At the end of my Gaga class in the Suzanne Dellal Center this morning, a siren went off in Tel Aviv as part of a national drill. We kept on jumping while across the country, teachers and students practiced going to shelters and a variety of authorities practiced their emergency response protocols. After class I sat down for a cup of coffee at a cafe on Nachalat Binyamin, watching the weekly crafts fair fill up with people and chatting with the waiter and a family of Australian tourists. When the tourists asked about the sirens and wondered how Tel Avivians responded generally to war, suicide bombings, etc., the waiter replied that everyone just went to the beach. The overall message here (and in many other conversations I’ve had with Israelis on this topic) is that life goes on; in fact, it MUST go on. Echoing GWTW’s thoughts above, as I have observed the society around me, I get the sense that people live really fully here in part because of the situation. This general attitude certainly influences the dance scene. If someone’s passion is dance, they’ll really throw themselves into it.

I should note that dance isn’t the only art that flourishes here – there’s a vibrant theatre and music scene, I see lots of galleries around Tel Aviv, and I’ve been told that Israeli film is taking off. I still need to search for some statistical figures, but I have heard from a few people that Israel is one of the top ranking countries when it comes to the size of arts audiences. And why do people seek out art? Perhaps because it has the power to provide an escape from a harsh reality. There’s plenty of precedent for this; during WWI, for instance, the Ballets Russes was a fertile ground for artistic experimentation, and it drew huge crowds. While they were in the theater, European audiences could put aside the news of the day and be transported into a magical world.

As I’ve watched dance and started talking with dance professionals, I have started to see how the “situation” shapes the dance world here. Most dances don’t deal with the situation, thus providing the escape I mention above. However, there are some choreographers who have explicitly dealt with the subject in their work (see http://web.mac.com/deborahfriedes/iWeb/Deborah%20Friedes,%20MFA/blog%20/FB96B6B4-7542-4B1C-A26D-6CD0AB1A52FF.html for a post on one of Yasmeen Godder’s works). Other choreographers have told me that the situation sometimes worms its way into their dances even when they are not planning on grappling with the issues (my next podcast, with Noa Dar, gets into this a bit).

I also have started to think a lot about how the physicality of Israeli dance is connected to the situation. I’ll probably write more about this in some other posts and am thinking of doing a longer article about it, but I’ll just jot down a few thoughts for now. Several people I have interviewed say that the physicality in Israeli dance is characterized by aggressiveness, a tension in the body, a lack of borders, a sense of weight, etc.; all of these can be linked to living in this particular situation (and frequently the people I talk to mention these connections). On the other hand, newer techniques in Israel such as release-based approaches and Gaga seem to offer alternative modes of movement which allow people to release this tension, instead finding ease, efficiency, and joy in movement. Further, while talking with Nir Ben Gal this weekend at Adama, he spoke about finding a specifically non-violent way of moving.

This turned out to be a bit longer and more fragmented than I’d intended, but I hope it helps you in thinking about the question you raised!