B'Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, gives away video cameras to Palestinians volunteers living in the West Bank. The resulting footage shows the violence of the occupation. What posture to adopt when faced with those images, especially when one is an Israel citizen? That's the question Arkadi Zaides asks, in a most literal sense, by placing himself in front of a screen onto which some of that footage is projected. The choreographer tries to find his place among those images by feel, with humility and passion. He reproduces the postures of the people on the screen, by turns curled up, swaggering, nonchalant, or possessed. He glides from one body to the next, becomes a settler throwing a stone or an Israeli child banging on a wall of a house which he understands to belong to his enemies. Some of their movements he reproduces and completes in his dancing, others he repeats over and over again, and by constructing a vocabulary out of these gestures, he creates new dimensions. Arkadi Zaides never ceases to move around the stage, alternatively turning his body into a filter, a magnifying glass, a frame, or a mask, forcing us every time to change the way we look at things. Out of those images, taken from hundreds of hours of footage, he creates an almost abstract material, a maelstrom of sensations, a human archive with which every member of the audience must grapple in order to refine his or her own understanding of the situation.
Distribution
With Arkadi Zaides
Archive materials volunteers for the "Camera Project"of B'Tselem - The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories Iman Sufan, Mu'az Sufan, Bilal Tamimi, Udai 'Aqel, Awani D'ana, Bassam J'abri, Abu 'Ayesha, Qassem Saleh, Mustafa Elkam, Raed Abu Ermeileh, Abd al-Karim J'abri, Issa 'Amro, Mu'ataz Sufan, Ahmad Jundiyeh, Nasser Harizat, Abu Sa'ifan, Oren Yakobovich, Nayel Najar
Choreography Arkadi Zaides
Video artists Effi and Amir (Effi Weiss and Amir Borenstein)
Sound artist Tom Tlalim
Artistic adviser Katerina Bakatsaki
Choreography assistant Ofir Yudilevitch
Costumes Adam Kalderon
Light designer Thalie Lurault
Technical manager Pierre-Olivier Boulant
Producer Yael Bechor
Special thanks to Myriam Van Imschoot
Production
Production Arkadi Zaides
Coproduction Festival d'Avignon, Centre de développement chorégraphique de Toulouse, Théâtre national de Chaillot (Paris), Centre national de danse contemporaine d'Angers, The Emile Zola Chair For Human Rights (Israël)
Reception in residence STUK de Leuven (Belgique) & WP Zimmer, Anvers (Belgique), The Theaterschool, Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
With the support of la Fondation BNP Paribas
In partnership with the Chartreuse de Villeneuve lez Avignon