The black belt is the test for the highest level in martial arts which testifies to abilities and skills acquired throughout the years of training. In November 2019, an Israeli military operation of this same name was carried out in the Gaza Strip.
When we think of dance and movement we often think of the physical dimension, the range of physical ability, the execution, the ability to challenge ourselves, to improve and promote the flexibility, power, and strength inherent in it, to reach towards our edges and sometimes arrive to the end of our ability. But our body is much more than merely the physical skill acquired through it. It is the keeper of the emotional and mental memory within us. It is ‘the home’. When the physical, the emotional, and the mental are woven into one tapestry, there will be a peace within us, alongside the strength. We will allow the breath to bring about the movement and create a flow that has stability and balance as well as a sense of flight and boldness.
In martial arts, unlike in military warfare, the test represents not the final stage but rather the beginning, it is the beginning of our path to an understanding of our power and our ability to act with vigilance, awareness and respect. The aim is not the final result, but the path itself, it is not about victory or surrender, but about agreeing to engage with the other, with the understanding that he carries a reflection of who I am. And this battle, actually, is with myself, and not with the other.
The Adama Dance Company operates and trains in the city of Sderot, which is located on the border with Gaza. Daily work in the studio in a place like this – so vulnerable and carrying wounds, and located far from the urban centers of the country often considered to be the ‘home’ of Israeli art – inevitably requires a different take on movement and on the human body that seeks balance between the work of art and a complex and painful reality.
The choreography was built on different training foundations and different worlds of movement – acrobatics and martial arts – bursting power, natural movement, quieting the mind. This made possible a movement-based investigation that brings energetic and conscious balance. What does our body remember as an acquired ability that bestows skill, and what can it give up and let go of in order to accept the constant and inevitable change, to allow the weight to be present and thus lift heavy burdens from ourselves.
One of the things that stands out in the daily reality during a war round is that all the coffee shops close as a symbol of the closing of the public space. Coffee is braided into the choreography, not only as the fruit that it is but also as the process it undertakes in its physical form: from when the coffee beans are crushed, crumbled into powder, in the hands of the harvesters, and make their way to the hands that hold the coffee cups, from the distant fields in Africa, South America to branded Western consumer culture, which anchored it as a unifying element for meeting and intimacy.
In a world of contradictions, conflicts, and clashes, movement seeks an understanding to face first of all the person that I am, here and now, to learn my independence and power, to shake off the illusion, the dream, to look with open and silent eyes at the calling reality, even when we are hanging in the air.