Everything You Have is Yours?

Brooklyn Studios for Dance, November 11-12 2017
Choreography: Hadar Ahuvia. Dramaturgy: Lily Bo Shapiro.
Projections: Gil Sperling. Lighting: Elizabeth Mak.
Photography: Cory Antiel and Karl Cooney.
Pictured: Mor Mendel and Hadar Ahuvia.

“Everything you have is yours?” investigates the construction of Israeli identity through gestures appropriated from Palestinian and Yemeni culture. Hadar Ahuvia and Mor Mendel imitate and translate instructional videos of Israeli folk dances by Israelis and American Christian Zionist, embodying distance and proximity to Israel, Israeliness, and enacting the feedback loop through which national ideology is disseminated and sustained. In their performative mirroring of these videos, they reveal the subtext of dances, making explicit the Otherness at the kernel of Israeli identity.