When I moved to Abu Dhabi 12 years ago, much of what drew me here was still a promise. Looking at the undeveloped desert around NYU Abu Dhabi’s campus, where I then lived, what I saw was not absence, but potential. The museums taking shape on Saadiyat Island and the country’s commitment to arts and culture offered an opportunity to help build something for which the possibilities were still unfolding.
Today, I work within an ever-widening cultural community. Audiences move between museums, festivals, concerts and performances, and some who first came to watch are now creating work themselves. New institutions are opening, and new colleagues are becoming friends and collaborators. The International Day of the Intangible Cultural Heritage prompts me to consider how these encounters help people draw from the past, learn from one another and build the culture future generations will inherit.
Heritage is not fixed in the past. Intangible cultural heritage is constantly renewed through music, storytelling, crafts, performance, celebrations and knowledge passed across generations and reinvented in real time. Communities sustain these practices through teaching and participation, adapting them as their lives change. Our role is to support the people who carry them forward.
For me, the arts are social infrastructure. They give people with different lived experiences reasons to gather and become part of a community. A performance can begin a conversation, introduce future collaborators or persuade someone that they, too, have a story worth telling. Sustained opportunities to participate, make work and learn from others help transform cultural investment into a lasting contribution to the life of a country.
Earlier this month, I participated in a LiveX panel where the Royal College of Art’s Prof Adrian Lahoud compared the opportunity New York represented for earlier generations of newcomers with what Abu Dhabi and Dubai represent today. As a lifelong New Yorker, I recognise a similar energy of ambitious people arriving with different experiences and a belief that they could build a life together.
Abu Dhabi’s cultural character will continue to develop from its own history, rooted in Emirati heritage and shaped by the lives and encounters of people here. Its neighbourhoods and artistic communities will look different from New York’s, and the significance of today’s beginnings may only become clear a generation from now.
I think of the words of Zaki Nusseibeh, cultural adviser to the UAE President, in The New York Times, which I read the week I moved here in 2014. “We know we cannot create culture overnight,” he said, describing the forthcoming museums, “so we can find our own voice. Hopefully, in 20 or 30 years’ time, we will have our own cultural elite, so our young people won’t have to go to London or Paris to learn about art.”
We are already starting to meet that aspiration. I have met people who first visited us on high school trips, became NYUAD students, encountered unfamiliar performances, took workshops and became artists whose work we present and commission. A children’s matinee can open a possibility that stays with someone for years.
Artists need opportunities to develop their practice and sustain a career. The Arts Centre’s Numoo professional development accelerator provides practical knowledge and builds networks across artforms and backgrounds. People find collaborators and develop work we could not have anticipated when we brought them together, sharing stories that help others understand life here.
Hekayah | The Story, our annual gathering celebrating the UAE’s National Day, Eid Al Etihad, asks: how do you create a national narrative? Poets and musicians from different backgrounds are selected collaboratively by curators from the UAE’s literary and performing arts communities. Sharing stories shaped by their histories, heritages and experiences of home, they give the country’s many voices and languages a stage. This year’s first collaboration with Public Art Abu Dhabi extends that opportunity for shared storytelling.
In the same LiveX conversation, architect Bjarke Ingels recalled Leonard Cohen’s lyric, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” He was discussing openings for the unanticipated in a city’s development, spaces where magic can happen.
Putting that intention into practice means creating conditions for serendipity: affordable communities where artists can live near one another, meet regularly, exchange ideas and stumble upon collaborators. Urban planning can enable encounters even when we cannot predict what will follow. Some ideas will falter or change direction; others become more interesting through an unexpected contribution. A cultural scene needs room for that imperfect process, recognising that failure can be as important as inspiration.
Audiences bring their own perspectives, too. At The Arts Centre’s opening concert this season, Fanfarai, a French North African brass and percussion ensemble, shared the evening with New Orleans’s Dirty Dozen Brass Band. I noticed people clapping on different beats, bringing their own musical instincts to the performance. Yet they shared the joy of being there together, creating a new common history. After shows, people tell me about friendships and experiences that have helped them make Abu Dhabi their home.
The International Day of the Intangible Cultural Heritage invites us to consider our responsibility to the practices and knowledge communities value and pass forward. Preserving and extending them means supporting people to practice, teach, perform and contribute, recognising that what they pass on will change. The promise that brought me here has become visible in the work people make and the connections they form. We can honour what they bring while leaving room for discoveries none of us could have planned. As Octavia E Butler wrote in Parable of the Sower, the subject of the first show of The Arts Centre’s inaugural season: “The only lasting truth is change.”
