Paper Short Abstract:

Performance archives pose a key question: "What is a movement made of?" Step, sweat, accent, hand-to-hand experiences demand creative material transformations. My research examines a dance gathering that took place in 1944 in Palestine and how bodily movements that were preserved can be reenacted.

Paper Abstract:

The 1944 dance gathering at Kibbutz Dalia was a watershed moment in Hebrew physical culture, often considered the genesis of Israeli dance, and particularly Israeli folk dance, which would later emerge as a global phenomenon. This two-day event took place during the British Mandate of Palestine against the backdrop of the atrocities of the Holocaust.

The curators led mostly by women who had migrated from Europe, tried creating a diverse and creative space encouraging hybrid formats: Biblical ballet, German expressionism, Palestinian Dabke, along with Hassidic and Yemenite traditional performances. In order to follow this experimental spirit, along with the Archive/Performance delicate balance (Taylor, 2003), this event developed unique preservation practices. The question of archiving a step received different answers, beyond the 'face to face' act of performing in small groups (Ben Amos, 1971). In fact, the aim to encompass a physical event was one of the main achievements of the event leaders.

Eighty years later, the event's archival materials remain scattered across thirty different institutional and private collections, each one of them reflecting diverse claims over this cultural legacy. My paper examines physical documentation that has emerged from the event over the years, focusing on three distinct archival documentation forms of movement: folk-dance booklets (1947), Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation of Yemenite dances project (1972) and contemporary reenactments that I created during my research (2024). Through these forms, I explore the possibility of writing and unwriting historical narratives in order to keep the archive active, offering diverse narratives of specific dance-historical events.