Liverpool Arab Arts Festival Announces Lineup

Liverpool Arab Arts Festival reveals a powerful programme of theatre and performance. The UK's premier annual Arab arts festival, LAAF brings a thrilling celebration of Arab culture incorporating music, visual art, theatre, performance, spoken word, literature and film. It runs from 5-14 July 2019.

Writer, activist and poet, Dana Dajani, is the festival's artist in residence. She presents a World Exclusive of her one-woman show Heroine with a Thousand Dresses at Bluecoat (13 July), taking the audience through the diverse and eclectic wardrobe of her own grandmother - a boutique owner in Jerusalem whose love of fashion was her mode of self-expression.

Serving as a Mistress of Ceremonies, Dana will dissect image and identity, style, sexuality, and standards of beauty in contemporary society, through the ritual of dressing. As she tries on garment by garment in the performance, Dana embodies a pantheon of strong and powerful feminine archetypes, telling HERstory through a personal, ancestral, and mythological lens.

At Unity Theatre, ?volv? (11 July) is a complex, magical delight from visual artist and performer, Yara Boustany. Following a journey from idyllic nature in the mountains of Lebanon, to the busy street-life of Beirut with its startling roofscapes and noisy traffic, ?volv? is filled with wondrous images and optical illusions.

Also at Unity Theatre, Bahraini poet Qassim Haddad's powerful rendering of the classic love story of Majnun Layla (7 July)- often described as the Arab Romeo and Juliet - is transformed into a live experience by renowned Palestinian actor and writer, Amer Hlehel.

The UK premiere of Gesturing Refugees, by Farah Saleh and her collaborators is at Liverpool's Bluecoat. A combination of dance and visual art, the interactive performance intends to archive hidden stories of refugeehood using the bodies of refugee artists and audience members, while playing with other archive material, testimonies and imagination.

Funded by Creative Scotland and Cultural Resource and supported by Dance Base, the re-enactment, transformation and deformation of the alternative and personal memories of refugees, performed by refugee artists, will allow the re-appropriation of the narrative of refugeehood and develop a collective gestural identity that might challenge that of passive victimhood to which refugees are often subjected.

LAAF Chair, Mustapha Koriba, said: "We are incredibly proud to be bringing such powerful, diverse and inspirational Arab artists to the city for this year's festival.

"Our 2019 theme, Shadow and Light, goes to the heart of how we tell the story of Arab art and culture and female voices from across the Arab diaspora contribute so much to that rich tapestry."