ThrumMming with Knowledge

by Irit Rogoff, Keir Foundation, 08/24

My subject is the conjunction of ‘research’, ‘knowledge production’ and ‘creative practice’ as we are seeing it unfold today across so many art forms. To try and capture the synchronicity of embodied processes of knowledge production, of how research is lived out rather than utilised, I address the work of dancer and choreographer, Arkadi Zaides. In a series of recent works emerging from collaborations with NGOs, Zaides simultaneously focuses on urgencies afflicting our world as well as recognises NGOs as important knowledge producers. The notion of thrumming I am in search of is both epistemic and embodied. It’s a form of ‘Being with Knowledge’ that does not reach conclusions or seal it off temporally.

Disappearing Dance, Dancing Disappearance

by Krassimira Kruschkova, Performance Research, 09/19

An almost empty stage, only two large screens in the background: a large white one on the right and a smaller black one on the left with a mixing desk in front of it. "Good evening. Thank you for coming. My name is Arkadi Zaides. I am a choreographer. I am Israeli. For the past fifteen years I have been living in Tel Aviv. The West Bank is 20 km away from Tel Aviv. The materials you are about to watch were filmed in the West Bank. All the people you will see in these clips are Israeli, like myself. The clips were selected from a video archive of an organization called B’Tselem." With this introduction the choreographer Arkadi Zaides starts his solo performance Archive (premiered 2014 in Avignon). For these short introductory words a young man (working at Tanzquartier Vienna where Achive was presented in 2016) stands close to Zaides and translates simultaneously every single sentence – in an act of collective responsibility as we could think instantly hearing this text. In the mere act of translating into German the young man must say of course also that his name is Arkadi Zaides. Thus, in the very beginning choreographic problems of authorship appear.

Dance as Documentary: Conflictual Images in the Choreographic Mirror

by Frédéric Pouillaude, Dance Research Journal, 08/16

In a solo performance entitled Archive (2014), the Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides offers a physical and choreographic interpretation of videos collected by the Israeli non-governmental organization B’Tselem within the frame of an operation called “Camera Project”. The footage projected on stage shows only Israelis, but the viewpoint is Palestinian. Starting from this material, Arkadi Zaides performs, by extraction, imitation, and repetition, a (self-)analysis of the contemporary Israeli body, following a procedure reminiscent of Avi Mograbi’s for film. What is the specific nature of these images, whose very mode of capture emblematizes the conflict situation? In the face of them, what might be the contribution of an approach that puts the dancer’s kinesthetic knowledge to work? How far does this offering force us to think about the “documentary” potential of dance performance, which is too often brushed aside or played down?

Choreographing Violence

by Ruthie Abeliovich, TDR, 02/16

Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides’s solo dance performance Archive investigates the somatic impact of transgressions performed daily in the West Bank by Israeli fundamentalist settlers against Palestinians. The performance, which premiered at Festival d’Avignon in July 2014, activates the enduring habits of Israeli violence by weaving together two concurrent threads: video projections from an archive assembled by B’Tselem, 1 an organization that documents human rights violations in the occupied territories, and Zaides’s live performance in which he embodies the physical and vocal gestures in the video in order to re-present the Israeli aggressive position.2 While Archive has been performed in different venues around the world,3 it generates the

The Occupations and Preoccupations of Arkadi Zaides

by Naomi Zeveloff, 02/15

In the video clip, a Jewish boy of no more than 12, seemingly drunk on Purim wine and missing a shoe, kicks and slaps the exterior of a Palestinian home in Hebron. A man in a kippah, perhaps the boy’s father, appears and drags the boy away. The man turns to a soldier off camera who was presumably about to intervene: “You’re not touching him, right?” The boy resists the older man’s grasp. His legs splayed on the ground, he looks up at the Palestinian who is filming him from inside the house and shouts the Hebrew equivalent of “Damn you.” Then the man throws the boy over his shoulder and lumbers away.

Arkadi Zaides, Archive, Salle Maurice Béjart

by Nicholas Minns, Writing About Dance Blog, 02/15

The Palais de Chaillot in Paris is where, on December 10 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Palais de Chaillot is now the Théâtre National de Chaillot, and in its basement theatre — Salle Maurice Béjart — Arkadi Zaides is performing Archive in which he borrows a Palestinian perspective to view transgressions of human rights by Israeli soldiers and settlers against the indigenous Palestinian population.

The significance of the place is not lost on Zaides but he doesn’t reveal it until the post-show discussion: the context of Archive is undoubtedly human rights but it is not the main focus of this work.

The Palais de Chaillot in Paris is where, on December 10 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Palais de Chaillot is now the Théâtre National de Chaillot, and in its basement theatre — Salle Maurice Béjart — Arkadi Zaides is performing Archive in which he borrows a Palestinian perspective to view transgressions of human rights by Israeli soldiers and settlers against the indigenous Palestinian population.