Omar Rajeh, founder and artistic director of Maqamat, is a choreographer and dancer, festival director and cultural architect. His practice explores the body as a site of memory, imagination and resistance, questioning the structures that shape our movements, behaviours and relationships.

Through a physically intense choreographic language, he approaches dance as an assertion of presence, where being accumulates through experience and takes form through movement. The body emerges as a multiplicity of memories, sensations and impulses, generating fields of energy and shifting between lived, perceived and imagined realities. He regards dance as a process through which the body claims and questions space, participating in shaping the world around it. His works have toured widely and been presented at major international festivals and theatres.

Central to his approach is maqam, a practice of instant composition and creation in the moment. It is a continuous process of folding, growing, and becoming that is organising space through relationships rather than form.  MAQAM approaches the body as a living constellation of shifting centers, and an emerging architecture of internal impulses. They interact to shape space in real time. It is rooted in a conceptual and physical approach that conceives the body as “multi-bodies” - a constellation of centers of signification in constant dialogue. Dance moves beyond form and intellect, it expands into a journey of sensorial channels, where movement unfolds outside of representation, towards generating situations of urgency and being. The body is constantly organising, accumulating, and becoming.

Rajeh’s artistic work is inseparable from the cultural ecosystems he has initiated and sustained. He founded BIPOD – Beirut International Platform of Dance, one of the key contemporary dance platforms in the Levant, and co-founded the Masahat network, connecting artists and organizations worldwide. He initiated Takween, an intensive training program, and Moultaqa Leymoun, a platform supporting young and established choreographers through accompaniment, visibility, and exchange.

In 2017 he established Citerne Beirut, a pioneering choreographic and cultural center in Lebanon. After its forced dismantling in 2019, he created Citerne.live in France: a digital platform dedicated to artistic circulation, documentation of practices, and new forms of encounter between artists, structures, and publics.

For his contribution to culture, he was distinguished by the French Ministry of Culture as Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Questions of artistic freedom, shared space and collective imagination run through his choreography, curatorial work and cultural initiatives.