A Whole In Two Parts
Creative Intervention
This video dance short and durational video installation is one in a series of works, titled Minimum Dance, that insert performers and inject meaning into an otherwise day-to-day public scene, using minimal creative intervention to create a choreographed composition.
This piece, shot covertly, guerrilla-style at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, focuses on issues of segregation, partitions, and walls of separation. It introduces performers into the worshiping area of the Jewish faith’s most sacred site, creating an interaction across the gender barrier that divides male and female worshipers. It is a direct commentary on the rising practice of exclusion of women and gender-based oppression among orthodox Jews, while the location, in this divided/united city, in front of the wall surrounding the Temple Mount, at the point where the divine and the earthly, East and West, the Jewish, Christian and Muslim sections of the city meet, adds additional layers of meaning, highlighting our human tendency to block-off and avoid that which we are unable to make peace with.