This story aired in the April 23, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents
The Arabic folk dance has roots in Palestine and is also practiced around the Levantine region, which includes Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. It is a generations-old dance and one Palestinian dance troupe in Oakland has been performing it as a way to tell the story of their people’s fight for liberation.
TRANSCRIPT:
Fourteen dancers line up facing a studio mirror. The dirbekeh drumline signals release.
In perfect unison, the dancers spring off their feet— left foot anchored on the floor while the right propels them into the next formation. Their steps are so light that you can’t even hear their feet over the group’s rhythmic claps. In just a few hops, the dancers face each other in two lines, hands interlinked. Their feet never touch the ground for longer than a millisecond.
And they never break formation.
The scene is something you might see at a Palestinian wedding, or graduation, or visiting family back home. That beat is a call to action- if you let it, the drumbeat will spring you out of your seat.
Dabke is one of the oldest known folk dances from Palestine. No one knows exactly how it was created. One popular story goes that it started as an agricultural ritual. Farmers would dance in concentric circles- hands always interlinked– and stomp seeds into Palestine’s hard salty earth.
For the generations dancing today– the popular line dance has become a symbol for their fight against erasure.
“I'm Palestinian and I was born and raised in Kuwait. I am a child of Palestinian parents who were both made refugees in the 1948 Nakba.”
Wael AlBuhaissy leads the group. Most of the dancers grew up in the Bay Area, and their troupe is aptly named Al Juthoor– Arabic for roots.
“Palestinians who were born in the diaspora like myself.
have just a strong connection as their parents or grandparents because that link is made early on.”
Wael’s parents, who were exiled from their villages into Gaza, maintained that link by taking him to Gaza every summer to stay with his entire extended family. He learned dabke the same way you learn to speak: by just being around other Palestinians. Especially during special occasions.
“From time to time there'd be a wedding. So we'd also see how the whole village would participate in the wedding.”
At the same time, he came face to face with the grim reality of life under occupation. The last time he visited Gaza in 1982:
“The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was actually at its height during that time.”
This invasion led to one of the biggest massacres of Palestinian refugees in modern history-- and even more injuries of Arab civilians in Lebanon.
But Wael says that all over the Israeli news– which was all they could get clearly in Gaza– the story was told by the perpetrator.
“I remember the Israeli reporter reporting on the invasion and calling the Palestinians, mukharibeen, terrorists.”
Sometimes history plays in a loop– 1982 and 2026 aren’t so different in today’s news cycle.The dance– with its own series of repetitions and loops, weaved through generation after generation– is how Wael rejects a fabricated history, and how he keeps the Palestinian narrative at the forefront.
“The sense of actually now that I'm representing something that's other than myself, bigger than myself. That was always a source of power.”
Today in the studio, Wael and the Juthoor dancers are practicing new choreography to Ya Yumma– an old refugee folk song about a grieving mother who hears a knock on her door.
“It’s actually a real story. She had thought her son was martyred, but then he shows up and he has to convince her that it's him.”
When they perform, they embody what the song is about. They stomp forcefully– a rush of adrenaline fills the studio. Kind of like hearing a knock on the door. And that’s by design.
“There are songs that are about resistance, defiance, even loss and tragedy, where we need to kind of work out the mannerisms and body language.”
The themes in the songs are still being written about today. When Wael dances, he thinks of the family he’s lost.
“Samer was the son of my first cousin, Maazouza. He was killed on October 12. And then Mohammed, his son Hamdan and granddaughter. Naser and Rab’ea, also two cousins and their children.”
Older generations shared the songs through word of mouth. Nowadays, people are sharing them on social media.
That’s where Wael’s niece and dancer, Yasmeen Odeh, found the song Shel Shel. It’s a modern piece that resonated with dancers in Gaza.
“A teacher in Gaza taught it to their kids, and they sang it, and it kind of blew up on social media. And so I was like, Y'all, what if we did a song to this dance? Like that would be really amazing.”
The song is heavy– its sound represents the reality of life in Gaza today.
“This song was sung to harmonize with drone sounds right, to produce, like, joy and escape from like the thing that's actually taunting you and tormenting you and keeping you from sleeping. When you hear it, you don't think dabke, it doesn't feel dabke in your body. And so Layla put together a piece of contemporary choreography for it.”
Leila Mire is a contemporary dance scholar at UC Berkeley and Juthoor member.
“I think abstract dance is really powerful because it doesn't tell you exactly what it's saying but it hints at it and it kind of gets into your psyche more.”
Under Leila’s direction, the troupe transforms. Yasmeen drops to her knees and pulses with the solemn tone of the singer. Two dancers meet her in the middle of the room. With backs to each other the three dancers mirror each other’s movements. The rest of the troupe dances in unison behind them. Their feet barely move– but they sway in unison. They become the hum of the drones.
For Leila and Yasmeen– dabke carries more meaning than a dance stuck in a certain timeframe. Bringing in contemporary dance is a bridge.
“A lot of these songs are really old pieces that have either been redone or that we're doing as a tribute to what we're going through today and connecting it back to what happened then.”
“It can be heavy some days, and that's because we feel that sense of responsibility and duty, right? We're not doing this just for entertainment's purposes. We're doing this to perform and to share our message with our broader community, which is that we're here. We're not going anywhere. And this is our culture and it’s beautiful in its own right.”
