“Back Up” staged in its simplest mode. “To back up”: literally, to go backwards or go back in time, but also, in computer jargon, to save. It is with this double injunction that “Bribes”, Haïm Adri's trilogy dedicated to the workings of memory, finishes.As the third element of this triptych, “Back Up” investigates the problematic entanglement of the individual and the group in the collective memory of Israelis and Palestinians, irrevocably shaped by the history of territorial conflict. “Back Up” probes the great difficulty that exists in both Israel and Palestine in constructing an expression in words, a particular memory, in a political context where the collective issues at stake – “the community unconscious”, says Haïm Adri – tend to erode individual paths.

“Back Up” exists in two versions: one filmed, the other choreographed. For the film, finished in 2004, Haïm Adri took the time to let the memories of four Israelis and Palestinians (three women and a man) well up in the course of long interviews. Images and movements which sprang from this accompany their accounts, and the film transforms and transposes them. Each of the film's four sections therefore becomes the moment when one is born to oneself, with a simultaneous poetic emergence.

The choreographed “Back Up” starts with this material. The four performers (three women and a man) have allowed the memories, voices and gestures of the people filmed to resonate within them. They interweave these with their own stories and, in turn, distill and pass on a real-life experience. Completed during a creative residency at the Centre National de la Danse, the choreographic version leaves the question of space and the sharing territory painfully insistent. Moving around, approaching the other, meeting each other… These things are not at all simple or fluid. Each of the dancers is shut away within his or her own solitude, both protective and destructive at the same time. They are all struggling with their own suffering and rage.

Intense without being bombastic, “Back Up” bears witness to the fear, but also to the desire and urgency, felt by Palestinian artists when facing the prospect of working hand in hand. It is a matter of creating a common perspective, a place where sensitivities can be shared, where one is human before being political. In Israel and Palestine, such an intent immediately made “Back Up” a subversive piece. It was well received there from April 2005 onwards, but only outside the official circuits. This is why Haïm Adri chose to minimise “Back Up”'s staging and technical requirements. The show is light and flexible, so it can be adapted to all kinds of informal venues: cafés, showrooms, outdoor spaces… This “small scale” version of “Back Up”, inaugurated at the Centre National de la Danse, was succeeded in 2005 by a large-scale version suitable for European theatres and festivals.

Annie Suquet

Updating : March 2010

Haïm Adri was originally a self-taught plastic artist, lover of photographic images and video, volumes and free jazz. His encounter with theatre and discovery of physical involvement, of body and voice as the stuff of artworks even, led him to France to meet Jacques Lecoq, who explores drama through visual forms of grotesque mask work and approaching objects as performing partners.

Through intellectual and artistic encounters, he gradually embarked upon a performing career which willingly crossed the formal boundaries of dance and theatre: with Mercèdes C. Aguirre, Michel Laubu and his Turak Théâtre d'Objet, Anne-Marie Pascoli, Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil, Olivia Grandville... This provided a training by immersion in complementary experiences, some of which – like the encounter with traditional and radical forms of Kathakali, Balinese theatre and Peking Opera while he was with the Théâtre du Soleil – are echoed strongly in his work. Since 1996, Haïm Adri has developed a specific way of working with various objects, such as the stick, as part of his research into emotional and physical states with dancers, whether in the studio or in his teaching. In parallel with this career, he has continued his training and personal research at the frontiers of technique and the artistic act: treating stage lighting as material and architecture (with the studio and video director, Luc Lauga).

Finally, the discovery of improvisation as a singular means of representation, and as a ground where musicians and modern dancers might share their working methods, brought him into contact with Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Simone Forti, Julyen Hamilton and instant choreographic composition, an area of fundamental research into the composition process..

In 1998 he founded the Compagnie Sisyphe Heureux, a research and creation environment within which multidisciplinary artistic collaborations develop, and the specific and complementary views of choreographic artists, musicians and image and sound technicians meet. A project of utopian association which nourishes his career as an artist.

Further information

sisypheheureux.org

Updating : November 2010

Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).