Current Exhibition

For Algerian-American dance artist and curator Esraa Warda, dance can transform the body into a vessel for narrative. What can we learn about a person’s story and their people, culture, and history from observing their movements? Can dance be an embodied archive, a record of cultural continuity, a decolonial way to store memory for people from formerly colonised lands? Can the knowledge stored in the body be preserved as an artifact as meaningfully as a written record?

To attempt to answer these questions, Warda collaborated with multidisciplinary artist Muyassar Kurdi to film and photograph six Algerian women across New York City in the intimacy of their homes, documenting their dances in traditional forms. The women were encouraged to be themselves, dress as they wish, and move to their favorite songs. Warda captured audio reflections from each woman and has transcribed key excerpts into text, presented in the exhibition alongside each embodied story. 

The six women, a mix of immigrants and first-generation, encompass diverse ages, body types, careers, and life paths, and originate from different cities across Algeria, though primarily from the North. Some have chosen to divulge their identity, and others have chosen to remain anonymous. Anonymity invites us even more to witness and use our senses to watch what their body remembers without needing to identify them. Each video displayed offers a deeply personal and unfiltered extension of the woman’s body and dance. Viewers are invited to witness each woman in her vulnerability. It invites observation without judgment and reveals the cultural language her movements carry: a language that insists on being heard. In addition to the six danced interviews, a projection features Warda’s 101 video tutorial, introducing traditional Algerian dances, their aesthetics, postures, and basic movement vocabulary for viewers to follow along in the space. Warda incorporates this informational component to underscore the complexity and specificity of these heritage dances, the rigor required to master them, and to challenge their reduction to vague labels such as “Arab dance” or “belly dance.”

By and with Algerian women, this work celebrates individual movement stories open for interpretation and does not claim to represent the entirety of Algerian stories or its dances. Rather, it centers the power of muscle memory as a practice of cultural remembrance.