We Love Arabs

We Love Arabs is a dance-comedy-drama show; it is simple in concept but rich in metaphor, allegory and irony.  It is beautifully, straight-facedly executed satire and – beneath its wit and its piss-take on the pretensions of ‘contemporary dance, a bitingly serious piece.  It is – ostensibly and actually - about those awkward neighbours, the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The barbed irony begins with the title: the ‘We’ is Israelis – the liberal Israelis who just love Arabs and yet, as suggested here,know little about them, can’t pronounce Arab names and don’t know what that ‘thing’ (the crescent) is above the mosque.  It is striking, even shocking that in Israeli Hillel Kogan’s version of the state of things in his show, ‘Arabs’ are wilfully ‘the Other’.

Dancer and choreographer Kogan explains to the audience that he wants to create a dance work, an art work, on or about this topic of Israeli and Arab, but in dance, in movement, ‘without text’.  It’s about space, about being in a space, but there are some spaces where the body invades the space, and yet others where, so to speak, the space invades the body…  All splendidly, evasively abstract – with such a clear subtext.  He explains haltingly but at length; he’s philosophical, solemn, qualifying, contradicting – and with a plethora of very precise (but deliberately meaningless) hand gestures. 

The audience begins to chuckle, then giggle and soon, laugh outright.  Naturally, he is deeply serious, but the ‘concept’ sounds more and more like self-serving bullsh*t, the more the character explains it. 

And to realise his concept, he has engaged, of course, an Arab dancer, Adi Boutrous, with whom Mr Kogan will dance.  They will dance together.  But first, Mr Kogan has trouble with Mr Botrous’ name and is then surprised that he lives in Tel Aviv.  ‘Tel ‘Aviv?  Really?’  ‘Yes.’  ‘Oh. Okay.’  Mr Kogan divides the stage in two, all the same, and tells Mr Boutrous that that is his side and this side is Mr Kogan’s side – but that they will meet… in the middle. 

Throughout the show, Mr Boutrous – or his character, ‘the Arab’ - remains expressionless and answers questions only in monosyllables.  (In a radio interview before opening night, Mr Kogan explained, without a hint of irony, that the Arab cannot have a voice in the show because that is the state of things for an Arab in Israel.  To give the Arab a voice, he said, would be ‘pretentious’.) 

Mr Boutrous can, nevertheless, dance extremely well – perhaps too well, too inventively for the choreographer, who attempts to maintain control at all times.  After all, it’s his concept.  Mr Boutrous listens – expressionless – then performs as instructed, but goes too far – and has to be stopped.

As the piece develops in stops and starts, and the movements and configurations of the two dancers’ bodies suggest the history and the politics of Palestine and Israel, Mr Kogan introduces objects – a knife and fork – and then hummus (the Arab dish co-opted by the Israelis as their national dish), which he smears on both their faces… as a unifying gesture…

I won’t spoil the implications of the final dance moves, but they are blackly comic and – when you stop laughing – could be quite depressing.  In its deadpan, seemingly unaware irony, We Love Arabs depicts a sadly fixed, immutable position; itis sharp and pointed satire, not just on the politics, but on the way reality can be disguised and evaded by being rendered into ‘Art’.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Maria Grazia Lenzini