For the Palestinian American choreographer Samar Haddad King, the orange is more than a prop in her latest show. It’s an entry point into her culture.
“It’s one of the few fruits that you can divide into individual components without using a knife,” King said, noting that oranges are symbols of livelihood and sustenance to many Palestinians. Each slice “is perfectly formed with its own casing and borders, and yet, it’s just a piece of the whole.”
In “Gathering: New York City,” hundreds of oranges spill across the floor. The performers toss the oranges in athletic dance phrases and stack them ceremoniously on each other’s prone bodies. Audience members are drawn into the play, rolling errant oranges toward the middle of the room.
“Gathering,” which has its world premiere on Thursday at the Shed as part of its Open Call series, tells the fictional story of an unnamed village under siege and one woman’s struggle to reconcile her fragmented memories. Though the work had been in development since before the pandemic, the Israel-Hamas war, which has gone on for several months, is now part of its subtext, lending increased resonance to its themes of trauma and dislocation — and bringing people together.
“Palestinians know how to gather — in celebration, in mourning, in harvest,” King said. “This piece started as a homage to that.”
The braided stories in “Gathering” span the intimate and the epic. Samaa Wakim plays Isra, a teacher who is trying to remember what has happened to her and her family. The text, written by King, has a surreal quality that oscillates between memories of an explosion on the day of Isra’s wedding and facts from science lessons she once taught. Personal revelation exists alongside the land speed of ostriches.
“There’s no space or time,” Wakim said about the abstract setting for the narrative, which she performs in English, her third language. “It can be everywhere, anywhere, anyone.”
The performers — a global group, who come from the Askar refugee camp in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Japan, among other places — sing and use puppets, as well as dance. With training as diverse as their backgrounds, they bring a wide range of performing styles to King’s layered narratives. The dynamic Mohammed Smahneh, for one, moves fluidly between styles, his dancing a through line that links dabke, a traditional Palestinian folk dance, and breaking.
King’s ability to home in on specific details that also have a universal appeal can be seen throughout her work. Now 40, she has choreographed more than 30 pieces in the past 18 years, including dances for the puppet Little Amal’s walk in Lower Manhattan (2022), and “Last Ward,” a critically acclaimed dance theater work from the same year that also meditates on life and death.
King grew up in Huntsville, Ala., and came to New York City in 2001 for the Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. program, where she focused on choreography. She befriended another student, Zoe Rabinowitz, and together they started Yaa Samar! Dance Theater just after graduation. Rabinowitz is now the executive director and a dancer in the company.
By 2007 the company was touring to dance festivals in the West Bank and Jordan. With a season at the Joyce SoHo in 2010 and a fully programmed 2011, the troupe seemed to be taking off.
But around that time, King’s husband was denied entry to the United States from East Jerusalem — a situation that King thought would be resolved in a matter of months but that instead changed the course of her life and her company.
“Zoe and I had a heart-to-heart and I said, ‘We can adapt,’” King said, recalling how they decided to create a decentralized model for the company that would allow her to live with her family. King and her dancers are now based in New York and in Palestinian cities.
“Dance gave me that,” King added, “the ability to maneuver, to see a broader vision, to hustle. And then being Palestinian, everything changes overnight, and you have to adapt as well.”
The shift meant they had to establish a remote rehearsal process. Residencies became opportunities for the company to meet in person, despite the challenges their various passports, visas, and ID cards present to international travel.
At one such residency, in March 2020 at New York University, company members were breaking open oranges and sharing them with a small audience. A few days later, Covid-19 forced them to continue the creative process apart, resulting in an interactive film, “3 x 13.” Further evolutions of “Gathering” came from workshops at the Freedom Theater in the Jenin refugee camp and elsewhere. But King began to wonder whether the work would ever see the stage.
And then the Shed called. The participatory nature of King’s vision matched Open Call’s civic mission.
“This work is deeply rooted in identity, experience and inquiry,” said Darren Biggart, who oversees Open Call. “And it has multiple entry points. It’s an invitation to hold complexity, to experience joy and grief.”
A series of community events has fed into the performances, with Yaa Samar! artists teaching dabke. In workshops held in April at an after-school club at the Arab-American Family Support Center in Queens and at Fort Hamilton High School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, teenagers joined hands to learn dabke, the social dance that King says is “used for everything: celebration, warning and resistance.”
Those same winding, malleable steps with their resilient spirit permeate “Gathering.”
“The tradition of our gathering and the heritage of music and dance — it’s a very rich culture,” Wakim said. “And I think it’s our role to preserve it, document it and share it.”
For King, the gravity of the moment adds contextual layers and urgency to the work’s themes. But it also deepens the symbolism she finds in the orange. She reflects on how, all too often, individual dreams become casualties, too.
“Most Palestinian artists around the globe will say they’re Palestinian before they say they’re artists, because it’s the identity that’s attacked,” she said, describing that tension. “It’s oftentimes ‘we believe,’ because of this collective energy when you’re displaced. You see the erasure and deep devastation, and it’s so hard to say, ‘I believe.’
“While ‘Gathering’ is definitely a celebration of the power of the collective and community, the individual is very important.”
Audience members, too, have a vital role: as participants or witnesses.
“People have the choice to switch their role,” King said of the audience, “because I believe there’s something about grabbing an orange and placing it on a body — the act of doing that. But the act of seeing it is also something engrossing and heart-wrenching.”
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