Yaraqa and British Council Lebanon have partnered up to develop a pilot program - CATAPULT.body - for professionals in the field of dance and movement looking to identify and access opportunities for support, growth and development.

CATAPULT.body program engages the local dance & movement community in Lebanon and the UK with a program of several components to launch in 2022. It aims to support professionals to adapt and upskill, to help them in recognizing what ecosystem and surroundings they require to sustain themselves and their art and aid them in expanding their network of collaborators across the value chain and across industries.

CATAPULT.body is part of a larger pilot initiative launched by British Council Lebanon’s Arts and Culture department - CATAPULT - as a talent development program in partnership with pre-existing hubs in different creative sectors.

It aims to support creative talents from Lebanon while building strong connections with the UK, focusing on creative expression, exchange, and enterprise. The initiative involves recognizing potential in each of the sectors and developing programs that respond to the needs and ambitions of artists. CATAPULT is about upskilling, opportunity, and thrive.

Dance Base (Scotland) and Yaraqa (Lebanon) present PRECIPITATE: a bespoke creation Lab that connects dance artists from Scotland and Lebanon in a series of online and in-person encounters, which facilitate the opportunity to create, collaborate and exchange. Taking place between July and November 2022, the Lab culminates into an in-person portion, in Edinburgh Scotland, between October 3rd - 14th, 2022.

Between the magnitude of the crises we are enduring and the inherited practices and infrastructures of short-term thinking, it is crucial that we (re)investigate what sustainability of dance could look like today, tomorrow, and in the future.

This is what CATAPULT.body* | the micro-forum** is about!

Yaraqa and British Council Lebanon have partnered up to create a space for professionals in dance & movement + other industries (health, design, technology and more) to come together and challenge the practices & assumptions of moving forward during hard-to-predict times.

Everything in CATAPULT.body begins and ends with dance & movement professionals based in Lebanon and those who have left over the recent years. Therefore for the first phase of the program, we invited active players in the local scene to participate in a study.

We want to better understand where they stand in their work, where they feel stuck, and how to empower them to move forward. A participatory approach is adopted to design the program components of 2022. Their participation, time and insights helped us build a more inclusive program tailored to their specific needs and ambitions.