2019 is “homegrown.” The image of its place and its time, encompassing languages, bodies, sounds, local folklore, and nationalism duplicated and replicated throughout our lives; it touches the baggage held in the body and dives into culture’s repertoire of movement.

The space is a space of hospitality. And so, as we look at what is happening, we are also looking at one another. At any given moment, someone returns our gaze. The piece takes place in such close proximity, that it eventually overflows and finds comfort in our lap, forcing us to acknowledge a shared fate and to shoulder the physical and mental burden together.

Naharin’s stage weaves a thread of non-chronological history, populated by bodies whose movement inspires a certain sense of nostalgia. At the same time, they celebrate and conflate the diverse identities that imbue the body in this narrow realm between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. They move back and forth, proudly displaying local myths, intertwining joy and effort with pathos-filled intensity, and then slow down, sometimes to a complete halt, withdrawing to inconsolable sorrow.

The mechanisms at play throughout the piece mirror those of local reality – mechanisms of excess and lack, accelerating and braking, joy and grief. The space is a space of passage, a buffer zone. The dancers, and us with them, linger on the threshold, between what happened and what is about to happen. After all, in the local narrative we are all sitting on the balcony watching the birds migrate, our body beating with hope for the new year but also anticipating the inevitable imminent war.