As a London-based Saudi DJ, Nooriyah ardently and unapologetically champions the music of MENA. Her latest method of doing so sees her celebrate darbouka with a strangely engrossing video that showcases three very different dance disciplines - but all to the rhythm of what the west calls a goblet drum.
Nooriyah invites Habibitch, Reem Naamani, and Esraa Warda to portray their ballroom, contemporary and North African dance respectively, resulting in the best kind of audiovisual assault.
“Through the drums, I wanted to show the beautiful diversity of our identities that are often viewed as homogeneous and painted with the same brush,” Nooriyah writes about the film. “It was also my own humorous response to how different MENA music is often labelled ‘belly dance music’ and the confines of this stereotype.”
Our favourite part, however, has to be Nooriyah rocking out at the bottom of the screen in the version posted to Instagram.
