‘Do You Think Combat Pilots Have Haemorrhoids?’

Abstract

The opening scene of Go, a dance piece created by Israeli choreographer Galit Liss in 2017, is accompanied by the music of the Israel Defense Forces march. On stage, however, do not appear vibrant young soldiers but elderly women who engage in performing a sequence of subtle movements that accentuate the vibrating muscles of their ageing bodies. For the past decade, Galit Liss has been working with ageing women who are non-professional dancers, and focused on revealing their emotional and bodily experiences, while uncovering the tension between their personal identities and society’s perception of them as old people. This choreographic practice of ‘writing’ the elderly female body resonates with a recurring theme in contemporary dance that accentuates ageing and adulthood, thus challenging a central characteristic of Western theatrical dance, which traditionally, and especially in genres like ballet, sanctifies youth and the virtuosic body. In addition to the significance of displaying elderly bodies on stage in light of their social silencing and artistic exclusion, Go examines ageing within the conflict between individual body and national identity. This, by means of reflecting on Israeli society’s idealization of the combat pilot, a masculine hero celebrated, even today, as the protector of the homeland that the generations to which her performers’ belong were educated and expected to adore. This essay will therefore discuss the choreographic and theatrical strategies utilized by Galit Liss to simultaneously ‘voice’ the ageing female body and validate its corporeal patina, while re-negotiating the privileged status of the combat male chosen body. Through this perspective, the images of elderly feminine corporeality in Go will be acknowledged as a social critique aimed at undermining the Zionist masculine-militarist ethos that still dominates Israel’s collective identity.