Moving in Solidarity: The Work Room endorses PACBI
The Work Room was established by a group of independent dance artists to reflect the diversity of what dance can be. It continues to run as an artist-led membership organisation, centring the community it supports and pioneering for diverse dance practices in Scotland and internationally.
Building on this legacy, The Work Room remains committed to expanding understandings of dance and challenging deeply entrenched systems of bias and structural inequality; recognising that dance—particularly white Western dance—has a colonial history shaped by cultural appropriation and the erasure of Indigenous dance and cultural practices.
Following a request submitted by a group of 30 artist-members, a motion was presented to the Annual General Meeting (AGM) for The Work Room to sign PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (see: https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines). The Work Room’s board of trustees worked with representatives to draft the motion that was presented at the AGM on Sunday 26 October. The membership vote was 91% in favour of endorsing PACBI.
PACBI calls for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their complicity with the Israeli Government’s regime of apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people. It is a direct appeal from Palestinian artists and academics for the international cultural community to stand with them, recognising that the Israeli state uses arts and culture to strengthen its international image. At the same time, arts and culture can be powerful tools of resistance and change.
By endorsing PACBI, The Work Room joins a broader movement of solidarity with Palestinian artists, alongside a growing number of dance and cultural organisations in Scotland and around the world. Importantly, the boycott targets institutions, not individuals. It opposes complicity, not identity.
In practice, this means The Work Room will not engage in:
- Collaborations with any Israeli cultural organisation funded by the Israeli government or state-sponsored institutions;
- Projects such as residencies or artistic exchanges that are sponsored by an Israeli government body or any organisation created to promote Israel;
- Projects that seek to “normalise” apartheid or frame Palestinians as responsible for their own oppression.
Across all our work, The Work Room aims to promote dance practices and cultural collaborations that resist colonial oppression.
To read more on The Work Room’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, visit:
https://theworkroom.org.uk/about/equalities-diversity-inclusion