Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Aubre Hill, the artistic director of the Qabila Dance Co. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Aubre, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Qabila started out of a sheer love of learning and sharing folkloric dances from across the Arab World. Offering cultural representations that most people only hear about through the news has been profound though. The arts allow meaningful connection and nurture a beautiful compassion across differences. So our performances are both full of gratitude to share these dances and full of respectful responsibility to offer insight to our humanity.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

The Qabila Dance Company is dedicated to sharing the diverse folkloric dances of the Arab World. We began in 2011 in a climate of growing Islamic hate and othering of our Arabic communities. Through dance performances and workshops we give audiences an opportunity to learn about different cultures, bringing our humanity and joy for life together across our differences. Folkloric dance is a form specifically created to allow everyone to belong, and this is the heart of everything we do.

We are one of the few pan Arabic dance companies on the planet with a repertoire spanning the Arab World. Our members are diverse in background, age, and identity. This is something audiences notice and share how empowering it is to see themselves reflected onstage regardless of gender, color, size, or ethnicity. In dance, we all belong. That does not mean the dances we present are easy. Our dancers rehearse regularly as well as attend workshops and trainings with native teachers to continue learning, refining, and growing our understanding.

Dance brings people together, united in humanity. The Qabila Foundation is dedicated to sharing the joy and diversity of Arabic folk dance rooted on the strong belief that art can build bridges of understanding across cultures, ages, genders, ideologies, and backgrounds and allows us all to belong. Be a part of the folk dance revolution!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The past three years have been a whirlwind for all of us. Being part of a group of artists can be complex anytime, but especially stressful events like a world-wide pandemic creates an evaluation of what is important and what your priorities are. Navigating a dance company through such turbulence was humbling but also the best grounding focus I could have hoped for. Like most we shifted our rehearsals and meetings to zoom. We were not working towards any particular performances since everything shut down, but we quickly found the regularity of our work supported our members physical and mental health and kept us connected even through digital screens. So we utilized the opportunity to deepen our research, have complex conversations about identity and representation, develop other skills, study with teachers all over the globe, and even connect to our audiences in new ways such as a series of family workshops held by our members and online dance parties.

We held open conversations about how we feel safe, what we need to feel supported, what is the purpose of a dance company, who we were serving, and how we support our communities. Our meetings shifted spaces and forms over time, but our mission is richer, deeper, and more fully embodied largely because of the reflective time we had. And we never stopped. The dances continue always!

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Creativity and arts are the heart of society. They are the crux of healing, connection, and innovation. With this importance, we need to prioritize the arts, make them a part of our budget (time, energy, and money), and strategize them as part of our lives as important as food, shelter, and air. We often think of needs as a hierarchy which reduces arts to a supplement, and yes I fully agree you need air much more in the immediate than the others. But if we think of our needs only in the short term, we miss the ability to sustain and thrive forward. If we remove the time restriction and start looking at what we need to live thriving full lives, we shift the hierarchy to understand arts are vital for our survival. Especially now!    

Contact Info:

• Website: www.qabilafoundation.org
• Instagram: @qabilafoundation
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/QabilaFoundation

Image Credits
Marcos Adrian Aubre Hill