Week 13

Last weekend my classmates came to Tel Aviv for a program organized through Hebrew College.  After an enormous dairy dinner on Thursday night that could make anyone lactose intolerant, they all had this immense thirst for the normal.  Since I don't go out, I called a friend.  He took us to a bar that looked suspiciously like a house.  When I went to the bathroom, bath towels hung on hooks, and toothbrushes and toothpaste were crammed in the little shelf above the sink.  In the back room of the bar stood a glass shower stall.

This week was the second week of the International Contact Improv Festival, and I had signed up for two intensive workshops that took place in Tel Aviv.  But I managed to get a cruel cold over the weekend, so skipped the opening jam of the Festival on Monday, which gave me a full day to sit at home and worry that my roommate was pissed off at me: it seems like since I've come I've broken the refrigerator and the water heating switch...and the previous night the shower attachment stopped working when I went to use it.  I decided she was going to kick me out.  I decided she was avoiding me.

I had to wait until I had made a curry lentil soup, and had food to offer her, to feel comfortable bringing it up.  Turns out, of course, that she hadn't used the shower, and didn't know.  I was glad I broke the news to her, even though her immediate response was to determine that I'm bad luck.  I didn't have much proof to the contrary.

Though my cold raged on, and exploded in all kinds of constellations of pain in my head, I participated in both workshops I had enrolled in at the Contact Improv Festival.  Over the course of the week, I've danced between trees, on top of public sculptures in boulevards, with the wind, sky and grass.  I've learned how to activate my center and move from it, communicate details of the dance through the point of contact I make with my back and another body, and roll people off the ground and onto my shoulders.  One night I waited for the bus back home for forty minutes, and looked up on time to see a shooting star glide silently into darkness above the busy street.

On Wednesday, as we spread our arms in Rabin Square - a pixel in the grid of city sounds and sights - an older lady in a long coat passed by us and lifted her arms to dance with us for a moment.  In the same workshop, we shed layers of clothes that had accumulated on us over the course of the last few wintry days, and danced on the beach with our shadows and with each other.  When I came back home, I had pockets full of sand.