What inspires Yaraqa to engage in field support?
Insight already lives in the ecosystem; our role is to make space for listening and tools that help it surface.
Relations across boundaries of experience, discipline, reality, and pace expand what becomes possible in collective practice.
Methodologies help shape how things are done with care and intentionality, so others can act and adapt over time.
Activating the Ecosystem
What We Are Testing
Our experimentation plan unfolds through cycles of internal and external labs that bring together a digital mapping platform and peer-to-peer gatherings to help activate Lebanon’s dance and movement ecosystem. These labs support the creation of interconnected, responsive spaces, both digital and in-person, that inform and strengthen one another. At the core of our experiment is this feedback loop between structure and experience, data and encounter, reflection and activation.
Over the course of these 18 months, we are also exploring how to move from tools to praxis, embodying ecosystem thinking as a way of rehearsing the culture we seek to cultivate. Our approach aims to embrace the complexity of our lived conditions by being iterative and relational: situated, embodied, applied, and responsive.
We also recognized that ecosystem work is not driven by fixed outcomes but shaped through care, presence, and trust. Drawing on the team’s collective expertise, we are designing spaces of encounter that move beyond the transactional and grounded in both structured data and embodied practice, strategy and experience. This work continues to evolve in response to the shifting needs, insights, and contributions of the communities it engages.
Peer-to-Peer Gatherings
Choreographed gatherings that move through sensing what is emerging in the field, discovering others’ practices, forming connections, and allowing reflection to evolve into action. These gatherings invite embodied ways of engaging, are informed by the platform, and generate data that is fed back into it.
Digital Mapping Platform
A participatory and relational tool that surfaces needs, opportunities, actors, and actions. It enables professionals to locate themselves within the ecosystem, observe where connection and alignment are possible, and see how different parts of the field intersect and interact.
Support Models
Support models that reflect lived realities. Formats and methods developed through internal and external labs, shaped by the conditions people are working within, and tested in relation to shifting needs and contexts.
Feedback Loops
Experimenting with Feedback Loops. We are testing how the mapping platform and gatherings can work in tandem. The goal is to ensure that conversations spark action and that digital tools remain responsive and grounded in lived engagement.
As we carry out this experiment, we are asking ourselves:
- How do we stay open to what emerges, while grounding ourselves in ways of working that can endure?
- How can we design for interconnectedness while balancing the tension between tools and practice, outcomes and conditions, strategy and lived experience?
- How do we create participatory models that hold complexity, not by resolving it, but by moving with it?
- How do we leave everyone we interact with—especially through long-term programs—with meaningful and lasting change?
- How can we exchange cultural practices and methodologies effectively with other institutions and practitioners?
- How do we turn evaluation feedback into actionable, applicable outcomes?
- What strategies can help us empower and enable cultural actors in their different roles more effectively?
Meet the team
Yaraqa is a creative production and consulting company working with dance practices and thinking in movement methodologies to inspire cultural shifts across communities and industries. Since 2014, we’ve worked with individuals and organizations to reshape how people think, engage with, and experience their world from different vantage points, with intentionality and overlap. We produce, consult, research, and develop concepts, tools, strategies, and collaborations, bringing unlikely people and disciplines together with dance and movement as the unifying force.
We are a team of practitioners and creatives from different worlds: technology, design, research, and dance and movement. We meet around shared values of care and a commitment to showing up, together, for the field. Our work comes to life where these disciplines overlap, guided by a belief in experimentation and a blend of embodied and data-informed approaches.
We often work across four, sometimes five or six, time zones — with Emma in Scotland, Philippa in Portugal, Grace in the USA, and Romy, Joanne, and Jad in Lebanon. Zoom has become our shared studio, a global playground of perspectives orbiting around the Lebanese ecosystem.