HOLY/OBJECT ensemble piece, (2018)

Performance and Panel Discussion

Jewish Art Salon

(short description: dance performance exploring the concept of prayer spaces, mehitza, and woman as the holy/object. ten dancers move through the questions, looking at the ways in which women's voices, bodies, and presence is affected by ritualized silence, through both external and internalized boundaries.)

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The performance is a movement-based experience analyzing the concept of "mehitza" - or sex segregation in holy spaces. It began by looking at the ways in which women's voices, bodies, and existence in space is affected by ritual, through the creation of both external and internalized boundaries. My desire is to ask what happens when the silence and invisibility of women becomes ritualized. How does it affect ones movement, voice and self perception to be hidden away and covered. The dance explores the idea of women as “distractions”, yet also as “holy”. The woman as the holy/object. Erased and elevated. To be hidden away like this is to be confined to one's body and reduced to objects. It is this exclusion from attempted transcendence, this binding to the earth that interests me

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LEAVES (2017) Performed in Brooklyn and Jerusalem

performance on the ideas of movement, migration and memory. It picks apart
the things that stay. It questions if the movements that remain in our gestures are the
only remnants of Syria in our bodies. Perhaps the memories of our pasts, our past
homes, our past lands, are contained within our movement. The movements of our
mothers, grandmothers, leave their physical memories in our hands: in the way they
cleaned grains of rice, in the way they rolled grape leaves. How can I use this movement
as a way to access a shared cultural memory and bring us back to a closeness that I
imagine is embedded within us? How can I ideation of this constant movement across
seas and times and cultures and places and identities?

 

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