Reflection by Jeroen Donckers

Badke(remix)
The resistance of madness against the madness of destruction.

The former company les ballets C de la B had a long history of collaboration with artists from the Palestinian territories. Ten years ago, this led to the dance performance 'Badke', directed by Koen Augustijnen, Hildegard Devuyst and Rosalba Torres Guerrero. Meanwhile, C de la B has been absorbed into laGeste. In 2023, the plan emerged to revive 'Badke'. Without yet realizing that the latest war in Gaza would continue to this day. Now, in 2025, 'Badke(remix)' is on stage. Resolutely in the hands of Palestinian creators, Amir Sabra and Ata Khatab. laGeste unleashes 10 dancers, delivering them to a thundering danse macabre, until blood, life and madness spatter from all eyes. 'Badke', a reverse wordplay on the original Palestinian folk dance Dabke, made for all your weddings and village festivals. 10 Palestinian dancers. At least 10 dancers with a Palestinian passport who in 2025 were able to come to Belgium for rehearsals and performances. A bureaucratic and diplomatic tour de force that preceded this performance. Rehearsals on the West Bank: no longer possible. Dancers from Gaza: unthinkable. You can't get out of there anymore. Which makes Gaza the invisible and unspoken backdrop that everyone looks toward during this dance.
This appears to be a review or description of a contemporary dance performance that addresses the Palestinian experience and the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

Nothing is said, nothing is explained, nothing is accused. Yet this wild dance celebration is surrounded on all sides by the current reality of bombardments, executions and famine in the Palestinian territories; by the displacement of hundreds of thousands from their homes and birth villages; by the aggressive colonial logic of the state of Israel that continues relentlessly with colonization; by the extermination of millions of Jews during World War II; by the shamelessness with which countless surviving Jews after the war were no longer welcome in their former European homes, in their former European countries of origin. By decades of international politics of expulsion, racial hatred and death. By centuries of human enterprise of extermination and mass murder. By a never-ending history of power based on instrumental killing.

How many countless dead lie buried beneath the surface of this earth? Piled in pits, in quarries, in old mines, ravines, jungles, forests, and fields. How many massacres have occurred? How many times has the systematic annihilation of a village, a city, a people taken place? The wrathful God of the Old Testament set the stage with the destruction of all humanity, save for the couples aboard the Ark. Since then, blood has again and again seeped into the soil. After the Spartacus revolt, tens of thousands of slaves were crucified. Roman punitive expeditions like the destruction of Carthage or Judea, with 500,000 deaths. Constantly recurring pogroms. It’s impossible to provide an accurate historical overview. It has never stopped. Not to this day. The Incas were eradicated. Native Americans and Aboriginals decimated. The wealth of every former colonial power rests on looting, abuse, and murder. The death toll in the Belgian Congo is estimated at three million. The Indonesian war for independence cost a hundred thousand lives. Millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Millions murdered under Stalin. Tens of millions starved under Mao. The Rwandan genocide took around a million lives, this time under UN oversight. In Argentina, Peru, Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh… again and again. Every civilization seems built upon a prehistory of radical murder. Sometimes feral and beastly, sometimes disciplined and systematic. Perhaps according to the preferences or impact of some existing or absent central authority.

Meanwhile, the entire world conspires in the greatest murder since the history of humanity: the collective rendering uninhabitable of countless ecosystems, the extermination of tens or hundreds or thousands of animal and plant species, and ultimately threatening the livability of the entire planet. After countless genocides, humanity is engaged in one great steady ecocide. Although we have known for almost 50 years since the Club of Rome report what we are doing and what disaster we are heading toward, we collectively continue calmly but hastily. No time to waste in the fatal direction. The situation is hopeless, and has always been so.

That incessant and unstoppable cocktail of possessiveness, power-thinking and destruction forms such an essential part of human history that it is pointless to assume that this will or can come to an end. Humans are destructive, to the point of absurdity.


The question is simple: what to do in light of this incessant and unstoppable destructive lust?

The task is simple: what to do?

What to do when we can watch the Hamas raid on the music festival on October 7, 2023 over and over again on social media and know that such raids will happen again and again? What to do when we can follow live the systematic massacre in and the deliberate rendering uninhabitable of Gaza and know that it will start over again and again?

What to do when there is no solution?

What to do when nothing helps? That fundamental question was posed by the 20th-century Zen Buddhist Hisamatsu. A question within the tradition of Buddhist koans, questions without logical answers that bring you closer to Enlightenment. Questions to carry with you in life. Questions to answer while living; suddenly; intuitively.

What to do, here and now, when nothing helps?

'Badke(remix)' answers with the lightness of the verb 'to do'. When nothing helps, do!

laGeste unleashes ten dancers. 'Badke(remix)' is a danced answer to the fundamental question.

Fear, powerlessness, hunger, grief, panic, sorrow, meaninglessness, loneliness, desperation, irrationality, madness. These are the words evoked by the systematic destruction currently taking place, and which forms the context for this performance. All ten dancers carry fear within them and transmit this fear, this panic, this irrational madness to the audience. There is no solution, it is all constantly present. The question about the solution is the wrong question. The question about an answer is the wrong question. What are you going to do, when no solution or answer is possible

That is what is danced. The dancing that is no solution and no answer. The dancing in order not 'not to dance'. Nasser Al-Fares' soundtrack is a steadily swelling storm, a storm that will not subside, that whips everything up beyond the limit of physical exhaustion. Until physical exhaustion is no longer a limit. That resolutely and radically embraces the fear, the panic, the irrationality. That takes the knots of irrational panic out of the constriction of head, stomach and heart and centrifuges them in a delirium of living madness. Round and round and round. If you have experienced this performance, for a while there is no longer any possibility of sinking depressively into powerlessness and apathy. Whatever the resistance, whatever the problem, however great the superior force may be, however delirious the destruction is, there is always the possibility to 'do'. It is not a moral duty, it is an evidence. Doing is always a possibility.

Existence is resistance. Existence is continuing to exist. Continuing to exist is resistance. Humans are the constant collision of boundless destruction and resistance. What is destroyed always continues to exist. Perhaps that is precisely what makes destruction inherently delirious. Because nothing that is destroyed remains destroyed. Destruction may triumph for so long. Ultimately it loses. Resistance may prove pointless for so long. Ultimately it cannot be defeated. Because what is oppressed and destroyed always comes back. Through another door. In a new form. But it always comes back.

You can dam or redirect a river. The water always remembers its bed and will always return to it.

You can drain a swamp. The land always remembers the water. Until it returns.

Mao Zedong wanted to destroy all sparrows in China. It became a disaster for the country. The sparrow always came back.

You can take a sleeping pill against insomnia. The fatigue always returns.
The Romans drove the Jews out of Judea. They came back two thousand years later.

Israel can drive all Palestinians from their homes, destroy their houses, uproot their olive trees, make them disappear in camps like sinkholes. Generation after generation they will remember their home. They will keep dreaming of their home. They will keep remembering the return.

You can destroy the earth. The earth will continue to exist.
Humans can do everything. Except exterminate. What humans exterminate always comes back. How many times has humanity solved a problem through massive slaughter? How many times has that actually succeeded?

Existence is constantly remembering. Not only with thoughts, or words, or books or slogans. But with the body. The body that is born from a body that remembers. That passes on the memory.

This memory, this 'remembering' is resistance against the insane destruction that wants to annihilate existence. Remembering is continuing to exist in spite of destruction. Remembering is not a story around a campfire. Remembering is not a diary, not a blog, not a website. Grief is memory. Fear is memory. Powerlessness, hunger, panic, sorrow, meaninglessness, loneliness, desperation, irrationality, madness... everything is memory.

The destructive logic of power constantly creates memory, which cannot be destroyed.

'Badke(remix)' takes up the gauntlet, goes with ten pairs of feet right into the middle of fear and madness, and begins to move, keeps moving, dances, keeps dancing. Continues remembering. Shows the uprising that no one can stop. An uprising of memory, of the body. An uprising without demonstration, without violence, without argument, without accusation. An uprising without revenge. Without reciprocal destruction. An uprising that does not send destruction back the other way again. On the contrary. An uprising of truth, and of dignity. Destruction thought it would put an end to a problem once and for all, but has produced continuous memory. The art is not to convert that memory back into destruction. The art is to let fear be fear, panic be panic, madness be madness. Is that art? Is that 'Badke(remix)'? A memory that surrenders fear and madness to a thundering rhythm, that distills life from it, that distills playfulness from it, that lets spontaneity and creativity drip from it.

Such art that is no answer to the problem. That does not want to and cannot be a solution. Art that remembers and creates life with it, liveliness, joy of play. With still fear, hunger, panic, irrationality and very much madness. Because madness is the continuous memory of insane destruction. And the continuous resistance.

Jeroen Donckers (July 2025)