Dance Umbrella announces the London Premiere of Dance is Not for Us by Cie Omar Rajeh & Maqamat

London’s leading International dance festival, Dance Umbrella today announces the London premiere of Dance is Not for Us by Cie Omar Rajeh & Maqamat (Beirut, Lebanon / Lyon, France) at The Pit, Barbican, 16 & 17 October.
 
Omar Rajeh is a choreographer, festival director and cultural architect whose practice spans performance, participation and moving image. Dance is Not for Us marks a rare London appearance from the founder of Maqamat and BIPOD – Beirut International Platform of Dance, and recipient of France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Rajeh brings over two decades of choreographic practice to an intimate solo that is at once a personal memoir and a political act.
 
Alone onstage, he dances and speaks of a past that no longer exists – of Lebanon, of loss, of a world that froze before it could become a future. Raw, urgent and deeply human, this is a work that asks what it means to keep dancing when everything around you says stop.
 
Drawing on maqam – his practice of instant composition - Rajeh refuses the structures of power that would reduce dance to something safe or palatable. The dancing body, he insists, creates its own rules, its own logic, its own hope. Performance becomes a gathering, a space where artist and audience enter into a shared experience that pushes back against fear and normalisation.
 
Omar Rajeh said: ‘It might have been weird on many levels that I chose dance in a country that was coming out of civil war, destruction, death and loss. However, dance at the time seemed to be the most revolutionary, the most provocative, and the most confrontational.’
 
Omar Rajeh is a choreographer, dancer, founder and artistic director of Maqamat, based between Lebanon and Lyon. Across more than twenty choreographic works presented on major international stages, he develops a practice that questions the politics of gatherings and relationships, treating space as a living composition shaped by how it is arranged, occupied, and negotiated. Central to his approach is maqam – a practice of instant composition that conceives the body as a constellation of shifting centres. He founded BIPOD – Beirut International Platform of Dance, and was distinguished by the French Ministry of Culture as Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
 
A production of Cie Omar Rajeh & Maqamat, Co-Presented by Dance Umbrella and the Barbican.
 
Special thanks to CN D à Lyon, Sima Performing Arts, Al-Serkal Avenue, Amadeus école de danse et de musique With the support of the DRAC - Auvergne Rhône-Alpes.
 
This performance is supported by the Programme international de diffusion artistique (PIDA).
 
Further programming for Dance Umbrella Festival 2026 will be announced soon.