Choreographies of Power: The Public Movement Collective

Co-founded in 2006 by Dana Yahalomi and Omer Krieger, the Israeli collective Public Movement is a performative research group that stages public choreographies and rituals such as parades, referendums, dances, and games (most of the times in public spaces) to explore how political power structures aestheticize daily life to produce identification and consensus to the status quo. This community-based practice rooted in discussions and interviews, dubbed by the group "performing politics," aims to produce collective awareness through art and play. The group's performances are place- and time-specific—or rather context-specific—and therefore unique. As in the tradition of performance art and Happenings, they are usually not repeated; their success relies precisely on the unexpected effects they produce on the audience.

The group's work could be distinguished in two areas, determined by the two different types of audience addressed: a generic and a specific one. The generic audience mostly consists of anonymous passersby who behold and sometimes participate in choreographed public performances based on celebrative events or simulating real-life situations, like emergency procedures and joyful gatherings inspired by Jewish youth organizations. A specific audience, instead, is addressed during debriefing one-on-one sessions conducted by a so-called "double agent" in a formal setting, or in conferences opened to many people. Their critique of representational democracy is a way to empower the audience in understanding how choices are determined and the role of the individual within a community and the state.

Halfway between visual arts, theatre, dance, and activism, Public Movement is part of a new generation of genre-defying groups that emerged in the early twenty-first century that employ performance to explore social and political dynamics. Analogies could be traced, for instance, with such entities as Chto Delat (What Is to Be Done?) from Russia or the Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll, both practicing forms of investigative theatre based on pre-existing documentary material, often involving non-professionals, and resulting from the collaboration with insiders, experts, or representatives of specific fields or organizations. Recurring issues addressed by such groups include the conditions of labor, soft power, and bottom-up forms of political struggles, usually addressed from a leftist perspective and aimed at disclosing cases of social injustice.

What characterizes this new generation of performance collectives is the multi-disciplinary background of their members, ranging from visual arts to theatre to political science to philosophy. Add to this the countless temporary members and consultants from the most disparate fields for an idea of how many diversified competences come into play. The production of these groups is striking in the degree of mimesis with factual reality they are able to reach. In Spring in Warsaw (2009), for instance, Public Movement led a walk in the Warsaw Ghetto not unlike one of those pilgrimages organized periodically by Jewish youth delegations. The ritualistic march, which involved about 1,300 people, was in fact a metalinguistic event: it worked as a real march and at the same time, being framed as a work of art, functioned as its representation.

Invited by cultural institutions, besides Israel, Public Movement has also performed in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, Australia, Taiwan, and the United States. Collaborating with local authorities such as police precincts, military units, firefighters, medical services, and government representatives, the group's actions represent situations of unity, resistance, choice, debate, or obedience. The performances, which aim to stimulate the audience in psychological terms and sometimes involve them physically, range from organizing trainings in emergency preparedness (i.e. Emergency, Tel Aviv–Jaffa, 2008) to referendums (i.e. Census, Bat-Yam, Israel, 2010), from public interventions (i.e. The Łódź Actions, Lodz, Poland, 2008) to cultural summits (i.e. Make Art Policy, Helsinki, Finland, 2014).

Since 2011, Public Movement has been under the sole leadership of Yahalomi. Although collectives are usually structured as horizontal entities, it is meaningful to use the term "leadership" when referring to Public Movement. Its hierarchical structure doesn't have to be considered anti-democratic though, but is itself part of the tactic of mimesis conducted by the group to explore...