Choreographing Violence: Arkadi Zaides’s <i>Archive</i>

Abeliovich, Ruthie

doi:10.1162/dram_a_00531

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Many of the settlers' sonic tactics have been documented by videographers working with the B'Tselem Video Archive and are used as evidence of the tactical deployment as part of the Israeli civilian occupation of the West Bank. Some of these documentary videos are showcased in the performance piece Archive, on which I collaborated with choreographer Arkadi Zaides and B'Tselem (Zaides and Tlalim 2014; see also Abeliovich 2016;Segal, Weizman, and Tartakover 2003).…”

Section: The 'Sound System Of the State'mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sound System of the State: Critical Listening as Performative Resistance

Tlalim¹

2021

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies

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What is heard and what goes unheard in contemporary sonic experience is subject to constant negotiation. Although high-powered industrial emissions overshadow fainter organic vibrations, meaningful signals are still frequently intercepted in spite of the noisy environment. Such sonic signifiers or 'cues' could be considered as the fundamental 'sonic blocks' of ideology. 1 This chapter discusses the sonic methodology of critical listening as a means of interpreting these cues in their political context. This methodology can be used to reveal the ways in which sound operates as an ideological sphere. I will examine critical listening both as a method for analysing state sound systems and as a performative act of political resistance in its own right. The text draws on John L. Austin's influential theory of speech acts, outlining the role of the listening agency in setting the conditions for the failure or success of illocutionary acts. Critical listening is then conceptualized as a means of resistance that can challenge or subvert the ideological signification of state-produced sounds. Building upon this performative role, critical listening is theorized as a method which broadens our understanding of how ideological sound systems can be challenged and resisted.The chapter also includes a case study of critical listening, based on my experience of listening to state-produced sounds in Tel Aviv during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. The case explores Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system and its part in the state's self-inflicted soundscape of war. The case helps to support the underlying argument that reading and observing politics and ideology must also be supplemented by listening to the 'Sound System of the State' as one of the central tools of ideology.

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Section: The 'Sound System Of the State'mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sound System of the State: Critical Listening as Performative Resistance

Tlalim¹

2021

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies

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“…Whereas Archive has widely toured throughout Europe and United States (more than seventy performances since the premiere), in Israel the work has been shown only in Tel Aviv on a few occasions at the Tmuna Theater (September 4–5, 2014; January 8–9, 2015; June 11–12, 2015). On one occasion, “the Ministry of Culture and Sport requested that Zaides remove its logo from the performance's list of sponsors, with the justification that it should not appear alongside B'Tselem's, an organization it perceives as defamatory of Israel's policy in the West Bank” (Abeliovich 2016, 165). During the summer 2014, right-wing activists asked the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Tel Aviv, which was hosting the installation version of Archive (installation with two screens entitled Capture Practice ), to shut down the exhibition.…”

Section: An Israeli Embodying Gestures Of the Israeli Occupation Seenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What is more, a large number of the clips tend to contradict or overturn the usual iconography of the conflict: here, Israelis too throw stones, Israelis too put on masks, thus appropriating for themselves some codes and gestures of the Intifada. In a recent article, Ruthie Abeliovich has pointed out how much the T-shirts covering the settlers' faces resembled “the shape of a Palestinian keffiyeh , a well-known symbol of the Palestinian national resistance” (Abeliovich 2016, 169). Such an agonistic mimicry, occurring, for instance, in section 5 with the video entitled “group of face-covered settlers with slings to throw stones,” 18 turns our own iconic stereotypes upside down and makes it absolutely necessary to start off by mentioning that only Israelis appear in the frame.…”

Section: Antagonistic Imagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As mentioned above, the installation version of Archive , designed for museums and galleries, is entitled Capture Practice, 20 and, indeed, Zaides's practice is all about capture: capturing some fragments of reality through video-recordings, letting oneself be captured by the gestures they depict, and organizing an apparatus capable of showing this double movement of capture. In her comments on Archive , Abeliovich refers in a very pertinent way to André Lepecki's article “Choreography as Apparatus of Capture” (Lepecki 2007) and points out clearly that “Zaides's choreography operates as an ‘apparatus of capture’” (Abeliovich 2016, 167). Nevertheless, by following Lepecki's statement contrasting the oppressive powers of choreography as apparatus with the potential emancipatory movements of dance as breaking the apparatus—a statement inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1980) and pursued in another article by Lepecki (2013)—she mainly focuses on the moments when Zaides “intervenes in this system of power by diverging from the score that the video archive imposes” (Abeliovich 2016, 168).…”

Section: “Apparatus Of Capture” and Mirror Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dance as Documentary: Conflictual Images in the Choreographic Mirror (On Archive by Arkadi Zaides)

Pouillaude¹

2016

Dance Res. J.

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In a solo performance entitled Archive (2014), the Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides offers a physical and choreographic interpretation of videos collected by the Israeli nongovernmental organization B'Tselem in the context 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? 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?

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“…In June 2015, shortly after the election of a majority Likud government in Israel, which signaled a further shift to the right, newly elected Minister of Culture Miri Regev declared that she would remove the Ministry of Culture insignia from any items promoting this choreographic piece ). 8 This prompted objections from protestors from the left-wing. During the summer of 2014, right-wing activists asked the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Tel Aviv, which was hosting the installation version of Archive (installation with two screens entitled Capture Practice), to shut down the exhibition.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dancing Human Rights: Politics in Archive

Goren

2022

SSSH

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In his solo work Archive, Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides provides a physical and choreographic interpretation of footage collected by the Israeli humanitarian group B'Tselem as part of its "Camera Project" initiative. Arkadi Zaides conducts a self-analysis of the modern Israeli body by extracting, imitating, and repeating this material. As isolated choreographic material, the gestures reform in an ongoing act of abstraction: as a critical pointing at absence, they defy any metaphysics of presence, activating an archive of gestures, focusing on the aesthetic and political potential for the disappearance, pausing poses and positionsliteral and figurative, ambiguous positions. Here, deconstruction techniques call into question the linearity of a history's causes and effects. This paper will discuss the synthesis of the following questions to illuminate the methodology and political impact of Zaides' Archive. How does the duality of Archive help it to serve as a tool for criticising Israeli society? How does the implementation of Zaides' forms of expression and dance techniques change the role of the Israeli people in Israeli-Palestinian conflicts? To what extent does Archive engage with real politics, both locally and globally?

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Choreographing Violence: Arkadi Zaides’s Archive

Cited by 5 publications

References 4 publications

The Sound System of the State: Critical Listening as Performative Resistance

The Sound System of the State: Critical Listening as Performative Resistance

Dance as Documentary: Conflictual Images in the Choreographic Mirror (On Archive by Arkadi Zaides)

Dancing Human Rights: Politics in Archive

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