HADAR AHUVIA & SHIRA EVIATAR
Possessing brings together artists Hadar Ahuvia and Shira Eviatar to collaboratively question their shared, inherited trauma of the Israeli nation-state, asking “How do we move together?” Ahuvia, unpacking Ashkenazi heritage in institutionalized Zionist folk dance, and Eviatar, recentralizing Arab/Mizrahi aesthetics in contemporary performance, incite dialogue around appropriation, legacy, and settler-colonialism. After conducting research separately, they come together to deepen their questions and application of their respective forms.
Their search unfolds in movements that recall ancestors’ and institutionalized celebration and mourning rituals—extending far past their respective bodies and histories. They invite community engagement as part of this first iteration of performance research.
Please join us for a post-show Toast on November 21, and post-performance discussion moderated by Jen Abrams on November 22.
This performance contains nudity.
Shira Eviatar examines the transmission of embodied cultural knowledge, calling on her Moroccan Jewish heritage. She researches traditional forms of gathering and celebration. Her work considers the body as both material and coded, reflecting the collective values, states of mind, sensations and feelings in cultural practice. It makes visible and nurtures spaces for excluded forms, recentralizing Mizrahi/Arab Jewish aesthetics and subjectivities.
Eviatar is an independent choreographer and dancer based in Jaffa. She was a 2015 DanceWeb Scholarship Program participant (2015), holds a degree in dance theatre from Kibbutzim College. She studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York and at Kelim – a program for choreographic research. She has performed her works in festivals throughout Israel and Europe, such as Rencontres chorégraphiques Festival, Fabbrica Europa festival, SPRING festival, EPOS Film Festival / Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and more. She was invited to present her works Body Roots and Rising at Theater De La Bastille in Paris and by the Bat-Sheva Dance Company. Eviatar has lectured and led workshops about her work in Israel, Europe, and the US.
Eviatar was a guest artist at SEAD and at the International Cumplicidades Festival in Portugal with the AADK in Spain, a project which aimed at generating dialogue between artists of the Mediterranean area. She recently collaborated with the international tap dancer Josette Wiggan to co-create Tapping into Self, which premiered in Intimadance Festival, 2018. Some of her works include Body Roots, Body Mandala, Rising, Eviatar/Said, Three Generations: One Body, Kosher and De-Port Workers.
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