Skill-less Tricks: A score for moving through walls

Abstract

In the current context of restricted movement due to COVID-19, I have found myself reflecting upon my connection to friends and collaborators in Palestine. This article proposes my use of a performance score - ‘Skill-less Tricks’ - as a method of cultivating an ongoing connection with those friends and collaborators. As many western nation states have spent much of the last year policing their borders in ways anathema to the freedom of movement expected by global tourism, my time and relationships in Palestine have been brought into sharp relief. This article begins with a discussion of my connection to Palestine and how I came to be regularly working with communities in the West Bank. It explains the personal and political impulse for crossing the wall between Israel and Palestine, and the bodily experience of ‘what it takes to cross a border’ (Noeth 2019). The main reason for my ongoing work in Palestine is due to working with the SkatePal charity in the West Bank who build skateparks and teach children to skateboard. This article reflects on the role SkatePal take within this specific political context. The history and current context of the Palestine/Israel conflict have been well documented in numerous sources including Elizabeth Matthews’s edited collection with David Newman and Mohammed Dajani Daoudi (2011). This source presents a range of viewpoints on central aspects of the conflict from sixteen contributors and offers a balanced introduction. Instead of repeating work that has been done elsewhere, this article reflects on aspects of the current state of the conflict from my own personal perspective captured in journal entries, which are scattered throughout the main body of the text. This selection of journal entries is - more or less - as they were written during the three weeks I spent with SkatePal in the summer of 2015. I have selected material from my journal that is most directly associated with experiences of the wall, of crossing checkpoints and borders and about expressive movement practice. The decision I made to journal my experience was inspired by reflective practice in performance and dance broadly as a research method, and by anthropologist Michael Taussig’s own reflections and experience of Palestine in his article, ‘Two weeks in Palestine’ (2013). Finally, the article discusses the creation of my score, Skill-less Tricks - its origination as part of my Ph.D. research, its adaptation for this new use, its translation from English into Arabic and my intentions for using this as the basis for the continuation of an informal remote exchange. © 2020 Intellect Ltd Article.