Inspired by Jewish activist and artistic traditions, JVP’s Artists and Cultural Workers Council convened as a group of Jews and allies drawing on diverse histories, experiences, and disciplines-- including visual art, music, poetry, circus, literature, dance, theater, embodiment, comics, ritual, media, photography, technology, film/video, and more-- with the goal of supporting JVP’s work in the larger movement for peace and justice in Palestine and the U.S., by offering art and cultural work to both strengthen organizing as well as shape its strategy.
This gallery represents a selection of work by Council Members. Scroll below for images, writing, sound, and video.
A Jew in the Diaspora Writes to the Trees in Israel
Shelby Handler, 2015.
"The Twin Ghosts of Slavery and the Nakba: The Roots that Connect Ferguson and Palestine."
Wendy Elisheva Somerson, 2015.
Leaving Jordan
Jenny Levison, 2014.
"Chicken Fight." (2014)
Nicole Bindler and Gabrielle Revlock
We, Nicole Bindler and Gabrielle Revlock–award winning choreographers–take a leap into a new discipline: filmmaking! The film, Chicken Fight is a nonlinear, narrative, feminist, comedic tour-de-force about romantic love among the Jewish diaspora, set in Berlin, 2014. Chicken fight is not a dance for the camera, but a narrative film with choreographic sensibilities. What are the skills and techniques that we dance-makers bring to the screen? Has this ever been done before? No. We are working intensively with a screenwriter, dramaturg, director and fight choreographer to create this movie which is inspired by heritage, desire, psychosis, combat, failure, cattiness, Quebecois line dancing, compromise, beauty, primal impulses, endings, kinesthesia, queer theory, spectacle, technology, quantum physics and barbarism. Chicken Fight is named after our favorite game from summer camp where people would fight in pairs with one person sitting on the other’s shoulders. This is the paradox of war; how soldiers must cooperate in order to destroy.