Badke(remix) through the eyes of Alain Platel
Alain Platel attended a rehearsal of Badke(remix) on March 18th of this year at Studio laGeste, just seven days after the 15-member group was finally able to start working in full, following visa issues.
He was blown away and felt compelled to bear witness to it.
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INDIGNEZ-VOUS!
(Stéphane Hessel)
It is nearly impossible to capture a massive conflict like the one in Israel and the Occupied Territories in a performance. Far too easily, one slips into pamphleteering statements, polarizing imagery, or finger-pointing.
Badke(remix) by laGeste does something different. It is a dance performance that doesn't shout, doesn't make a political statement, and doesn't wave flags (or burn them…), but it is a performance that leaves you with sweaty palms and the compelling thought: I must and I can do something!
When you go to Badke(remix), you know you're watching a group of Palestinian dancers. On stage, there are only the performers, a small water fountain, and a laundry basket with towels. That, together with the music, the lighting, and the exuberant, exhausting dance, in which collective moments alternate at breakneck speed with solos, duets, and trios, is enough to make you feel the full tragedy of the situation (as the conflict there is often called). Vibrating bodies that scream through dance on behalf of the millions oppressed and the countless wounded and dead. It is rare for dance to evoke such intense feelings of hope and powerlessness in the audience that not only alternate rapidly but also seem to stumble over each other in their urgency.
BADKE is a performance created in 2013. After more than ten years of regular travels to the Occupied Territories to explore how artistic collaborations with Palestinian artists could be established, les ballets C de la B decided, together with Hildegard De Vuyst, Koen Augustijnen, and Rosalba Torres Guerrero, to create a performance with and by Palestinian dancers (with KVS and the Qattan Foundation). The starting point was the traditional Palestinian dance dabke. This is a stirring, inviting, irresistible group dance that radiates vitality and togetherness. In today’s context, it can be seen as a form of rebellion. WE ARE ALIVE!!!
This season, laGeste scheduled a remake of BADKE, entirely in the hands of a Palestinian group of artists and directed by Ata Khatab and Amir Sabra. Khatab was issued a travel ban by the Israeli government and could therefore only co-direct via Zoom. This is how Badke(remix) came into being.
In Badke(remix), the common ground is created by a live recording of a commercial version of the traditional dabke music, very popular at wedding parties and in mini-buses. For just over an hour, we watch a group of irresistibly passionate men and women dance their souls out. As if they would gladly evaporate afterwards.
The performance personally takes me back to the first time I visited the Occupied Territories in 2001. Things were extremely tense then. I remember wondering how it was even possible to ‘make dance’ there, in such circumstances. The answer I got was: “Art is the only thing that still gives us hope.”
During that first stay, there were two deadly bomb attacks in Jerusalem. As a result, a permanent curfew was imposed in the Occupied Territories, which meant people couldn’t make it to rehearsals or couldn’t get home afterward. But the urgency to keep rehearsing was so strong that they started working in hotels, so the dancers wouldn’t have to risk their lives getting home in the evenings.
In Badke(remix), the rhythm of the music slips into your own heartbeat, the sudden silences are deafeningly loud, and when the lights go out, I relive the moment after the attacks in Jerusalem when the entire West Bank was sealed off. We were evacuated from Ramallah by the Belgian ambassador because it had become clear the Israeli army would enter the city to carry out reprisals. We suddenly had to leave behind our newly made friends in Ramallah.
When the dancers slowly raise their hands into the air, tears well up in my eyes, and I relive the moment in 2001 when I was stopped for the first time at the Qalandia checkpoint by two tanks and a few very young Israeli soldiers, boys with acne and heavily made-up girls with long, flowing hair. In the blazing sun, sheltered themselves by a colorful parasol, they were holding up a line of hundreds of men, women, and children, deciding among themselves who could pass and when.
Although there are no literal references to the situation in the performance, it is fully present and palpable in Badke(remix). You don’t need to have been there yourself to imagine what it’s like. We are already more than saturated with images through (social) media. Implicitly, the performance invites the audience to do something with that afterwards. That art has this potential is a hopeful thought.
Because I am deeply ashamed that the Flemish artistic community, which prides itself so loudly on its tremendous social engagement, lacks the guts to take a clear and collective stance, for example, by uncompromisingly supporting the boycott.
Along with many others, I believe that a widely supported boycott can be effective, and for more than twenty (!) years I’ve been trying to convince colleagues of that. If people no longer want to use South Africa as an example, then look at the recent Tesla effect following Musk’s disgusting appearance in Trump-land.
On the website of the boycott movement BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) — www.bdsmovement.net — you’ll find a list of products and organizations we commonly encounter in daily life (such as Carrefour, Starbucks, McDonald’s… to name just a few) that can easily be avoided or replaced. But also as a community, the artistic community, we can collectively, clearly, and loudly endorse the boycott movement in a radical way.
You do not become a member of BDS, it is a broad, global, nonviolent citizens’ movement, composed largely of artists and academics, which you can simply take part in. In addition to calling for a boycott of Israeli products, the movement also encourages avoiding Israel as a (travel) destination and refraining from collaborating with individuals and organizations that are supported by the Israeli regime.
As citizens, we are obliged to keep putting pressure on our politicians. They must speak out, loudly and clearly, on the international stage. The fact that our Prime Minister, De Wever, shamelessly declared that he would ignore the ICJ ruling to arrest war criminal Netanyahu if he came to Belgium, was nauseating — and, in my view, criminal. That he was hardly contradicted in this at first was deeply disturbing.
But by now, it has become impossible for the international community to keep looking the other way. We can follow, live and uncensored, the criminal and genocidal course of the Israeli regime. Since October 7, it has been openly communicating its true intention: to expel or eliminate all Palestinians from the country and annex the entire West Bank, Gaza and probably parts of Lebanon and Syria. Day by day, it becomes more apparent that this plan is being put into action. Together with many others, I have been warning about this scenario for a quarter of a century. Even if it feels like there's nothing we can do as individuals, abandoning the millions of victims would be an act of cowardice. Badke(remix) may, in a surprising way, give that extra push to move us toward action.
Alain Platel - May 2025
Badke(remix) premiere on 11 June 2025 at the KVS (Brussels).
Here more information regarding the tour.