"BALADK" Street & Urban Art Festival
Resistance (2015)
[ About ]
BALADK’s Street & Urban Art Festival is an eight day event celebrating the urban art movement. Championing live art, murals, graffitiو artist talks and workshops. The Festival is an important gathering of the global artistic community in Amman – Jordan and Jordanian artists. It provides a platform for emerging and established artists to connect, learn and create.
BALADK’s Street & Urban Art Festival is an eight day event celebrating the urban art movement. Championing live art, murals, graffitiو artist talks and workshops. The Festival is an important gathering of the global artistic community in Amman – Jordan and Jordanian artists. It provides a platform for emerging and established artists to connect, learn and create.
[ The collaboration ]
For the 2015 edition, Amman based dance company played a prominent role in the organization and implementation the evening event of dance, music, parkour, skateboarding, beatboxing, stilt walking, graffiti, fire dance at 7Hills Skatepark, on 27/05/2015, in downtown Amman of Jordan.
[ Dance and the city ]
As Studio 8, we are big believers that dance should be experienced anywhere, anytime, and accessible to everyone either by choice or in passing.
Dance in public spaces has the power to reach people of all ages, backgrounds, and build new and vibrant connections between the traditional and the contemporary, the past and the future. Since 2014, Studio 8 offers free activities for the public.
In 2014-2015, we collaborated with 7Hills Skatepark and organized public dance and circus arts workshops in the skatepark, park of Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, totally free of charge. The workshops provide a safe place for leisure and physical education for diverse youth in Amman, reaching 200 youth of Jordanian, Syrian, and Sudanese background.
In 2018, we joined with artists from the States, teaching dance inside Zaatari refugee camp, the largest Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. This teaching project was initiated by New York based nonprofit called Bridging Education and Art Together, including a series of workshops from September 16-23rd, 2018, to more than 400 boys and girls in Zaatari. Studio 8 artists were teaching, along with some of the best dancers in the world (Lilou, Menno, Sophie, Waaak One) and really enjoyed the process. The final result of the workshops was a dance performance of more than 100 boys and girls dancing in Zaatari, shaking the dust, while hundreds, possibly thousands community members watched.
In 2020, to tackle the problem that performing arts education within Jordan's public-school education system is generally neglected, undervalued and is not implemented in its fullness in the schools. We planned a training program with ICU – Istituto per la Cooperazione Universitaria Onlus, bringing dance outside of Amman, into community based organizations in Irbid, prior to the pandemic lock-down in Jordan. In Deyr Yousef and Erhaba, we were planning to teach 100 children aged 8 to 13 of Jordanian and Syrian background with 20% of disabilities creative movement for 6 months. The objectives is to educate, motivate and empower children and youth through participation in creation of live arts, and to provide access of performing arts to previously excluded Jordanian regions and social groups, especially children and young people, The project has been delayed and shortened due to the pandemic. But it will happen. The starting date of training is resumed in July.
