Dancing Around the World

Global Movement. Local Stories. Shared Humanity.

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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?


 

Artists



Videos



Photos



Journal


Dancing Around The World - Hyderabad

Dancing Around The World - Hyderabad

Friday 15th, January 2016

Dancing Around The World - Hyderabad


Dancing Around The World - Antananarivo

Dancing Around The World - Antananarivo

Tuesday 22nd, December 2015

Dancing Around The World - Antananarivo


Dancing Around The World- Tunis

Dancing Around The World- Tunis

Monday 14th, December 2015

Dancing Around The World - Tunis


Dancing Around The World - Nairobi

Dancing Around The World - Nairobi

Tuesday 27th, October 2015

Dancing Around The World - Nairobi


Dancing  Around The World - Paris

Dancing Around The World - Paris

Saturday 3rd, October 2015

Dancing Around The World - Paris



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