Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Floating on a Dead Sea, an immersive show about life in Palestine’s West Bank before October 2023, will be staged at the city’s Town Hall Theatre on Tuesday, October 29, at 8pm.

This unique work that weaves dance, film, live music and text, is presented by Catherine Young Dance. It grew out of a residency that choreographer Catherine had in Kerry in 2016 when she created a show with asylum seekers and refugees living in direct provision.

“Dance is a great way to integrate new communities, because it needs no words,” she says of the show which was staged for Kerry’s Festival of Welcomes.

Participants included a young dancer from Gaza who performed a Palestinian folk dance, known as dabke. It became part of the show, alongside dances from various other countries.

That September, Caterine reimagined the show for Culture Night at the University of Limerick, which led to an invitation to participate in the 2017 Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival in Palestine.

Catherine and 12 others travelled to the West Bank, working with a local company for two performances, one in Ramallah and the other in Jerusalem.

“And that changed everything,” she says.

Catherine describes the process of dealing with Israeli security as the dance troupe crossed from the West Bank into Israel for the performance in Jerusalem. It’s clear that the injustice faced by the young Palestinians on that occasion has left its mark. The armed soldiers simply refused to let them through the checkpoint. Catherine and her Irish colleagues were in a separate area, and although she knew the soldiers’ behaviour was wrong, she was powerless.

Palestinians have had to live with this injustice and powerlessness every day, even before the latest war, she says.

“You think you understand human rights. Then you realise you know nothing and your life changes.”

On that trip, she asked one question of their hosts: “What can we do to help?”

The result is this show, accompanied by a short film shot during the visit, in which Palestinians described their lives and the challenges they faced then.  Catherine’s original plan was to stage this show in Ireland in 2020 and it had a brief life that year, but Covid happened.

The group did a short version in 2021 and edited the film, so that at least something would exist. Then, last year, before Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s resulting onslaught on Gaza, they got funding to revive it.

Pictured: Finding joy in dance in Ramallah in 2017. Even before Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had to deal with oppression on a daily basis.  PHOTO ALAA ALIABDALLA.