Intimacy On The Dancefloor

When my husband suggested we make Aliyah, I didn't think twice about it. I didn't even think once about it, there was no way I would pick up our five children and move them to a country whose primary goal was to prevent itself from annihilation by hostile neighbours intent on its destruction, all in a language I neither spoke nor understood. At the time, we were living an essentially religious life and my connection with my body, apart from its role as a delivery truck to my babies, was completely nonexistent. One evening a friend suggested I come along to an Israeli Folk dance class in Sydney. I had been a tap dancer till my late teens so she thought I would manage the intermediate class even though they were half way through the year. She was wrong. I spent the next three years chasing legs just to catch one tiny piece of a sequence without tripping over myself and bumping into everyone else even though I was sure they were all going the wrong way!

A few years later when my husband broached the subject of Israel again, I made a deal with him. I would come live in Israel with him if he would come learn Israeli dancing with me; and so it was that we made Aliya just over a year ago. He came to a few classes and subsequently dropped out, he's not a dancer, it's just not his thing and much as I would 'immigrate' just to dance with him, I gave up pushing it and embraced the opportunity to dance three sometimes four times a week and have him stay home and hold the fort. I had a lot of catching up to do.

I remember dancing a solo tap routine from the Broadway musical Cats as a young teenager and experiencing that moment when you 'get' what it means to lose yourself in a performance. It's a transcendent moment that allows you to be something greater than your regular self. In dance it's about complete presence, focus and body centred awareness. You have to lose yourself (your ego, your self consciousness, your fear), to access your greater self - the fearless, expansive part that resides in your centre. That's how I wanted it to be when I danced, not for the performance, but for the sheer bliss of feeling expanded and present. For me dance is a much needed meditation.

Yet to be completely present in a dance with a man who is not your life's partner, presents some challenges. At this point I will dance with anyone who will dance with me, even though I have some partners with whom I feel a particular affection, and with whom our movement, time and rhythm is perfectly weighted and synchronized. The challenge is not in the connection of the body but rather in the connection of the soul, which happens through the meeting of the eyes. When two people are aligned in a movement together and look at each other from the centre of their bliss, intimacy is the natural expression; dancing after all is courting ritual.

The question is not how to prevent that intimacy from expressing itself, because to do that one would have to disengage from their own centre, but rather how to manage it in a grown up world where married men and women dance with other married men and women. If you are able to feel the intimacy and allow it to express itself in the moment, without interpretation or transference it can be as innocent as two friends sharing a joke. For me that is the ultimate way to dance, connected heart to heart in innocence and bliss.

Still it's very hard to separate parts of ourselves, and stay clean in an intimate exchange between two humans. We confuse sex with love, the personal with the universal, our emotional with our intellectual. I watch couples dance together and wonder how they manage to be present with each other without complication. Perhaps it's the fact that I can't communicate in Hebrew to create clear boundaries or perhaps I'm missing something complicated in their partnership, an underlying chemistry that is not immediately revealed. Or perhaps I have to find a gay partner with whom I will be able to play and dance pretending we are secret lovers in an old black and white movie, or perhaps one day the true love of my life will get the jitters and join me in this exciting adventure on the dance floor of a basketball court somewhere in the middle east.

Marketing Israel to Itself

At this moment in time, Israel sits between that casual non affected place we all fell in love with in the seventies and a slick stylised future of the new century - hovering somewhere between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Kylie Mons 'locomotive'. Last weeks Yom Ha'atzmaut celebration was a case in point. Podiums designed to look like large blue underpants , a pompous staged military presence, endless formations of predictable Israeli symbols visible only to the camera's eye, and masses of dancers all doing the same thing over and over again to the backdrop of (I concede) some relatively impressive entertainment technology.

I imagine some big Israeli names were called in to produce the event but still it felt staged and flat. Of course in the Tel-Aviv world of design Israel is well and truly up there with the best, as it is in the world of the arts, music and dance, but the rest of the country, is still very much stuck in flared jeans and gaudy fonts.

During the week I attended a small Yom Ha'atzmaut celebration where Children from all the kindergardens in the town gather at the local military courtyard to sing national songs, wave Israeli flags and be indoctrinated through a somewhat dated socialist youth project. Scattered parents hovered close to their children as they all swore emotional allegiance to the State through song and dance. Of course there isn't a dry eye when little Jewish children sing Hatikvah but it's the military and nationalistic overtone that I found somewhat dated. If this country wants to market itself to the next generation, it's going to have to find a better strategy.

I understand why Israeli children need to be indoctrinated, they will all give at least two years of their life to the country in service and it's important that they have a strong sense of National Pride to do so. Still as I watched little mouths yawning away to no less than six official speeches, I couldn't help but feel that these ceremonies are more about the adults reaffirming their allegiance to the state than the children who would be just as easily bought off with a Magen-David shaped chocolate on a stick and a bag of Bambas.

Last week I went with my daughter to the Misrad Haklita, the Absorbtion Centre in Hadera to sign some forms. On the way up to the office, we went in to what looked like a regular pharmacy, though the name of one of the National Health Funds was clearly signed. My daughter needed to buy a packet of tissues. When we finally get to the counter, the woman serving us asked if we were members of Macabbi. What, to buy a tissue? I ask back, astounded. Yes, she replied, you can only buy tissues here if you are a member of Macabbi. My daughter and I burst out laughing; the woman serving us doesn't get the joke.

When we got upstairs I shared my tissue story with the woman at the misrad - who has been nothing short of a Godsend to us. She told us that during Chol Hamoed, across the state, the misrad employ staff to sit in the office all day to answer the phone, even though the office is officially closed. Their sole purpose, for that week is to tell whoever calls that the office is closed. She shrugged her shoulders and explained in a word - "Inertia".

'Inertia' indeed – the country that markets itself on its intelligence is still running on the generators of a dated socialism, reflecting the cumbersome sluggish style of its post hippy era. We will never return to the Zionistic free-style of long days in the Sinai but the conservative style of the eighties and nineties has been replaced by diversification and vitality that must be reflected in all things Israeli not just its hi-tech industry.