“Contemporary Dance in the Arab World: Fieldwork from Tunisia”

"Contemporary Dance in the Arab World" presents the results of fieldwork research conducted in Tunisia from 2010-2019, and questions the place and function of contemporary dance in the Arab world. Is the practice of contemporary dance in the Arab world an importation of a Western exogeneous genre?

"I aim to analyze how contemporary dance can write its own history in Tunisia, and by deconstructing the universality of contemporaneity, I propose a new definition of contemporary dance as a specific dance genre in the Arab world."

Mariem Guellouz is an associate professor in sociolinguistics at Université Paris Cité and a researcher at the CERLIS (centre de recherche sur les liens sociaux-CNRS). She is also an artist and a performer. Guellouz analyzes activist discourses in Arab social movements as political performances and their relationship with poetics, esthetics and artistic creations. She is interested in the effects of orientalist/colonial discourses on the artistic practices in Arab countries.

Arts Interdisciplinary Research (AIR) is a holistic research center and forum for creative and scholarly research across the arts that includes cutting-edge colloquia, exploratory seminars, lecture demonstrations, launches of research publications and creative works, reading groups, faculty talks, and stand-alone conferences initiated by the faculty of the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts.