After crossing the Red Sea, the Israelites emerged exhausted, disoriented, carrying little, with no clear sense of what lay ahead. In that moment, Miriam took a drum and began to dance. At first alone, and then joined by the other women, she created rhythm where there had been rupture.
On a first reading, Miriam’s dance can be understood as a celebration. But now, in the midst of war, it feels possible that her movement came from somewhere else – not joy but a need for connection.
Faced with uncertainty and loss, Miriam turned to the most immediate tools available to her: her body, her hands, her voice. Through movement, she reoriented herself and those around her.
For the past several months, choreographers Bosmat Nossan and Roni Chadash have been deep in the creation of new works for the Batsheva Ensemble, a milestone moment in each of their careers. Both were entering the final stretch before the premiere of their joint evening when the current war abruptly suspended all plans. A date that had been fixed more than a year in advance dissolved overnight into the unknown.
“I was very stressed by the deadline, the date for the show that was set far in advance. All of a sudden, there is no date. ‘The performance will happen when the war ends,’ is all we know,” Nossan said.
Her piece, Dome, explores the physical implications of living under constant threat. “The work began from a feeling, an everyday sensation of vulnerability, of knowing that everything can end at any second. I experience it as something physical. There is fear, violence, and fragility, but also a strong desire to live now. When the future is unclear, the present becomes more intense. The piece is about this place and how it lives in the body.”
Like Miriam’s drum, this attention to physical sensation becomes a way of locating oneself inside instability, of giving form to something otherwise overwhelming. Alongside the turmoil outside, Nossan’s personal life has also undergone upheaval.
“I think everyone is experiencing this overlap between the public and the private. There is instability in every sphere. I am witnessing the unraveling of the home that is Israel, and in parallel, the unraveling of my own home.”
For over a week, it seemed as though all future plans had disappeared. Then, as restrictions shifted, the dance company returned to the studio, though performances remained indefinitely postponed. Nossan and Chadash found themselves working in an interim space: able to create but without a set deadline.
“At the beginning, I didn’t know how to return to the work,” said Chadash said. “But the moment we did, something clicked. Being back in the studio brings me back to the body. It reminds me who I am, my identity, and of a kind of beauty, not external but internal. It connects.”
As we spoke, her newborn son slept in the next room. During our conversation, she received news that shrapnel had damaged her car. “I’ll deal with that later,” she said, calmly returning to the present moment.
Here, too, the act of moving becomes less about expression and more about anchoring, about holding onto a sense of self when the external world becomes unrecognizable.
For dancers, movement anchors identity in instability
Chadash’s new work, Separations, uses all 19 dancers of the ensemble, the largest group she has worked with to date. In the process, her movement language has expanded toward the philosophical.
“I wanted to engage with the physical language I work with, dismantling the body into parts. From there, the theme of separation emerged: separations within the body and within society. I am interested in the tension between the animal body, the organs, the raw physicality, and the socialized, contained human body.”
Since October 7, this inquiry has taken on a new dimension. “I understood that I am perceived in a certain way. Even if I didn’t define myself as Israeli or Jewish, that is how I am seen from the outside. I realized that I can’t separate Israeliness from my body or from my work.”
If Miriam’s dance marked a moment in which identity was forged through movement, then here, too, the body becomes the site where identity is both imposed and reclaimed.
Now back in the studio, Nossan and Chadash continue to work within uncertainty. Where many might choose to wait until a new premiere date is set, they have chosen to continue, if only for the act itself. “It’s important to keep going,” Chadash said. “The studio balances the noise outside. It allows me to find simplicity, to feel grounded. When I’m dancing, I am temporarily cut off from everything else.”
Nossan reflected that “dance has always been the filter through which I experience life. I don’t know that it’s important, in principle, to keep dancing. But the body continues. There is always movement. And within that movement, I feel there is potential for something to shift.
“Not necessarily hope, just something that exists within survival, and sometimes within resistance. Without it, I feel I have no meaning. Right now, everything is focused on the present moment. There is no future; we are working for the moment itself.”
In this sense, Miriam’s dance is not a distant story but an ongoing practice. Not an act of celebration but of survival. Not a response to certainty but to its absence. In moments when the future disappears, movement remains, not as an answer but as a way to continue.