Dabke
دبكة
The communal line dance of Palestine and the Levant, performed at weddings and celebrations, with stamping steps that shake the earth.
Dabke is a line dance shared across Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, in which dancers link arms or shoulders and move in a semicircle or line, led by a lead dancer — the lawweeh or raas — who improvises with a cane or handkerchief. The name derives from the Arabic root meaning “to stamp,” and the dance is built on synchronized stomping, kicks, and leaps.
One popular account of its origins ties the stamping to the communal trampling of mud-and-straw roofs in village life: when a roof cracked, neighbors gathered to tread it firm again, to the rhythm of song. Whatever its origin, dabke remains inseparable from collective labor, harvest, and celebration, and no Palestinian wedding is complete without it.
Since the mid-twentieth century, professional troupes such as El-Funoun, founded in Palestine in 1979, have staged dabke as a choreographed art form and an assertion of cultural continuity. For Palestinians in the diaspora, teaching children dabke is a way of keeping a homeland under their feet.