I found out that this was originally a theatrical dance piece called "Highway #1". Could you explain about it? Where there any changes in the choreography?
 
Yes. it is correct. Actually this was our general approach to all of the pieces we made for the "Jerusalem city dance project"- They were all based upon existing choreographies that were re-arranged and adapted to be site-specific,  meeting the chosen location restrictions and the time frame we dedicated to each one.
 
 
What changed the most in what audiences receive from the piece when it was made into a film?
 
It is two different things to see a dance piece on stage and to watch a video of that piece taking place in an outdoor public space. There is an extra layer of visual stimulation, atmosphere and storytelling that exists in the video and does not exist in theater. On the other hand a live dance piece has its own impact.
 
 
I believe the location is somewhere in Jerusalem. Can you tell us where in Jerusalem this is and why you chose that place?
 
Actually, it is at the very center of Jerusalem city, near Jaffa road. we chose that location because we wanted to try and catch some of the mixed realities that this city holds- the religious and the secular, the artistic and the casual activities, the spiritual and the commercial, etc. All of them co-existing side by side in this city and especially this area.
 
 
It's impressive to see the dancers dancing while people watch and cars pass by. How much did you control the surroundings when it was shot? Were there any re-shots necessary?
 
This is exactly what we were aiming for- bringing a dance piece, usually only seen in theater by people who can afford it, out to the streets to a public space, setting it free and giving it to everybody who happens to be there. As a general rule for this project we decided not to control or intervene with whatever happens in the street when we shoot, so to give a place for chance to play and contribute its share to the video piece. We did take several takes in which we just experimented with different choreography of the camera, which we tried to keep as almost one-shot, in relation to the choreography of the dance. and picked out the one we liked most in the editing stage.

LIOR HAR-LEV
Film maker, artist
 
Israeli born film maker and artist, graduate of WIZO Canada academy of design, Haifa, Israel.
With more than 20 years of experience as a film maker and multidisciplinary artist, Lior Har-Lev works range between the commercial and the experimental, from mainstream to cutting edge alternative. Lior’s multiple creative talents and skills along with his natural curiosity led him to explore and create in many different genres and formats including: a full-length feature film, shorts, commercials, music videos, video dance and art, and VR experiences.
As an artist, working with video, digital media, installations and mixed media, his works shifts between narrative and symbolic, bringing life to imaginative worlds and alternate realities.
 
www.liorharlev.com
 

The location seems to be an old building. Was this place a convent as the title suggests? Please tell us about the location.
 
It was selected at IV Creative Meeting at Magalia to create "The silence project" like director, near Madrid,  close to the residential area  an old castle, it was this Convent under construction, very beautiful, I decided to make a short Videoart there with the same team and we made "El Convento"
The Silence Project is a conversation about what is silence between dance, music and video with interactive live software 
https://ciabatafurai.wordpress.com/repertorio/el-silencio-proyect/
 
 
The place looks very old, but the three characters in the film seem to be dressed in modern clothing and don't look like monks or nuns at all. Who are they?
 
 
We imagine how it is like to live in that place in the present, and action there and how to go out from there, I saw the light coming in through the window, putting light on the dark space, so I danced receiving this light on my body.
 
 
The double-layered images were impressive and the effect seemed like a dance or choreography itself. Why did you use this method?
 
At the beginning, we create this Videoart to be projected from 1 projector giving a circle vision turning on itself, so the image is dancing also.
 
 
Electronic music is also a unique element of this film. Please tell us about the music.
 
The musician was there also creating live music, taking the feeling and the atmosphere of the place like Sound Space. It is very important that video and music also are one element more at interaction with dancers.

ROCÍO F. FRAILE
 
Dancer, choreographer, Visual artist,   specialist at Japanese Arts (Sumie, Kamishibai, Kokedama)
Director of Cía. Bàtáfurai dance and Haru Project: Dance & Media Ibiza
 
She studied Video edition. Degree in Psychology and Master in Dance Therapy.
She began studying  Clásic Ballet at the age of 4 and was part of the Spanish Classic company Al-Andalus for 9 years.Dancer and assistant director of  Contemporary Dance companies from 20 years old.
At the age of 25 he began his training in Butô and Body Weather Contemporary Dance in Barcelona, Madrid, Germany, Thailand, Portugal and Japan. Trained in traditional Japanese dances Nihon buyô, Bon o dori and Kamigata-mai from the Edo period.

CÍA. BÀTÁFURAI DANCE
Company created in 2005 in Barcelona by Rocío F. Fraile. It explores and reveals through the language of dance the complexity of the human being, looking for the way to integrate body and mind, from a subtle and suggestive language.
Hybride between Butô dance and Body Weather Company resident in Ibiza, Balearic Islands since 2007.
https://ciabatafurai.wordpress.com/

There are many works that layer the city and the countryside, but there seemed to be nothing strangely similar to this one. Did you have any pieces that you had in mind when creating this film? Or are there any films or works that you think are similar to this film?
 
Your question is very flattering, thank you. What I mostly had in mind creating this movie was actually a piece of life, as it was very much rooted in my experience of a countryside girl migrating to a big city. Works that might have indirectly inspired that film are numerous, but years after I still have in mind Jacques Tati's movies and Blow Up tennis pantomime scene (Antonioni) as kind of anchors. The principle of depriving actions of their context and to place them is an unfitting frame permits to open a liberating absurdity.
 
 
Even though it's mainly located in the countryside, I felt this was a film that expressed the city. What kind of place is a city for you? Do you have any specific city in mind as a model?
 
The specific city I experienced for almost 20 years after having spent my childhood in Noroy-le-Bourg (right in the eastern armpit of France) is Paris. Being embedded in such flows of people was very shocking for me. I was coming from a place where there were 17 inhabitants per square kilometer, and many more wild bores and caws, and suddenly there were more people living in my building than in my whole village. City is for me a place of continuous flow, a perpetual boiling matter where people are particles bubbling and frictionning each other. This saturation nourishes for me a kind of ambiguous madness in big cities, which is both wonderful and terrible.
 
 
On the other hand, what kind of place is the countryside for you? Do you have memories or attachments to the countryside?
 
For me, countryside is the negative (in photographic terms) of a city. You get and miss the exact opposites in one or the other. Countryside probably offers a more direct relationship to other beings (wind, sky, vegetals, animals....), less possibilities to gather with people who might have the same obsessions, which corollary permits you to meet people who have very different lives and points of views than yours, a social life wich needs a very different commitment.
I have memories linked to the countryside as I grew up in a small village in the forest, and obviously have strong attachments to it as I moved back to the countryside after almost 20 years in Paris. (I leave now since 2018 in Le Viseney, Jura, 8 km from Poligny, world capital of Comté cheese ;).
 
 
About the performers. Are they dancers? How did you find them?
 
Performers were partly voluntary dancers, partly casual dancers, but all of them were friends ! I found them in my life, which is always the way I find partners to work with. If you would have asked the same question about the technical team, you would have gotten the same answer.

CÉLINE LARRÈRE / FRANCE
Born in Vesoul (eastern armpit of France) 9 months after François Mitterrand’s election, Céline is an improviser and choreographer. She cultivates moving objects, dancing noises, putrefying texts, perishable choreographies, and unreasonable sustainable development performances through various media – body, voice, installation, photography, writing, cooking, in solo or with other people, in different sites and contexts. After having emigrated in Paris for almost 2 decades, she now lives in Jura, 10,3 km away from Comté cheese world’s capital.
Over the past few years she has been performing in various French, Balkan and other European festivals and collaborated with artists from performance, theater, audiovisual, music and dance fields. She is part of Les Moric(h)ettes (improvised performance collective with Emmanuel Matte and Eve Petermann), Jevtovic & Larrerovic (duet with Jana Jevotvic, Canadian-Serbian choreographer), and the worst halves of Average Bastards (duet with the Norwegian musician John Hegre) and Cheval Chamane (duet with the French artist Anne Vaudrey).
She is currently developing GRAINS, a series of encounters and performances at farmers’ places, which will also lead to a series of short films entitled IVRAIES directed by Diane Sorin.

Please tell us about you, and what kind of pieces you have made in the past.
 
Michele Manzini : I create figures.Figures are an attempt at making a form and which I contrast with the fascination of images which, even though laden with truth, shine and then vanish without becoming knowledge.
My figures contain polemos in themselves, in the sense that they contain in themselves instability, conflict and otherness without dissolving or resolving it.The figure is the process of "another thought" with respect to that of classical philosophy, a thought that passes through literary "images" and concepts and that holds together two "half truths": the greatest abstraction of the concepts and the great strength of myths, unreasoning, analogies, and images.
As Musil has said, the figure dwells between these two worlds.
 
 
I found out that Palladio, is an Italian architect of the 16th century. Is the architecture in the film, one of his works? Why did you choose this location?
 
Michele Manzini : The architecture in the film is that of Villa Pojana, a design by Andrea Palladio dating from 1546.
Palladio constructed those spaces by following an ideal model of beauty that foresaw the use of harmonious relationships completely based on calculations, mathematics, and Euclidian geometry. In this model there is no space for chance, error, or for a knowledge of reality arrived at through the body or the passions. It was for this reason that I was extremely interested in undertaking a work in those places in search of a definition of images, gestures, and sequences that might hold within them a conflict with this architecture, without explaining or resolving it.
 
 
Please tell us the meaning of the title. What exactly are ‘snags’?
 
Michele Manzini : A snag is one of the many forms of error, and error is one of the many ways in which we can experience knowledge. Since antiquity a subject who is knowledgeable is a subject who has no body, who has renounced the body and thus keeps his distance from the errors that, as Plato said, are caused by the "barbaric slush" of our desires, passions, and needs. According to me this has been an insuperable problem in the history of Western thought which has always tried to deal with the same problem: how to be freed from the body and the experience of the body.
 
 
Whole of the film had the impression of being beautifully geometrical, even the dancers’ and their moves. How did you direct the human bodies and the choreography in this piece?
 
Michele Manzini : In elaborating my work the text is a basic element. Before arriving at a completed work I need to face up to writing, and this is both a means of analysis but also of an inner and intellectual clarification. I have always devoted myself to theoretical writings in a humble way and, perhaps, with an approach that is very different from the usual one. I have always considered them as the scaffolding that we use for construction but which afterwards it is convenient to remove. As far as I am concerned, what is destined to remain is not the theory but the work. The judgment that theoretical writing aims for, at least in art, concerns this ability to bear fruit: its fertility rather than its truth. And this work is no exception. I shared the texts of the project with all those who have collaborated with me, in particular with the performers with whom I talked a great deal about various themes. There were very many meetings before beginning the research into gestures. I can say that together we found a slender thread which we could follow.
 
 
When you create your works, are there any policies you have on filming locations and how to handle them?
 
Michele Manzini : My works are almost always constructed on the relationship between space and bodies or objects: on what that relationship can tell me. For this reason, my choice of spaces is never random, but chosen with great attention on the basis of what I am looking for and on the themes I want to work on.

Michele Manzini (Italy, 1967)
I create figures.
The figure is an attempt at form that compares the fascination of images, which even if filled with truth shimmer and then vanish without changing into knowledge.  The figure is the process itself of “another thought,” with respect to that of classical philosophy, of a thought which moves through literary “images” and concepts and holds together the two “half-truths”: the maximum abstraction of the concept and the great power of that which is myth, reason, analogy and image. My figures contain within themselves the conflict, in the sense that they assume within themselves the instability and the otherness without dissolving it, without resolving it.
This knowledge leaves over the charge of these unresolved tensions. Its horizon is one populated by many, by infinite possible forms, open, as destiny was open to the tragic hero before the “many forms which the divine assumes” that are the terrible and stupendous richness that unfolds itself in front of men of modernity.
 

Please tell us about yourself, and what kind of pieces you have made in the past.
 
Rike Flämig : I usually create site specific works and dance performances for theatres and festivals. In Spring 2016 we were invited to hold a collaborative exhibition where we showed photographs and a video installation on the topic of „LAND“ - actually also relating to the realities in Palestine as well as to the former Border within Germany. So for me it´s always about creating images with the body - be it on stage, in a short film or a video installation, often using public space to relate to political context.
 
Felipe Frozza : My work navigates between documentary film, video art and photography. I like to collaborate with dancers, performance artists, musicians and sound artists because of the expertise they have with non verbal communication. I prefer to depart from real existing circumstances rather than trying to recreate them in a studio. In reality everything is given: light, sound, location. You just need to add or extract something here and there and you´re ready to shoot. When you´re including reality in your work you have to develop a good a sense of observation, but also quick decision and spontaneous reactions. That´s why Rike and I can dialogue well while working together. We have a similar approach. Our political interests are also running parallel and, while in the editing room, we are both also fascinated by the different possibilities of telling a story that comes from such “unexpected” footage.
 
 
The film is located in Palestine. To be honest, although we know about Palestine and its conflict with Israel, it is difficult to consider it as a close matter to us living in Japan. Is that also the case in Germany? What were your motives to film a movie in Palestine?
 
Rike Flämig : As we both live in Berlin we often find traces that remind us our city was once separated by a wall which was impossible to cross. I was born in East Germany and the wall was a given reality for me. It was a strong experience to see it fall. Therefore I´m also interested in the walls which are still existing nowadays and in the contexts where they are embedded.
 
Felipe Frozza : From the perspective of a Brazilian who migrated to Germany eight years ago, I see it somehow as a close matter. Since the beginning of my time here I have been very impressed with the engagement that the German society discusses its responsibility for the Second World War and the Shoa (Holocaust). For me there´s a link between that and the way some people here passionately argue about the political developments in Israel and Palestine. As for the reason that motivated me to film in Palestine: in the two trips I had done to the region before the shooting I realized how complex and complicated the whole situation is. It has also been extensively documented by all sorts of media outlets from around the world. Being with Rike there opened a new perspective for me on how to touch the matter. Through dance. And that´s when I convinced myself it was worth doing something about the topic.
 
  
Moves by the dancer seems to be quite abstract, rather than gesture-like or explanatory. How was it choreographed?
 
Rike Flämig : The movements are completely improvised, created from impulses taken from the space, sounds and visuals found on the location. The texture of the marble pieces inspired my feet to move in a certain way. Of course, being in front of a wall that cannot be crossed was triggering very specific sensations and movements. But also simple things like just observing a lizard and how he moved along the wall inspired the creation.
 
 
Before actually going to Palestine for the filming, how detailed was the blueprint? Did you have specific locations in mind?
 
Rike Flämig + Felipe Frozza :When we went to Palestine, we knew we wanted to shoot near the wall as it our trip took place in 2014  which marked the jubilee of 25 years after the fall of the wall in Germany. We were also interested in getting to know more about life in Palestine under the Israeli occupation. We stayed at some friends house in Hebron, a city that has a wall inside itself and where the conflict is visible at every corner. The wall was right at the end of the street where we were living, it was our close neighbour. What looked so aggressive at the beginning ended up becoming part of our daily way home and that´s how we got confident to film in front of it. The second piece of wall that you see in “Disruptions” is at the Aida Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. It´s a much bigger wall. It actually divides Israel from the West Bank. Walking alongside the wall we discovered the spot with the leftovers of a marble factory. From there one could see very clearly how far the wall reaches. So it was clear to us again, that that was the perfect place for the shooting.
 
 
Were the situation which the dancer is seen by the soldier and where the children shows off a rat, intentional? If not, why did you include the cuts in the final print?
 
Rike Flämig + Felipe Frozza : As we chose a spot full of conflict on purpose we knew things like this could happen. Nevertheless we were surprised how short time was left for us to film and how soon the disruptions appeared. It also put us in quite extreme situations and brought us to the limit of knowing how to handle it. We watched the entire footage and soon it became clear that the soldier and the kids with the rat had to be part of it. For us this real life incidents tell a lot about the density of daily life in Palestine and give much more insight into those realities than we could have shared with a made up story or a „beautiful dance video.“
 
 
In the previous interview, you mentioned Palestine now and Berlin in the past experienced similar disruption. Nowadays, the social situation has changed dramatically due to the lockdown and self-quarantine caused by the corona crisis. Do you think that what is happening around the world is the disruption that you tried to capture in this film? Or is it something totaly different? 
 
Rike Flämig: That’s an interesting question. The Corona Crisis is definitely a disruption to the lives we knew before - and a challenge to find new solutions & to invent new ways of being with each other. The Virus itself brings a very different disruption than the context of a dictatorship or an occupation. Nevertheless It struck me to see in an interview of a young man from Bethlehem after the city experienced a Corona related Lock Down. He said something like: "This is normal for us. We are used to this - that from one moment to another we are locked down and then have to deal & to live on with it. Usually there is Lock Down because of the Occupation - now there is a Lock Down because of a Virus." So this made me wonder, if people in the West Bank might be more „trained“ in dealing with harsh decisions that are taken about the context of their lives. This also makes me aware, that the reduction of our Basic Rights of Citizens - no matter in what country and - even because of a Virus - should only be used very short term and very limited - as our Democratic Rights as Citizens are something we fought for and which need urgently to continue healthy and resilient lives.

Felipe Frozza
フェリペ・フローズはベルリン在住、ブラジル人の映像作家。彼は映画や舞台で使われるドキュメンタリーやフィクション作品を製作している。ドキュメンタリーとフィクションの境の領域で活躍する彼は、現実を出発点としながら最後には超現実や不合理に至る物語を描く。サンパウロで国際関係学を修め、現在はベルリンで映画のためにカメラを学ぶ。ヨーロッパ、南アメリカや中東のフェスティバルで作品を発表。
 
 
Rike Flämig
リケ・フレーミッヒはベルリン在住、ポスト共産主義のパフォーマー、振付家。身体を抵抗の道具にパフォーマンスアートとコンテンポラリーダンスの間を行き来している。ドキュメンタリーシアターと公共の場や劇場や映像を使ったサイトスペシフィックな作品を自ら企画している。ヒルデスハイムでパフォーマンスアートを、アムステルダムでコンテンポラリーダンスを学んだ後、ドイツ、東欧、中東で作品を発表。