ONE THING

Who are we permitted to be one with? To feel for and suffer with? Shared affect is a well-regulated commodity these days. Four axes of separation and unity guided a series of meditations I shared with my audience through a collage of texts, choreographed movements, and constellations of ready-made and found objects. The first axis, the most pressing: the divide between myself, my Israeli audience, and the Palestinian—constantly othered and thus barred from the possibility of co-suffering. Enmeshed within this horizontal line, one inevitably encounters the otherness of the transcendent, ever present in absence and absent in presence throughout in Jerusalem, the space me and my audience shared. Pushing the boundaries of affection further, I explored cyborgic interactions between myself and my bicycles (between us and our machines), and between myself and my late grandmother's hat (between us and our tools, masks, relics). Finally, the almost clichéd, much-derided fourth wall—that membrane between performer and audience, between me and "them." Is there something common to how unity and separation are policed across these realms? Can we marshal resources from one axis to challenge the deadly effects in another? For me, here and now in Jerusalem—suspended between the River Jordan and the concrete killing fields of Gaza—rendering myself porous to others becomes an ethical urgency pressing enough to question, even if futilely, the compartmentalization of identity and care we accept as given.