Plateau Stories: Park Hahursot

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By Anat Shamgar & Tom Soloveitzik

Collaborators: Michal Samama & Omer Uziel

Video: Noa Simhayof-Shahaf

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Plateau Stories: Park Hahursot is based on the recent corpus of works by Anat Shamgar and Tom Soloveitzik. In all of the pieces, there is a similar core and motive - the building of a common space for dialogue. In these pieces, we presented variations of expression of what we came to call “longing for emptiness”. Exploring silence as a space, movement as thought, and sound as material. These constitute the foundations for a dialogue whose aesthetics lie in sparseness. 

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The collaboration with Michal Samama and Omer Uziel, and with the photographer Noa Simhayof-Shahaf, pushed us from the abstract towards a relationship with the concrete and the present. The "Corona days" forced us to leave the studio space and to meet outside, in Park Hahursot in south Tel Aviv. The outdoors, with all its complexities, required different actions than those we had foreseen. Work in public spaces raises questions of identity, foreignness, belonging, politics, presence and communication. 

Throughout our working period, the existence of a performance (in its simple, pre-Corona, meaning) was uncertain. As such, the piece developed into two complimentary formats. One is a website, offering a perspective on our meetings and time spent in the park in a broader context. The second is performance in Park Hahursot on Friday, April 23, 2021 at 2 PM.

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The website exhibits a video of the piece filmed and edited by Noa Simhayof-Shahaf, texts by the participants, a sound-work based on recordings taken in Park Hahursot, the fruits of a collaboration between Tom Soloveitzik and Moshe Silver and complementary short video by Noa Simhayof-Shahaf.

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The performance is another edition of a series of our meetings in the park, in which we articulate anew the language and mechanisms that were established during the rehearsal period. This is a happening in which the audience watches-participates in our time in the park. We respond to the environment with our movements within it, stirring next to it. We move and are moved by it. We give and receive touch. We expand our territory to be among us. To be between object and subject. To build a third existence in which there is no I, no you, no we, but between us an interim is built that drives us.