Back Choreographing Livability after Oslo: Israeli Women Choreographers and Collective Responsibility –
Melissa Melpignano
18.03.2022
Through the choreographic analysis of key moments in dances choreographed between 1996 and 2015, this chapter illuminates how three works by Israeli choreographers Anat Danieli, Yasmeen Godder, and May Zarhy offer methods to organize life in the context of post-Oslo Israel, in order to promote modes of collective responsibility as a tactic to cripple oppressive and stagnant governmental politics. Although the works I have selected do not explicitly engage with or comment upon the Oslo Accords and their political legacies, I argue that the ways in which Danieli, Godder, and Zarhy con- ceptualize power dynamics through choreography–each of them in her specificity- -can contribute to a reorganization of the core principles through which politics is conceptualized in the context of Israel
The historical context in which I set my analysis is that of the failed construction of a path toward a diplomatic and bilateral resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in territorial and political terms, after the 1993 Oslo Accords, in which, for the first time, Israeli and Palestinian diplomatic delegations recognized each other and agreed to negotiate. Despite the hopes some Israelis, Palestinians, and members of the international community placed in the so-called “peace process,” since then, several factors, including the problematic premises of the agreement draft, have contributed to an exacerbation of the ethnonational divide. In the state of Israel, this has been notably marked by the approval of Israel’s Basic Law “Israel-The Nation-State of the Jewish Peoples” by the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) in 2018. This law privileges the citizenship status of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel (excluding rights of self-determination to the 20 percent of the population that is non-Jewish), and recognizes “settlement” as a core value of the State, thus arguably claiming the Occupation as a national mission.
In Israel, the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995, by an Israeli far-right nationalist symbolically and factually marked a radical deceleration and ultimate stagnation of the “peace process.” The murder marked a further escalation of right-wing and pro-Occupation movements that saw the peace accords as an existential threat for Israel. On the one hand, the Oslo Accords changed the Israeli “discursive landscape” by interrupting “the mental acrobatics of denying the existence of anything called ‘the Palestinian people'”; joint Israeli-Palestinian projects flourished, and critiques of Zionism and of the Ashkenazi hegemony in the country emerged. On the other hand, violence on both sides was never interrupted and worsened–from the series of terror attacks across Israel during the 1996 electoral campaign, to the targeted suppression of Palestinian militants, civilians, and even medical aid on the Gaza border started in March 2018, while extreme right-wing parties have progressively increased their influence in the Israeli governmental coalitions.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its systemic violence, the increasing ethnonational disparities, and its web of historical and international interests and unstable diplomatic plans, shapes not only everyday lives but also the very conceptualization of life in the region. In the specific context of Israel, the political and cultural means through which the state was established strongly impact how people conceive and calibrate their own life- stakes. For instance, one can consider how mandatory army service impacts individual and collective life, and how the varied and complex ethno-national-religious criteria that determine who can serve frame the notion of civil duty and responsibility in Israel. In order to analyze the life-stakes of dancing and choreographing in politically con- tested areas, where dance can be assigned contradictory, ambiguous, or competing functions, such as in the case of Israel, I have elaborated a theoretical platform that, drawing on several studies in biopolitics, ethics, moral philosophy, dance, and perfor- mance studies, I have named livability.” Livability considers how dancing and choreographing impact ideas of life and living in a specific context. More specifically, livability is the theoretical platform through which I observe how the stakes of dancing and choreographing intersect with the agendas of different institutional bodies that host, support, promote, or disseminate dance, in order to examine the reverberations that the acts of dancing and choreographing produce beyond the performance event. How does a performance reverberate and affect lives beyond its supposed ephemerality? How do dancing bodies and dances persevere in the light of and despite their networks of conditions and circumstances?
Briefly stated, in my conceptualization, livability assumes relationality as a given phenomenon that connects, in different modes and intensities, bodies, elements, structures, and so on; as a potentiality that can be crafted and reorganized; as a concept that is not inherently positive or that necessarily implies collaboration or reciprocity in terms of exchange. In other words, in the context of my research, I intend relationality as the interdependent implications of living life and moving our bodies in the inevitable or voluntary relation to other lives and bodies, to the structures and systems they inhabit, organize, or imagine, considering the power discrepancies in place. For instance, specific dancing subjects can persevere in their desire to live and dance while simulta- neously diminishing the conditions of livability of other subjects. Indeed, livability is concerned with the conditions in which dance happens and the effects it produces, and with the ways such conditions and effects inform, affect, or frame a dancer’s/a dance’s/a dance community’s life stakes.
In the livability platform, the conditions of interdependency call into question the practice of responsibility in dance (in making a dance, in being in a dance, in circulating a dance, and so on). Édouard Glissant offers a model to conceive collective responsibility as a practice that requires training in undoing “the habit of collective nonresponsibility” produced by the reliance on central authorities that, for the sake of a national project, do not foster solidarity among the population. The livability platform invests in dances that train us in collective responsibility–responsibility that is simultaneously individual and shared–and in non-hegemonic ways of shaping relations that, while exposing precariousness, take responsibility for it.
In Israel, in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, on the one hand, divisive policies and pro-Occupation interventions intensified, while, on the other hand, anti-Occupation groups, centers for monitoring violence and inequality, and artistic projects for the promotion of co-existence flourished. In particular, these latter initiatives, although minoritarian within Israeli society, invest in a sense of collective participation that contradicts and challenges systems of structured oppression and inequality. On the wave of these progressive forces, and through the perspective that the livability platform offers, in this chapter I interrogate three works, October by Anat Danieli (1996), Two Playful Pink by Yasmeen Godder (2002), and Yes by May Zarhy (2014), asking: What are the stakes of dancing and choreographing in Israel in the aftermath of Rabin’s assassina- tion, during the Second Intifada, or during “Operation Protective Edge”? Can choreography contribute to conceptualizing methods or discourses in order to break those “bad habits” that perpetuate violence and oppressive practices for control over Israel/ Palestine? Can choreographic works help us reconceptualize the political failure of the Oslo peace process?
Although one essay focused on the work of three choreographers cannot encompass the variety of responses that individuals and collectives within the Israeli concert dance community have generated in relation to the politics of the conflict, I posit that Danieli, Godder, and Zarhy offer methods to enhance collective responsibility, especially to their primarily Israeli audience, by undoing and reorganizing historically and cultur- ally rooted social and political norms, such as the patriarchy-informed Sabra method of conducting politics. In this way, they set the stage for a non-hegemonic interdepend- that can potentially arrest the reiteration of exclusionary practices. Therefore, their work detaches the notion of failure from the hegemonic control of governmental and para-governmental institutional and diplomatic bodies, and reactivates it in terms of civil practice.
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Yasmeen Godder was born in Jerusalem, and moved to New York with her family in 1984 where she trained at, among other places, Movement Research and the Klein School, and received a BFA from the Tisch School at New York University. In 1999, Godder returned to Israel, relocating to Jaffa, where she established her own company, and opened her studio in 2007. Godder is a prolific and internationally established choreographer, a recipient of several prizes and awards, strongly invested in choreographic movement and dramaturgical research. She has cultivated collaborations with dancers, whom, as independent creators, she supports and mentors. Besides hosting the rehearsals of the company, Godder’s studio accommodates affordable classes for professional and non-professional dancers, hosts community activities, and provides artistic support for emerging choreographers. Godder’s aesthetic and movement vocabulary have often been defined as “grotesque” with the intent of conceptualizing her adhesion to distortion and exaggeration, and her questioning of normatively pleasing visual canons, especially in relation to the female body. Godder’s research is informed by overarching questions such as those shared by her dramaturg, Itzik Giuli: “What can the dancer’s body incorporate? What inner world should it maintain in order to convey a complex and contradictory reality?” While surely these interrogations do not synthesize or cir- cumscribe the spectrum of Godder’s inquiry, they indicate a conceptualization of the body as a repository of the environment it inhabits, a body that also realizes, questions, explores, and reacts to the alienation and disturbance caused by the techniques it uti- lizes, the theatrical conventions in which it moves, the stimuli and images coming from the media, and so on.
Compared to Danieli’s October, Two Playful Pink, a duet Godder premiered in Tel Aviv in 2003, explores womanhood through a very different articulation of energetic exchange. Godder adopts an often-antagonistic approach in choreographing the relation between the two female dancers (Iris Erez and Godder herself) as a way to test the physical and psychological limits of an interaction in which the bodies are the object of a “game” in accordance with the semantics Godder formulated to discuss Two Playful a reciprocal game of physical manipulation, as I describe below. I utilize the notion
Pink as a duet based on “role playing,” whose rehearsal process constituted a space for “playing with ideas about deconstructing a body.” The idea of “playing” here also alludes to the voyeuristic Western theatrical dispositif of reciprocally watching while being watched. So, the power game of gaze and manipulation involves the two performers on stage as much as the relationship between performers and audience.
Godder’s conceptualization of the bodies for Two Playful Pink and for her corporeal theorization at this stage of her choreographic career was inspired by the study of the mechanics of fragmentation and recomposition that German visual artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) explored through dolls, in Berlin, in the 1930s (Figure 25.1). On the one hand, Bellmer’s obsessive fascination with the female automaton and the gro- tesque deconstruction of the female body denoted an unsurprising modernist, patriar- chal fetishism (which, at the same time, relies on the very disassembling of the woman’s body: giving up the integrity of the object of fetishist desire through the displacement of her body parts in order to gain control over her). On the other hand, his engagement with the anti-fascism of the Surrealists and with Freudian theories about the production of surrogates to replace an unbearable reality configures Bellmer’s work as a manifes- tation of dissent against the idealized construction of the hygienized bodies promoted by Nazi propaganda. Bellmer’s work not only visually informs Godder’s process but also conceptually intersects with her inquiry about the power that institutionalized systems exercise over the orientation of desire through their methods of cultural and corporeal subjugation. First, the corporeal and visual code Godder elaborates through the preparatory study of Bellemer’s dolls allows her to address the aggressiveness, eroticism, discomfort, and humor embedded in her deconstruction and reconfiguration of trained, healthy, and virtuosic female bodies. Secondarily, it foregrounds a historically layered critique of an ideologically constructed idea of normative body in the specific context of Israel. What happens to our bodies when they consciously exhibit and perform the same strategies of control through which they have been educated, working with both their vulnerability and capacity to obey?
A distinctive gestural cipher of Two Playful Pink is the two dancers’ reciprocal stretch, distortion, and manipulation of their faces, occurring in particular in the second and central section of the piece, where Erez and Godder wear black underwear and long-sleeve t-shirts with a belt highlighting their waistline. The two enter the stage, placing themselves one in front of the other, with Godder holding Erez’s hand while the latter is crouching. They balance for a few seconds, then Godder releases her hold, so that Erez rolls back and forward a few times, unsuccessfully trying to recatch Godder, until Erez brings her partner up only to start another round of manipulations. Several of these wrestling moments succeed through obsessive repetitions. At a certain point, while the two are running in a circle but not in unison, Godder stops Erez by holding her face from behind and stretching her cheeks, while Erez’s body continues to vibrate. Godder’s grip frames Erez’s face and presence. Now Godder holds her chin, the two slightly bounce up and down, with Erez staring at the audience, displaying her exaggerated cheek line. A quick turn and now Godder lifts Erez’s eyelids from behind, while Erez stretches her cheeks and jawline. With a quick gesture, Godder moves her hands from Erez’s eyes to her nose, and the mimicking of the alterations of plastic surgery becomes the representation of a shaking swine. Repetitions–in the form of the perform- ers getting stuck in their obsessive actions of distortion and manipulation–generate, for both the audience and the performers, that sense of grotesque observed in Godder’s work, which, in my opinion, is not merely located in the combination of humor and dis- turbance but in the exhibition of the voluntary and reciprocal game of dominance and subjugation, and in the use of choreography as a way to display docility in its making, re- inforced by the performers’ accuracy, specificity, and commitment to the movement, 42 Within the apparatus of representation the choreography manifests, the skillfulness the bodies exhibit is not only that of Erez and Godder as performers but that of the two characters as machines able to execute (to reciprocally enforce and receive) manipula- tory alterations that display how a body should look and what it takes to look that way. It is the exhibition of such a system that makes Godder’s grotesque machinery a source of reference for the dismantling of mechanisms of subjugation.
Godder produced Two Playful Pink, and other works characterized by similar cho- reographic tropes such as Sudden Birds (2002) and Strawberry, Cream, and Gunpowder (2004), during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (Second Intifada, 2000-2005). Believing in the possibility of resuming the peace accords, in 1999, the majority of Israeli voters did not confirm Netanyahu’s government, opting for Ehud Barak (Labor Party) as the new Prime Minister. Between July 2000 and January 2001, negotiations restarted and recollapsed. The Second Intifada and the unprecedented exposure of its violent manifestations through Israeli, Palestinian, and international media explicitly impacted Godder’s work in those years (Strawberry, Cream, and Gunpowder directly references that imagery). In Two Playful Pink, Godder undertakes a critique of patriarchal systems of violence through an aesthetic of the grotesque that relies on accurate kinesthetic research. Godder rechoreographs her visual sources by exaggerating the way in which the outer stimuli affect one’s bodily reactions–a method based on the principles of the Klein technique, in which Godder trained in New York and that she choreographically reworks. Susan Klein’s somatic practice focuses on the skeleton and the deep muscles as fundamental parts for the enhancement of corporeal stability and for better conducting energy through the body in a given environment. Somehow reversing the process, Godder starts off by acknowledging the complexity of such an environment, and looks at how outer elements, structures, events, or fragments of them reach the bones and the deepest tissues, hardly producing stability.46 In Two Playful Pink, the energy and visual force through which the bodies of the two performers invest the audience is proportional to the way violence intervenes on the perception of reality and reconfigures it.
In this way, choreography operates as a magnifying glass through which to closely observe how the process of fragmentation of subjects takes place. But in Two Playful Pink such fragmentation is not simply exemplified in the work of reciprocal manipulation of body parts informed by outer stimuli. In fact, the insistent gaze of the performers themselves works provocatively by reflecting upon the audience those same mechanisms of control and fragmentation. Hence, in Two Playful Pink, choreography also works as a game of mirrors in which the distorting dancing bodies seem to scream to their audience: “Move on! Don’t you see how distorted we are?!”