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- ELISTER'S ANXIETY-

asaf aharonson
asaf aharonson
asaf aharonson
asaf aharonson
asaf aharonson
asaf aharonson

The work ‘Elister's Anxiety’ was commissioned by the “Kenes Performance” festival 2018 ' Jerusalem.

I was asked me make work that related to folk dancing and audience participation . While thinking about what could be contemporary folk dance I stumbled upon the article ‘We are all very anxious' by Plan B collective. The article claimed that anxiety is one of the commonest phenomenons shared by people in Neo-liberal contemporary countries in the western world.
 
As a result “Elister's Anxiety” is an installation and an invitation to learn and participate in one of the practices that I’ve been developing over the last years, which I found very anxiety reducing. 

‘Elister's Anxiety’ is an installation for 7 people (30 min)  at a time. 

It is located on the bottom of an empty swimming pool in Jerusalem, and involves one performer. The people are invited to listen to a recording of the choreographer that is absent (in Berlin) and instead of him the host of the installation- Zohar Wiman Kelmn conducts the listening of different texts, through the activation of 3 analogue recording devices.

The texts are moving between notions of the formal and the personal, and their content is descriptive of the context of the work i.e  describing a collective studio in Berlin, the friends and people that the choreographer shares his time and research with, plus the emotional landscape that he was operating under at that time.


One text is in English and the other are in Hebrew, from the beginning the performer is engaging in her own trajectory of engagement with the recording. She is repeating the recordings with her own intonations and mannerisms, at one point adding simultaneous translation from the English text to Hebrew.

Part 1 ends with listening to one of the poems that was written in the studio during the work process. After that, the performer invites the audience into two options of continuation:

  1. People are welcomed to either go down to the deep side of the swimming pool where there are more recording devices with more poems from the practice/research.

  2. Welcomed to try the practice with themselves. 

Continue to practice HERE

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