Following its premiere run at the National Centre for Dance in Paris, La Porta presents Back Up, the third part of the trilogy dealing with memory by Israeli-born choreographer and filmmaker Haïm Adri, in Barcelona.
Back Up immerses us in the Palestine-Israel conflict through the first-person accounts of real characters. Haïm uses these accounts to set up an unusual mechanism of identity appropriation in which individual experiences are freed from the weight of collective history to recover their more personal, human meaning.
Over the last two years Haïm Adri visited his country and the Palestinian occupied territories, collecting personal accounts which he then used to make four films. In these four individual portraits - four monologues - dance, image and the spoken word narrate the personal experiences of the protagonists, which are inevitably strongly bound to their land.
The films are the principal source and the basis for creating the characters that inhabit the stage in the second part of Back Up, the choreographic piece, in which four Palestinian and Israeli performers find themselves in a kind of no-man's land, an imaginary check point. There they carry out a game of identity appropriation in which each sees him or herself in the past of the other in an attempt to re-gain a deeper knowledge of the reality of the other..
The story of our own memory contains what we are now and talks to us of this. In this sense, memory is always fiction. When a Palestinian or an Israeli tells his own story, he talks to us of the traumas of the conflict in his own cultural community, because the memory of each of them is inextricably linked to what people say or what we simply hear our people say each day.
...to perform the other it is not enough to listen, it is necessary to understand, to understand the other through oneself...
-Haïm Adri-
PROGRAM
Haïm Adri / Sisyphe Heureux Company
Back Up The films
January 13
Institut Français de Barcelona
Haïm Adri / Sisyphe Heureux Company
Back Up Performance piece
14/15/16 January
Sala Beckett
