Schism

Schism is a multidisciplinary dance work, created by Israel Aloni and cast, that explores our acceptance of the limits of existence and how it affects our perception of the world.

Schism deals with the notion of borders and how they impact the conceptualisation of the world within the hu-WO-man experience. As a gender-fluid individual who is also diasporic-nomadic Jew, Aloni takes on the challenge to describe the world by alternative means.

Schism takes on the challenge of describing the world around us by alternative means - the blurred boundaries between citizenship and prison, between desire and obsession, between reason and madness, between us and them? The intimate performance takes place in a unique eye-shaped space where there is a blurred boundary between the audience and participants.

Schism will be on tour again in Sweden and abroad during spring and autumn 2023.

Photos featured are taken by AdeY.

Choreographer’s notes by Israel Aloni

A significant inspiration to both the concept development and the methodologies which resulted in the making of Schism are rooted in the philosophical accounts of Rosi Braidotti - particularly her work on posthuman ecologies, and that of Achille Mbembe - particularly his work on the notion of borderless world. I identify as a fluid being and in my experience fluidity is evident in and vital to many, if not all, aspects of my being. This includes my gender identity, my chronological identity (how old I feel) my national identity (which nation I feel most affiliated with) my geographical identity (which place I feel most related to) my cultural identity (which culture I feel has most impact on the way I experience life) and so on. Therefore, I have been drawn to the notion of borderlessness - a state or a reality in which there are no borders. Can that be?

From the start, the creation process of Schism posed many fundamental questions: how can one bring something, or anything for that matter, into existence without somehow describing the limits of that very thing? Can we imagine anything without somehow imagining what it is not? And so, what describes the point-zone-way in which one thing stops being itself and starts being something else?

Through the incredibly stimulating collaboration during this process with Lærke, Smadar and MINQ as well as with Siri, Stina and Aida, we arrived at the realisation of our shared desire to address the notion of borders in ways that all hu-WO-man beings can relate to. This realisation led us to delve into the very experience of body, which relates strongly and directly to my movement-choreography practice, The I.Aloni Experience, in which I research what I call Corporeal Consciousness - experiencing the world through the subjective experience of what we perceive to be our body.

We all have some kind of presence in the physical realm - a body. Where does one body end and another body begins? What happens with the skin cells that we shed? What happens with the sweat which evaporates off the skin? What happens with our tears? And the air we exhale? Are all of these also “our body”?

Longer trailer by Emiliano Sacripanti available here.