Nicole Bindler gallery
Free Advice and an Interview with Farah Saleh
In this thINKingDANCE article, Nicole Bindler interviews Palestinian dance artist Farah Saleh after her performance of her new solo “Free Advice” at New York Live Arts as a part of the Live Ideas Festival. Saleh was born in Syria in 1985 in a Palestinian refugee camp. She moved to Jordan in 1990, and then to Palestine in 1996 after the Oslo Accords. In 2003 during the Second Intifada she had to go to Italy to finish her studies there. In 2009 she decided to go back to Palestine and use Ramallah as a base for her choreographic and curatorial work. Bindler has written several pieces on Palestinian and Israeli dance and politics for tD: Archiving Occupation, Identity, and Resistance (2016), Women (2015), Jewish American Choreographers Grapple with Zionism and the Nakba (2015), Palestinian Dabke Makes it to the Annenberg (2014).
Killer Sideburns’ Stochastic Stars
The ballroom of the William Way LGBT Center shimmers as Purim shpil attendees pour in, many wearing sequins, glitter, and wigs. My good friend Ezra Berkley Nepon, aka “Killer Sideburns,” comes onstage wearing Marx Brothers suspenders hooked onto booty shorts. They introduce their work, “No One Mourns The Wicked: The Wizard of Shushan,” co-directed by jaclyn Pryor, which is a mashup of the Book of Esther with the Wizard of Oz. They declare that the venue is ideal because “Purim is the queerest of Jewish holidays.”
Archiving Occupation, Identity and Resistance
In Archiving Occupation, Identity and Resistance (thINKingDance, March 10 2016), Bindler and tD guest writer Hadar Ahuvia discuss two works–Archive and Badke–presented in the New York Live Arts, Live Ideas Festival, curated by Tommy Kriegsmann and Adham Hafez. This year’s series features work from the Middle East and North Africa. Archive by Israeli Arkadi Zaides features video of Israeli soldiers and settlers taken by Palestinians, coordinated by the human rights organization, B'Tselem. Zaides performs in front of the footage and embodies the actions of the cameras’ subjects. Badke, a collaboration between Belgian dance companies, KVS, les ballets C de la B and the Palestinian organization A.M. Qattan Foundation, features ten Palestinian dancers from various disciplines including hip hop, ballet, contemporary, and circus arts. All of the dancers perform Palestinian folk dance.
WOMEN - Excerpts and interviews
Video trailer of the dance WOMEN, created by JVP Artist Council member, Nicole Bindler, in collaboration with Diyar Dance Theater.
"Women," Thinking Dance
In June 2015, Bindler traveled to Bethlehem, Palestine to make an evening length dance with three young dancers from Diyar Dance Theater, a Dabke company. She was invited by the director, Rami Khader to make a new piece with them about their experiences as women living in the occupied West Bank. What follows are excerpts from her writing about their rehearsal process, the challenges they faced and the questions that arose about cross-cultural collaboration. This piece is also a document of what she observed crossing checkpoints and borders, the prison-like conditions that Palestinians face and how it affects them on a bodily level.
"Dancing in Bethlehem: A Diary," Jewish Currents
"Hadar Ahuvia and Jesse Zaritt: Jewish-American Choreographers Grapple with Zionism and the Nakba," Thinking Dance
Bindler interviews two Jewish-American dance artists who are both currently making solo choreographic work that grapples with Zionism, identity, and Palestinian rights. They embody contradictions in their work: How can one celebrate the movement forms that have positively impacted their dancing lives–such as Israeli folk dance or Gaga–while simultaneously confronting the political implications of these forms that have been used by the state of Israel as propaganda tools?
"Palestinian Dabke Makes it to the Annenberg," Thinking Dance
On November 14th, 2014 the Philadelphia Coalition for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel (Philly BDS) and partners from Students for Justice in Palestine staged a protest against Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company (KCDC) outside the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Here Bindler investigates the questions surrounding the cultural and academic boycott of Israel through interviews with Philly BDS members and artists.