Setting the Syrian stage: A case study of dance and power

Abstract

This article first presents the Syrian stage of official dance representations as portrayed by the Ba’thist regime. Second, it criticises the official ideology on the basis of anthropological/ philosophical understandings. Third it shows how criticisms are always already embedded within the official ideological discourse. The aim, thus, is twofold: on one hand it strives to underlie the necessity for more political ethnographic studies of dance, and on the other, it aspires to show how, in the context of the ideological populism of the Syrian regime, alternative readings resisting and challenging authoritarian hegemonic ideological writings, are already embedded not only in the ideological contradictions of the official portrayal, but even in the syntax and the grammar the official rhetoric employs.