Hyphenated Performance On-Site

Abstract

This article contextualises and explores participatory site-specific walking performances created for the ‘hyphenated’ area between Tel Aviv and Jaffa in Israel – nowadays a space of trade and recreation, and which before the 1948 war was Manshiya, the northern quarter of Jaffa. In correlation with geopolitical hyphenation implemented through annexation and control, we suggest the concept of hyphenated performance. The performance embodies the urban and territorial connection while expressing a critical consciousness regarding the colonial paradigm of hyphenation. The reframed hyphen resides in composing present and past into a traumatic post-memory site; and in the tension – defined as ‘will-powering’ – between voluntary movement and its control in liberal space. Within this framework we discuss two performances: Miriam Schickler’s audio-walk Echoing Yafa (2014), which explicitly triggers the critical events in Manshiya through collective and subjective enacted stories; and Rabia Salfiti’s The Walk (2017), in which a small group of blindfolded participants were tied to one another and led by the artist along the un-told site.