Refugee Week Malta
Festival • Community Arts • Education & Advocacy
Since 2022, Dance Beyond Borders has produced Refugee Week Malta: the local edition of the world's largest arts and cultural festival celebrating the creativity, contributions, and resilience of refugee, asylum-seeking and migrant communities. The festival grew from our desire to use artistic and cultural practice to contribute meaningfully within the Maltese context by creating opportunities for deeper and more critical reflection around migration, while reconnecting with Malta's own histories of migration. We believe the arts and culture creates the conditions for encounter, where empathy grows through creativity, participation and shared experience.
Each June around World Refugee Day, together with our Advisory Group, artists, educators and community partners, we curate a weeks-long programme shaped around three invitations: Participate, Learn & Discuss, and Watch & Experience; performances, exhibitions, workshops, films and conversations that ask audiences to encounter migration beyond headlines and stereotypes. Every edition is shaped by the people involved.
Over the years, Refugee Week has shown us that through shared experiences like a conversation after a performance, a joyful moment with someone you've just met, a story that stays with you long after you leave, we can build and nourish connections that build communities. Refugee Week Malta continues to invite us to grow together by practising curiosity, empathy and solidarity as part of a Global Movement of Welcome.
Sugar. Stone. Sea.
Performance • Artivism • Decoloniality
SUGAR. STONE. SEA. is a multidisciplinary performance created by ARDA Collective and originally produced in Malta by Dance Beyond Borders. Through movement, music, spoken word and striking visual imagery, the work explores how colonial histories continue to shape Europe today, not as something distant or finished, but as something that lives on in everyday life. Collaboratively created by artists from European countries that have experienced colonialism and countries that once benefited from it, it asks a simple but urgent question: what does it mean to decolonise ourselves today?
The performance moves between English and the performers' mother tongues, blending physical theatre, music, text and visual storytelling into a rich sensory experience. Objects become characters. A stone becomes an island. A monument becomes a question. Audiences described it as "a powerful representation of painful, hidden wounds" and "provocative theatre subtle and not so subtle."
Rather than assigning blame, SUGAR. STONE. SEA. invites a shared reflection on memory, accountability and the futures we choose to build together. At a time when conversations around migration, nationalism and European identity are growing more polarised, it offers something different: a poetic encounter that asks audiences to slow down, look again and question what they may have taken for granted. Not simply to understand these histories, but to feel them and perhaps imagine what comes next.
Project Acknowledgements
Created Collaboratively by ARDA Collective: Angie Rottensteiner, Bojan Milosavljević, Chiara Bosco, Deborah Falzon
Elena Brea Sandín, Julienne Schembri, Kjersti Nilsen, Silvia Ribero
Light Design: Mohamed Ali Aguerbi.
Production: Dance Beyond Borders.
Marketing & Communications: Maya Aarohi.
Funding Body: Arts Council Malta
Additional support of: Acción Cultural Española, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di La Valletta and the patronage of the Embassy of Belgium.
Silent Voices
International Collaboration • Artivism • Performance
Connecting Silent Voices was an intercultural collaboration led by BILOURA Intercultural Arts Collective (Italy), together with WomanUp (Bulgaria), Artpolis (Kosovo) and Dance Beyond Borders as local coordinators of this Perform Europe initiative. It set out to create visibility around female sexual exploitation, a subject deeply rooted in patriarchal culture and closely bound to the economic exploitation of the fragile and the underprivileged.
We took an artivist approach: working alongside those already living or working within this reality. In Malta, that meant connecting and working with Dar Hosea, Movement Graffitti, the Libyan Observatory on Gender in Crisis, and academics, activists and practitioners working directly with women affected by sexual exploitation before presenting the performance itself through the Artivist Platform at Dance Festival Malta 2025.
The performance reflects on the female body as a site of trade, pleasure and pain, tracing how patriarchal systems intersect with economic vulnerability. It is uncomfortable because it refuses to look away. Choosing to deal artistically with a subject this raw, carries an ethical urgency; it sheds light on wounds that are not far from us, and puts us in front of the mirror. Twenty percent of ticket proceeds supported Dar Hosea directly, one small way of ensuring the project gave back to the community it drew from.
Rooted in collaboration, Silent Voices encourages actionable reflection and offers tools for understanding the local and global contexts of prostitution and trafficking; not as a distant issue, but one asking something of us here.
Project Acknowledgements
Winner of the Perform Europe Grant.
Locally coordinated by Dance Beyond Borders with Dar Hosea, Moviment Graffitti and the Libyan Observatory on Gender in Crisis, together with Emilia Figiel, Angele Galea, Prof. Marceline Naudi, Maria Borg Pellicano, Dr. Lara Dimitrijevic, Beth Cachia and Regina Egle Liotta Catrambone.
Supported by: Dance Festival Malta, Dance Studies Department, University of Malta,
St Patrick's School, Mark Bajada of Bajada Lyons Group, Ignazio Hotel.
Decoloniality: the story of us all
Research • Community Engagement • Artivism
Decoloniality: The Story of Us All was a long-held dream of ours, an international artistic research project developed with ARDA Collective, exploring how Europe's colonial legacies continue to shape identity, relationships and everyday life in Malta and beyond.
The project carried themes and stories we had held onto for years, including the words of the first woman we ever interviewed for this work: "Home is like a mother, you never want to leave, but sometimes you have to." Through artistic research, public conversations, community gatherings and creative workshops, we brought together artists, academics and communities across Europe to sit with that sentence and everything it holds.
We're proud to have hosted ARDA Collective's first theatre production, Sugar. Stone. Sea., in Malta as part of this process, exploring Maltese and wider European colonial legacy, identity and collective memory. In line with both DBB's and ARDA's artivist practice, we worked alongside academics and practitioners in the field of migration, including Dr Charles Xuereb, Ada Kostopoulou and Dr Maria Pisani, and drew on creative consultation with Helgard Haug of Rimini Protokoll to sharpen how we translated our research into performance.
The research culminated in a 5 week-long residency in Malta with community activities and the creation of Sugar. Stone. Sea. extending the conversation from research into public dialogue and performance.
Project Acknowledgements
Artistic Research & Residency: ARDA Collective: Angie Rottensteiner, Bojan Milosavljević, Chiara Bosco, Deborah Falzon, Elena Brea Sandín, Julienne Schembri, Kjersti Nilsen & Silvia Ribero.
Contributing Academics: Dr Charles Xuereb, Ada Kostopoulou, Dr Maria Pisani.
Artistic Consultation: Helgard Haug / Rimini Protokoll.
Community Engagement & Artivist Workshop: Emilia Figiel.
Producer: Julienne Schembri & Deborah Falzon
Marketing & Communication: Maya Aarohi
Funding Body: Arts Council Malta.
Todo lo que nos rodea está aún vivo
Artistic Residency • Community Engagement • Ecofeminism
This residency is part of a wider project carried by ARDA Collective artists from five countries; Belgium, Italy, Malta, Serbia and Spain,rooted in artivism and interculturality.
ARDA travelled to Galicia for an extended residency with A Casa Vella, working from an ecofeminist lens to ask how traditional rural knowledge and the relationships with land it carries can inspire more sustainable ways of living today. Through memory and the practical knowledge held particularly by local women, we explored a way of relating to the land built on care and reciprocity rather than domination, where everyone cares and is cared for in return.
Through community practice and participatory methods, we built an installation piece inspired by the daily practices in and with nature and the exposure to the local community. We understood the installation as a way of placing different forms of knowledge, craft, agricultural work and artistic practice on the same level, celebrating the act of making things by hand. We hold onto the belief that community practice can reaffirm that culture is never separate from daily life but is a way of life that belongs to everyone.
Alongside the residency, we held conversations with local people working across different disciplines, bringing diverse perspectives on the territory into the process
Project Acknowledgements
Residency Host: A Casa Vella.
ARDA Collective: Silvia Ribero, Angie Rottensteiner, Chiara Bosco, Julienne Schembri, Deborah Falzon, Elena Brea, Claudia Sanchez, Kjersti Nilsen, Bojan Milosavljevic.
Video: Rubén Vilanova; Ainhoa Viñuela, A&B Comunicación
Musica: Garganta, de Morita Vargas.
Funding Body: Culture Moves Europe
What language do you dream in?
Film • Cultural Facilitation • Participatory Arts
What Language Do You Dream In? explores the colonial legacy of language in Malta through an intergenerational, community-based process. Drawing on our embodied, co-creative way of working, we brought together Maltese participants of different ages, professions and linguistic identities to sit with a question that turned out to be far more personal than we expected: what does it mean to think, or dream, in a language that isn't your own?
Across a series of encounters, we asked how English as a tool of education, social mobility, control or resistance has shaped people's expression, access, identity and, sometimes, shame, across generations. Older participants carried lived memories of British colonial rule; others grew up navigating a bilingual, globalised Malta. Through conversation, somatic reflection and filmed interviews, people spoke about their first encounters with English, and how those moments echoed into who they became.
Inspired by Charles Xuereb's invitation to confront Malta's colonial history that still lingers in today's Maltese mentality, the reflections became a short film, a reflective tool, a way of sparking further questions about power, identity and expression in postcolonial societies that was presented as a participatory film screening during Kampusajf Festival.
Project Acknowledgements
Concept: Dance Beyond Borders
Artistic Contributions: Deborah Falzon, Karl Andrew Micallef u Julienne Schembri
Filming & Editing: Karl Andrew Micallef
Participants: Abigail Mallia, Evarist Bartolo, Josette Ciappara, Julian Bonnici, Kim Dalli, Kurt Gabriel Meli, Marcelle Bugre Zanya, Marija Camilleri, Nicole Zammit and Sarah Borg.
Presented in: Kampusajf 2025: Gathering of Possibilities under the direction of Elyse Tonna and Justin Galea.
Statelessness
Flashmob Performance • Artivism • Community Participation
Created with IntegrARTI Festival, Statelessness is a flashmob performance exploring citizenship, belonging and the experience of living without a nationality.
Facilitated by Francesca Zammit and Julienne Schembri, it uses public space deliberately bringing an often-overlooked issue into the middle of everyday life, where passers-by can't help but pause, witness and reflect. We chose the flashmob form because statelessness itself resists the shape of a traditional stage: it lives in bureaucracy, in waiting rooms, in the gap between one country's paperwork and another's. Moving that reality into a public square, unannounced, mirrors something of what it feels like to exist without the documents that make you visible to a state.
Alongside the performance, we shared lived-experience interviews developed by Moviment Graffitti: MINSIJA that let the people affected speak for themselves.
Echoes of Roots
International Residency • Artivist Performance • Research
Echoes of Roots was an international residency developed through the EFFEA programme and commissioned by Dance Festival Malta, bringing us into encounters with communities across Italy, Portugal and Malta to explore colonial memory through movement, dialogue and artistic research. Working across such different contexts, we found ourselves asking the same question in each place: how do personal and collective histories continue to shape our awareness of colonialism, not as history, but as something still being lived?
We delved into the interplay of imperialism, colonialism and racism that shapes present narratives of displacement and borders, exploring the historical country perspective as well as participants’ lived experience. Through hybrid residencies, we connected with international artists and with people from migrant communities gaining insight to how place and context shifts our knowledge and in turn affects our movement practice which was central to this project.
The residency culminated in a work-in-progress sharing at Dance Festival Malta 2024: an artistic reflection on the histories we inherit, and the futures we're building together, transcending borders, not just geographically but emotionally.
Project Acknowledgements
Artists: Deborah Falzon, Julienne Schembri, Aaron Shah Aristun Shah
Collaborating Arists: ARDA Collective: Angie Rottensteiner, Bojan Milosavljević, Chiara Bosco, Deborah Falzon, Elena Brea Sandín, Julienne Schembri, Kjersti Nilsen & Silvia Ribero
Funding Body: European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists
Partners: Dance Festival Malta (MT), INTERPLAY / Mozaico Danza (IT), Quinzena de Dança de Almada / Companhia de Dança de Almada (PT), Aerowaves Festival Sofia / Art Link Foundation (BG).
My House is at War
Site-Responsive Performance • Participatory Performance • International Residency
Developed during the Polimorfa Festival, My House is at War brought international artists together with the Valchiusella community to create a site-responsive performance reflecting on war as a present reality. It began with a series of simple, unsettling questions: if your house burns, what do you save? Where is your home? Who's inside? Who's left outside?
Presented in public space in 2024, it invited audiences into a collective reflection on what it means to feel safe, what we carry with us when home is threatened, and how someone else's story might not be as distant as it first appears.
Project Acknowledgements
By and with Angie Rottensteiner (Austria), Bojan Milosavljević (Serbia), Chiara Bosco (Italy), Claudia Maga (Spain), Deborah Falzon (Malta), Elena Brea (Spain), Julienne Schembri (Malta), Kjersti Nilsen (Belgium) and Silvia Ribero (Italy), together with 24 participants of the theatre workshop and 12 participants of the Terra dei Canti choir, directed by Giulia Attanasio. Festival: Polimorfa.
Produced by Biloura Intercultural Arts Collective.
Rivoluzione
Site-Responsive Performance • Participatory Performance • International Residency
Produced by Biloura Intercultural Arts Collective in 2023, Rivoluzione brought international artists together with the Valchiusella community to explore revolution as a cultural and collective practice not political upheaval, but a process of questioning, imagining and creating change together.
We explored revolution as both an individual and collective act: one often born from injustice and suffering, but equally sustained by hope, imagination and commitment. Participants became collaborators, shaping a performance around the capacity of communities to deconstruct, rebuild and envision different futures. More than a performance, Rivoluzione became a celebration of collective action, a reminder that communities hold power, and that change is something we can imagine and steer together.
Project Acknowledgements
By and with Angie Rottensteiner (Austria), Bojan Milosavljević (Serbia), Chiara Bosco (Italy), Claudia Maga (Spain), Deborah Falzon (Malta), Elena Brea (Spain), Julienne Schembri (Malta), Kjersti Nilsen (Belgium) and Silvia Ribero (Italy), together with participants of the theatre workshop "Revolution."
Production: Biloura Collective.
Festival: Polimorfa
Dancing to Dementia
Community Dance • Education & Advocacy
Developed with the Malta Dementia Society in 2022, Dancing to Dementia uses dance and movement to strengthen connection, communication and wellbeing for people living with dementia. Working within care settings, the project centres dignity, creativity and relationship with the aim to create joyful shared experiences for residents, carers and families alike.
Each session begins with the people in the room, and with what remains possible through movement, music and play. Dance becomes a way of communicating beyond words enabling moments of connection that everyday routines of care don't always make room for. The facilitators who delivered these sessions spoke of watching older adults light up with a newfound sense of freedom, of quiet residents suddenly singing and performing for the group, or of participants remembering a song from their past.
We curated and facilitated the project's first year: selecting and training dance facilitators, building the education pack, and supporting the initial cycle of delivery and evaluation, so that these sessions could take root as an ongoing part of care, not a one-off pilot.
Project Acknowledgements
Lead Organisation: Malta Dementia Society. Dance Coordinators: Julienne Schembri & Deborah Falzon.
Dance Training: Annemarie Labinjo.
Funding Body: Malta Council for the Voluntary Sector.
Żal
Site-Responsive Performance • Artivism
Żal is the melancholy felt at irretrievable loss; shapeshifting at one moment, complacent, the next rebellious. It combines the sadness, remorse and even the volatile rage that comes when parts of our lives change for good.
As Maltese, we feel Żal for the amount of lives lost at sea, for the way local and European governments treat people seeking safety, and for the unforgivable borders created to disrupt the natural flow of connection intrinsic to humanity.
Żal encapsulates our outcry for the injustices experienced by those simply searching for a better life. This work was performed intimately by the sea under the evening sky in Valletta, and premiered during Refugee Week Malta 2022.
Project Acknowledgements
Artistic Concept and Direction: Deborah Falzon and Julienne Schembri
Performers: Banjo Rancho, Deborah Falzon, Julienne Schembri and Mariele Zammit
Dramaturgy: Sandra Micallef
Visuial Concept: Bloc Collective
Videography: Emma Micallef
Haiku: Antoine Cassar
ĊAPċapċaqLAQ
Community Dance
ĊAPċapċaqLAQ was a community project for women and their children who had sought safety in Malta, many living in Refugee Open Centres, a partnership between Teatru Salesjan, Dance Beyond Borders and NGOs working in migration. Together, they built a space for women and children to come together each week over the summer.
Using rhythm, dance and movement, ĊAPċapċaqLAQ celebrated diversity and offered a space for healing. Djembe drum circles and community dance practices invited everyone to explore their own rhythm while moving together as a group; personal expression growing within a collective experience.
Each week held its own kind of joy: the warmth of holding hands, the connection made simply by moving and breathing together, the chance to play and imagine alongside one another.
Project Acknowledgements
Artistic Leaders : Abigail Agius, Deborah Falzon, Julienne Schembri, Rose
tta Debattista and
Zoe Camilleri
Assistants: Joshua Grogan, Zosia Stelmaszczyk.
Cultural Mediator: Hadia Bashir.
Intercultural Training: TAMA & UNHCR Malta. Photography and Film: Emma Micallef. Production: Teatru Salesjan & Dance Beyond Borders.
Funding Body: Arts Council Malta.
with further support by Intercomp Malta.
Anchoring Connection
Community Dance • Cultural Mediation
In 2020, as part of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, Anchoring Connection offered dance, movement and rhythm workshops to women seeking sanctuary at Refugee Open Centres in Malta.
Taking a participatory, community-based approach, we explored the tension between power and vulnerability through movement, reflection and discussion; sessions that fostered both personal and collective empowerment, built on trust and belonging. "After each session, I went about my days differently, I felt empowered for the whole day after," one participant reflected. Each session aimed to create a safe space for women to share their stories, support one another and feel valued as part of the local community. With cultural mediators alongside us, we used dance to support self and collective empowerment during the early stages of integration.
Project Acknowledgements
Artistic Leaders: Deborah Falzon, Julienne Schembri.
Participating Artists: Charlene Galea, Zoe Camilleri.
Cultural Mediator: JRS Malta.
Childcare: AWAS Activity Team.
Film: Emma Micallef.
Funding Body: UNHCR Malta
HER
Performance • Artistic Residency
HER presents fragments of one woman's experience of displacement. It began with an interview with a Somali woman who had sought safety in Malta, sharing her journey along the Central Mediterranean Route; from Somalia to Libya to Malta. Through dance theatre, HER offers a glimpse into her resilience, strength and bravery; qualities echoed by many across Malta's refugee and asylum-seeking communities.
The project began as a duet within a Dance Beyond Borders residency, before developing into a solo for ŻfinMade, ŻfinMalta's annual programme supporting emerging artists. Rather than attempting to tell every story, HER stays with one voice; iinviting audiences to consider the universal experience of searching for safety, belonging and home.
"Home is like a mother; you never want to leave, but sometimes you have to." — Hafsa
Project Acknowledgements
Artistic Research and Choreography: Deborah Falzon, Julienne Schembri.
Music: original score by Niels Plotard, featuring Nina Simone, "Human Touch."
Performer: Andrea Malbert, and Amber Van Veen
Funding Body: Air2020 ŻfinMalta Research Support Grant, Arts Council Malta,
Commission for ŻfinMade, ŻfinMalta.
