Towards Documentary Choreography - Encounter #2

by Arkadi Zaides, three-day symposium in Brussels, held at Beursschouwburg, Les Grands Carmes, and KVS BOL, 04/25

“Towards Documentary Choreography - Encounter #2” is the second in a series of symposiums linked to the doctoral research of choreographer Arkadi Zaides. This event brings together scholars, activists, artists, dance and performance practitioners to explore the multifaceted meanings of “documentary choreography” and to assess its potential engagement with sociopolitical issues as well as medium-specific concerns.

This edition places the act of attending to bodies at its core, emphasizing the body as a critical site of knowledge, memory, and agency. As such, the symposium invites participants to consider how physical gestures, movements, and embodied acts act as repositories of lived experience, capable of reflecting on and responding to sociopolitical realities. Attending to bodies means not only observing their actions but also recognizing the ways they embody histories of struggle, resilience, and transformation.

Blurry Manifestos

by Arkadi Zaides, for 'War and Aesthetics: Art, Technology, and the Futures of Warfare', edited by Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade and Christine Strandmose Toft, The MIT Press, 06/24

I was initially interested in the joint work of Israeli dancer, choreographer and theoretician Noa Eskhol and her student and later professor of architecture, Avraham Wachman, because their approach questions the notion of "document". The two, often referred to as avant-gardists (Zyman, Finkelman), are renowned for inventing one of the most simple and applicable systems that enable the precise notation of movement patterns (Yanai). However, when I embarked on my historical investigation, I was captivated by the way their system has transcended the artistic field to perform outside of its primary frameworks. 

Towards Documentary Choreography - Encounter #1

by Arkadi Zaides, three-day symposium in Brussels, held at Beursschouwburg, 12/23

For this symposium, which follows from his practice-based PhD research, Arkadi Zaides invited various practitioners and scholars to reflect collectively on the notion of “documentary choreography”. By looking at concrete case studies and by proposing various theoretical lenses, the participants explored the strategies used by artists when combining embodied and documentary practices. Through different formats, they considered the potentiality of such blending not only to challenge the boundaries of contemporary dance and documentary theater, but also to engage critically with social and political issues.

Necropolis. Counter Forensic Practices for Mourning the ‘Othered’ Dead

by Arkadi Zaides, in Rekto Verso, issue 96: Post Mortem, 09/22

For over a quarter of a century, UNITED for Intercultural Action, a network of hundreds of anti-racist organizations from all around Europe, has been compiling a list registering deaths of refugees and migrants who have attempted to reach Europe. This database forms the basis for the performance ‘Necropolis’, in which choreographer and director Arkadi Zaides attempts to outline an ‘invisible city of the dead’, mapped from the graves of the migrants who could not reach their final destinations in Europe.

Tentacular Thinking in Storied Places

by Christel Stalpaert, Arkadi Zaides, Michel Lussault, Philippe Rekacewicz, Igor Dobricic, Atelier Cartographique in GPS (Global Performance Studies), 01/22

This text is an in-between report of the ongoing collaborative practices of the NecropolisLAB in relation to the research-based perfromance project Necropolis. Every performance of Noceropolis is a preliminary culmination point in the many-faceted and long-term process, placing the body and choreography (in its most expansive sense) as key attention points. The Necropolis erformance calls upon the local (European) audience to individually and collectively acknowledge the death of people wh are dying on the Europien shore by mapping their place of death, performing a grave location search and a walk towards a grave of a migrant.

Necropolis – Walking through a List of Deaths

by Arkadi Zaides, for (W)archives: Archival imaginaries, war, and contemporary art, edited by Daniela Agostinho, Solveig Gade, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, and Kristin Veel, Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 12/20

In Europe after World War II, there were massive efforts to search for missing soldiers and citizens, many of which remained unresolved for decades. Only in the early 1990s, after Gorbachev's perestroika, were the Russian archives opened, finally allowing access to information about millions of German prisoners of war who had been previously untraceable. Since 2004, the German Red Cross has digitized two million prisoner files belonging to missing German soldiers and civilians from Russian military archives to create a database with personal information and details about their fates. Germany has not been the only country to conduct such efforts.