Dancing Human Rights: Politics in Archive

Abstract

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 positions — literal 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?