Moving through Conflict

Dance and Politcs in Israel

Dina Roginsky, Henia Rottenberg, Dina Roginsky, Henia Rottenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000750478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Moving through Conflict: Dance and Politics in Israel is a pioneering project in examining the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through dance. It proposes a research framework for study of the social, cultural, aesthetic and political dynamics between Jews and Arabs as reflected in dance from late 19th-century Palestine to present-day Israel.

Drawing on multiple disciplines, this book examines a variety of social and theatrical venues (communities, dance groups, evening classes and staged performances), dance genres (folk dancing, social dancing and theatrical dancing) and different cultural identities (Israeli, Palestinian and American). Underlying this work is a fundamental question: can the body and dance operate as nonverbal autonomous agents to mediate change in conflicting settings, transforming the "foreign" into the "familiar"? Or are they bound to their culturally dependent significance – and thus nothing more than additional sites of an embodied politics?

This anthology expounds on various studies on dance, historical periods, points of view and points of contact that help promote thinking about this fundamental issue. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of dance studies, sociology, anthropology, art history, education and cultural studies, as well as conflict and resolution studies.

Part I
Community relations

1
Community relations and Palestinian dance

Introduction to Part I

Dina Roginsky

The first part of the book, addressing community relations, focuses our attention on the immediate nature of dance as a physical connector of the members of the two groups or as connecting between the two communities’ dances that are interwoven. This part presents case studies that analyze dances of the Jewish community during the Ottoman era, Mandate Palestine era and state-based Israeli folk dances, as well as contemporary encounters of movement and dance in which Jews and Arabs dance together. Some studies in this part relate to the way the Palestinian men’s Dabke and the Middle Eastern women’s dance (not strictly Palestinian, but practiced in Palestine as well) were accepted, affected or appropriated by the Jewish-Israeli public and present dance practices of Palestinian-Israeli women who strengthen the sense of national identity within their home communities.

Dina Roginsky’s study, opening the first part, sets the book’s historical foundation by analyzing dance relations between the two communities as they took shape for more than 100 years. The discussion begins with the late 19th century and deals with the cultural dance-encounter between Jews and Arabs, changing its nature as different Jewish communities join the local community, with the establishment of socialist settlements and the founding of the state of Israel. The analysis ends in 2000 with the closure of state institutions for managing folk dance in Israel. The writer uses terminology of colonial and postcolonial analysis in order to interpret major themes in the relations between the two groups, moving – from the Jewish perspective – across a varied emotional and power spectrum: beginning with neighborly and culture-borrowing relations, through the orientalist and imitating perspective, continuing with artistic inspiration and appropriation relations (especially of the dabke) and ending with relations of patronization and representation.

Tovi Fenster, in her ethnography of a belly dancing class in Jerusalem, exposes the world of Jewish women who enjoy oriental dancing. Women participants in the class – young and old, secular and religious – tell about their dance and body experience to the researcher who is an observer-participator-interviewer. Their stories reflect the fact that dancing is their refuge from everyday pressures and gender and religious constraints. The studio offers the women a weekly framework delineated as a “safe space” where a personal, womanly physical movement experience takes place, liberated and liberating, within a supportive women’s group that contributes to their empowerment by increasing their self-worth and positive body sense.¹ Furthermore, the women depoliticize belly dancing as they extract it from its Arab cultural context and turn it into a bridge to a woman’s body, whoever she may be.

In her ethnographic study of Palestinian women dance practitioners in Israel, Hodel Ophir examines the practices, ideology and pedagogy of these women, arguing that through interweaving an art form recognized as Western or global with the local Arab-Palestinian culture and conditions, they are creating and nurturing experiences that lead to a strengthened sense of collective national identity and ethnocultural solidarity among dance participants. Addressing dance as an act of “performing nationality”, Ophir analyzes three separate modes through which this cultural fusion occurs: 1) the body in space, 2) the dancing body and music and 3) nationalism and gender between tradition and liberalism. In this process, the notion of nationalism is being expanded and reconceptualized in reference to images, such as warfare, suffering and scarifying on the one hand, and motherhood or earth on the other. As a “stand-tall generation” (Rabinowitz and Abu Baker 2002), these Palestinian women and girls in Israel gain a novel site for action and expression, at once rejecting and embracing traditional gender roles and taking upon themselves responsibility for the building of a unified community, one that acknowledges its pain and suffering but centers on the power and creativity of the dancing body.

Closing the first part of the book on community relations is the article by choreographer Ilanit Tadmor who writes about her personal journey along with her professional partner, Palestinian-Israeli choreographer Rabeah Morkus, initiating social-educational-dance projects that bring together Jews and Arabs, adults and youth in dance and movement in Israel. They first connected in 2010 during the Talking Art project in Jerusalem, and then at contact improvisation workshops under the heading Encounter Point: Two Languages-One Movement and at a movement mass sharing by Arabs and Jews titled Touching Hands that took place outdoors at Kufr Yassif. At present, they colead Bridges (םירשג روسج), a group of Israeli youth, Jews and Arabs who dance together in a variety of movement and modern dance styles. The group even participated in an encounter with another youth group in France. The chapter exposes the challenges and numerous difficulties that such encounters raise alongside the hope for change and renewal raised especially in such encounters of Arab and Jewish youth, the younger generation of Israeli citizens. Kussai Haj-Yehia’s appendix at the end of the book contains information about Palestinian Dabke groups that are presently active in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority.

The studies in this part of the book deal mostly with the way the Jewish-Israeli community was influenced by Palestinian dances and with the way modern dance styles currently impact Palestinian citizens of Israel, while the second part of the book deals with the Israeli artistic dance scene and its history. To add to a more comprehensive understanding of dancing in the Palestinian community, I will now expound historically on Palestinian dances within their separate cultural context in pre-Zionist Palestine, and I would like to attend to the two prominent gender representations of Palestinian-Arab dance: women’s dancing and men’s Dabke.²

The most comprehensive research on dance life in Palestine was written by Nicholas Rowe (2010), an Australian dancer, choreographer and researcher who lived and worked in Ramallah (in 2000–2008). Although his book does show certain bias, written as it is by a Western researcher whose historical base is mostly the perception of Western tourists and anthropologists who visited Palestine in the 19th century, he is apparently the main present source of knowledge in understanding the Palestinian community dance practices. I would like to present some important findings from his book here while focusing on variables of tradition versus modernity, communal dance versus performative dance, religion and gender.³

In his research, Rowe (2010) exposes a colorful history of Palestinian folk dance, which, according to testimonies of the 19th century, included domestic-group-familial dances alongside solo dancing in the community, performed at holiday celebrations, circumcision ceremonies and as a part of weddings and mourning customs. They included dances performed with gender separation (i.e., lamenting dance at homes of the bereaved and in cemeteries) alongside gender-mixed dances (at weddings, for example), both with the women’s heads covered (in the presence of strangers) and bare (among strictly family members). Dances were also differentiated by group frameworks: dances of rural fellaheen (farmers) alongside nomadic Bedouin dances and urban dances. Religious affiliation was also a factor: among Muslims and Christians, as well as among darwish individuals performing their distinct religious dancing.

Especially interesting is the process of Palestinian folk dances emerging from the domestic-communal sphere and onto the public-performative stage. According to Rowe (2010), this process may have begun as early as under Ottoman rule, when Palestinian villagers or Bedouins performed a local, spontaneous version of some of their traditional dances in which the general public participated in order to present them to European and American tourists for economic purposes. This activity became a kind of local tourist business that the foreigners named “fantasiya” and which included various group performances. Importantly, one of the women’s dances resembled the procession of the henna (prewedding) ceremony, unlike any kind of belly dance – the latter was not part of the local Palestinian tradition but rather imported later from Egypt or Lebanon.

A critical change took place in the 20th century, when the British Mandate on Palestine took over the country and moved the entire area toward westernization and modernization, affecting urban dancing contrary to its effect upon rural dancing. In public schools and along with the establishment of the “Scouts” movement by the British in Palestine, children were exposed to classes of European “folk dancing”. The wealthy Christian elite in Ramallah enjoyed European ballroom dancing at hotel gala evenings, offering dances and alcoholic beverages that were contrary to Muslim conventions. Urban women of the Palestinian elite took part in domestic women’s encounters in which they performed belly dances for each other imported from entertainment centers in Lebanon or Cairo. This process also led to the paid performances of dancers at weddings (Rowe 2010: 73). As a reaction to such Westernization among Palestinian Christian bourgeois society, rural Palestinian dancing was increasingly affected by anti-Western Islamist tendencies. Rowe emphasizes that, consequently, women – who had formerly been part and parcel of public community dancing, as well as taken part in gender-mixed dancing – were now restricted.

Women’s dancing in the Near/Middle East⁴ has different and varied names in different languages: raqas baladi (lit.: local dancing) – Baladi dance (Roushdy 2013), raqas al-sharqi (lit.: eastern dancing) – oriental dance (Sellers-Young 1992), Middle Eastern dance (Fisher 2003; Moe 2012), belly dance (Adra 2005; Maira 2008) and even exotic dance (Bock and Borland 2011). The different names signify a variety of subcategories but attest particularly to the wide interest that this type of dance and its dynamic development have awakened in the West, especially since the 19th century under colonial influence, and to the spread of this kind of dancing worldwide both as performative dance and as group or communal dancing for occidental women. Countless research studies have dealt with this type of dance, its uses in the West and its gender effects, from many perspectives including feminist, postcolonialist, therapeutic and spiritual approaches. However, this broad body of knowledge does not deal with this dance in its communal framework in the Middle East itself and is usually written by Western researchers.⁵

Yet a unique perspective on Palestinian women and urban dancing is provided by Manar Hassan (2008: 166–170) in her research titled “The Invisible: Women and the Palestinian Cities”. She discloses that in the cities of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nablus and Haifa, Palestinian women of the lower classes, called Jenakhi, were paid to perform on stage (singing, dancing and playing music). Hassan discovered evidence of this from the late 19th century, and the beginning of this phenomenon remains undated. Such women – Muslims, Christians and Jews among them – inhabited their own house as an urban group and were trained by older, more experienced professional women. A critical point to note is that the Jenakhi were claimed to hold dual social status: on the one hand, these women gained personal freedom and economic independence, and on the other, they were considered wanton. The Jenakhi performed at weddings, festivals and domestic meetings of upper-class women as well as at the women’s bathhouse, where they met and socialized as well. The Jenakhi were also invited to perform at various towns and villages throughout Palestine. What Hassan’s references do not reveal is the kind of dancing and body movement that characterized such women’s dances.

Unlike Palestinian women’s dancing, whose movement character remains rather vague in historical references – probably due to issues of chastity and dignity of the female body – the Palestinian men’s Dabke is much easier to characterize.⁶ This is a popular dance in Arab society – Muslim, Christian, Druze and Bedouin – in the Middle East. It is a group dance performed in a line or a half circle, with a prominent dancer in the lead (occasionally there are two leaders, each at another end of this line and noted for holding a kerchief, prayer beads or the like). Leading is the most gifted dancer, permitted to improvise and dictate dance rhythms to the other dancers. The direction is either in single file or as a stalwart front. The group consists of 8–16 men, a number that enables them to move precisely and in unison. The dance is accompanied by a double-flute (majwouz) or a single-flute (ney, shababa), at times with a singer performing a vocal dialogue with the group and the musicians. Rhythmic and tonal components added by the dancers are stomps, rhythmic hand clapping and enthusiastic cries while dancing.

The Dabke shows a variety of hand-holding forms and steps through various formations in space: when the line is close together, arms are held tightly at the sides of the body, and when the line opens up, the dancers hold each other’s arms, spread wide sideways. There is also the crisscrossed pattern of holding each other’s belts. Changes in arm- and hand-holding forms accommodate step changes and determine the type of advancing in space. Flexibility of the knees and ankles and rigidity of the feet, usually wearing boots, enable stressed stomping. Most of the dance movement is based on rhythmic leg motion and stomping, often syncopated. Body posture is erect and confident and typified in controlled movement of the shoulders, hips and head. A key principle of the Dabke is that of improvising repetitive patterns, both in the movement and in the musical structure of the dance. The dancers as well as the musicians are familiar with the dance’s basic patterns, and the result is a combination of improvised known patterns so that the concrete happening is a unique product affected by the atmosphere and coordination of all its components in its specific context.

Three types of Palestinian Dabke may be noted: Shamaliyah, Sha’arawiyah and Kurdiyah. These forms differ from one another in the number of stomps, hops and the opening leg.⁷ There is also a women’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Community relations
• PART II Representational relations
• Appendix 1: Dabke groups in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority
• Appendix 2: Chronology of theatrical dances in the state of Israel dealing with the political conflict between Arabs and Jews
• Index