Dancing Around the World is a global, site-specific dance project created by choreographer Nejla Yatkin in collaboration with videographer Enki Andrews. From April 2015 to April 2016, the two artists journeyed across 20 countries and 5 continents, engaging with local communities to explore how we move — through space, through culture, and through life itself.
At the heart of the project was a simple yet powerful question: What moves us?
The project traveled around the world from April 2015 to April 2016.
Dancing Around The World trailer
At the heart of the project was a simple yet powerful question: What moves us?
In each city, Nejla led dance workshops, created site-specific performances in public spaces, and collaborated with local artists, cultural centers, embassies, and institutions. Together with Enki, they filmed these encounters and collected stories, exploring how dance lives in the body, in landscapes, and in the collective memory of a place. The result is a vibrant mosaic of movement and meaning — a cinematic and choreographic archive of what connects us across cultures and continents.
Drawing inspiration from the five themes of geography — location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, and region — the project examined how dance reflects and reshapes our relationships to land, identity, and each other.
Dancing Around the World was born out of a desire to make dance accessible to all — beyond the walls of theaters, into the living, breathing spaces of everyday life. Its roots trace back to 2007, when Nejla first began choreographing in public spaces in Washington D.C., transforming Dupont Circle into an impromptu stage. The audience’s responses were transformative: people shared how the space now felt different — more alive, more connected.
From that seed, the vision expanded. Over the course of the world tour, Nejla and Enki connected with dance communities in Colombia, Peru, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Finland, Germany, Turkey, Italy, France, Tunisia, Kenya, Madagascar, India, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Australia. The project culminated in a final public performance in Washington, D.C. and Reston, Virginia in May 2016.
Through movement, conversation, and presence, Dancing Around the World became a bridge — between cultures, between strangers, between self and space. It is a living testimony to the power of kinetic empathy, the beauty of collaboration, and the possibility of creating shared meaning in every step we take.
This project invites us all to ask:
How do we move in the world?
How do we connect to place, to people, to ourselves?
And how might dance help us remember that we are — always — in motion, together?
Dancing Around The World Documentary short
Everything in life moves. The human body is designed to move and engage with the environment through movement. Throughout a lifetime of choreographing, teaching, and dancing I have learned how beneficial dance is to human development. Dance sharpens the senses, enhances social intelligence, challenges the body and mind and consequently reinvigorates our cognitive, physical and social development.
