The Sderot Adama Movement Center is a center for movement and dance located in the Nir-Am neighborhood in Sderot. The center was founded in 2017 by Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal – choreographers and dancers who wanted to reach a community located in a sensitive area outside of Israel’s main city centers in the desert of the country’s southern Negev region, with the intention of deepening the connection of art to healing and community.
The Municipality of Sderot in cooperation with the Ministry for the Development of the Negev and the Galilee renovated an old studio that had long stood empty, and it became their new home – a center for movement and dance whose purpose is to bring art and culture to an area that faces many security challenges, to facilitate the relaxation of the soul and the need for artistic expression even within a space of survival. Adama is a home for both creation and growth as well as vulnerability and rehabilitation; agreeing to allow these things to co-exist offers the place its power and beauty.
Adama is a home for both creation and growth as well as vulnerability and rehabilitation; agreeing to allow these things to co-exist offers the place its power and beauty
The Sderot Adam Movement Center is home to the Adama Dance Company under the management of Liat Dror. The center runs a movement school that includes two different programs of study – the Movement and Choreography Program and the Healing Through Movement Program. The center hosts workshops, performances, and residencies by artists from Israel and around the world. Once a year, the Pesach Adama Festival takes place – an international festival for contemporary dance held over the Passover holiday. We place an emphasis on connection to the community and the environment, and the center hosts groups for the broader community, including movement classes for those with mental illness, PTSD, wheelchair users, seniors, and beyond.
Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal began working together in 1997 in Tel Aviv. Their work was unique in the world of Israeli dance at that time and drew inspiration from concepts developed in the field of dance in Europe and the USA in which creators began to form independent dance groups. Their first choreography, Two Room Apartment, is considered a groundbreaking work in the world of dance and won them the first prize at the Israeli festival Shades in Dance and at the Bagnolet International Choreography Competition in Paris.
In the coming years, they created two more works as a duo: Equus Asinus (1998) and The Third Dance (1990). During the 1990s, they formed the Liat Dror Nir Ben Gal Dance Company and created a number of successful works that were performed throughout the country and the world, and won awards at many festivals and competitions.
In 2000, they left Tel Aviv and decided to move their creative base to Mitzpe Ramon – considered a “development town” in the periphery of the country’s southern Negev district – where they established Hangar Adama. With their success in the world of dance, they found themselves living a life that felt fast-paced, competitive and judgmental, and they felt that they were moving away from the very essence of dance and movement. In Mitzpe Ramon, they sought to build a life with dance as part of the everyday, and not as some high and disconnected art.
The desert – a place devoid of external stimuli and full of silence and unending space – served as a suitable setting that inspires renewal and the connection between dance and healing. What was once an abandoned ceramics factory in the industrial area of Mitzpe Ramon was converted into a huge dance studio, with a space for residents and guests. In Hangar Adama, a different concept of dance began to be built – dance that is connected to the soul, dance that is connected to nature, dance that is connected to the environment and to the community.
On October 7, 2023, the ground fell out from under our feet. The pain that pierced the foundations, shakes our sense of faith and worldviews. The massacre that occurred on that day revealed a blindness, which brought with it the disintegration of both the place and that of the human soul.
The question of whether art has the power to restore and heal becomes tangible. In a situation of survival during such a long war, is it possible to continue to produce culture through the intelligence of the moving body? Sderot Adama, as a cultural center, chose to return in order to continue their ongoing work, with all the complexity involved and with the absolute belief that the human spirit has a direct influence on the spirit of the place. That every movement holds the potential for growth and the restorative qualities that can heal what has been broken.