.