26/11/2024, Podewil in Berlin-Mitte
With: Ahmad Dakhnous, Johanna Voß. Using methods from Israel-Palestine educational videos.
A cooperation between Access Point Tanz, Offensive Tanz für junges Publikum, Tanz Zeit e.V.
This documentation was compiled by Elena Basteri and Elisa Ricci, with contributions by Agnieszka Habraschka, Ahmad Dakhnous, Johanna Voß, Martina Maria Helmke and anonymous participants.
Even before October 7, 2023, many people felt a great need to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This poses a particular challenge for those involved in dance mediation. In this practice-oriented workshop, participants learned how to talk openly and respectfully with colleagues and students about this highly complex topic.
Led by Ahmad Dakhnous and Johanna Voß, the participants reflected on their own perspectives on the Israel/Palestine conflict and analyzed the discourse in Germany. The starting point was: From which social and historical background are we speaking about Palestine and Israel, and what dynamics shape this discourse? Which symbols, terms and slogans frequently appear in this debate?
The aim of the workshop was to create a space for actors in the dance mediation field who wish to orient themselves within this discourse and who are seeking a human rights-oriented approach with which they feel pedagogically secure.
The workshop aimed to provide confidence in dealing with complex and emotionally-charged discussions as well as offer practical tools in promoting open and respectful dialogue.
The contributions to this documentation by contributors who took part in the workshop in different roles/functions include:
- Agnieszka Habraschka, Access consultant, describes the measures that were implemented to make the workshop a “relaxed event”.
- Ahmad Dakhnous and Johanna Voß, workshop leaders, answer some questions about the experience of this workshop specifically and the knowledge that was imparted.
- Martina Maria Helmke, community dance practitioner, educational speaker and participant of the workshop, as well as another participant who wishes to remain anonymous, offer what they gained from the workshop in a mini-interview and how they can potentially integrate this knowledge into their practice as facilitators.
1. Evaluation “Opening to different perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” as a relaxed event
by Agnieszka Habraschka
The event “Opening to different perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” was implemented as a relaxed event.
The event offered various seating options that were used individually or swapped out/adapted during the event. A room to retreat was available and was actively used. Trauma-sensitive physical exercises were introduced at the beginning of the event and could be repeated during the course of the workshop at the participants’ request. Mood toys and blankets were available in multiple locations. In addition, breaks were deliberately planned to provide sufficient recovery phases. Participants were made aware that they could take their own breaks. Snacks and refreshments were provided.
By clearly communicating the content in advance, we ensured that participants were prepared for potentially heavy content. This is particularly important for emotionally-charged topics so as not to unintentionally overwhelm or retraumatize participants. Overall, it became clear that all aspects of the relaxed event were positively received, and the participants made use of the available resources.
Physical interventions such as mood toys and trauma-sensitive exercises (e.g. tapping or breathing techniques) can play a crucial role in promoting physical and emotional regulation in conflict-laden conversations, as well as in the regulation of the nervous system. They can not only help to reduce individual tension, but also improve the general atmosphere and thus open up the space for productive and respectful discussions. Trauma is stored in the body and yet there is often a negation of the body or feelings when talking about politically upsetting topics. Relaxed events and the introduction of trauma-sensitive exercises and mood toys take this as their starting point and place the body at the center of the discussion. Due to these measures a feeling is created that emotions and physical reactions are not disruptive or undesirable, but rather a natural part of difficult conversations.
Overall, it was clear that all elements of the relaxed event were positively received and used by the participants.
The above-mentioned measures and methods, as well as their positive effects, are discussed in more detail below:
Measures and Methods
- Mood toys offer a calming, repetitive movement that stabilizes the nervous system and provides a sense of security. They help to reduce stress without people having to “react” verbally or visibly.
- Tapping techniques and exercises with crossed arms calm the vagus nerve and activate the body’s parasympathetic mode (“rest mode”), which enables participants to stay present even when confronted with difficult or stressful topics.
- Breathing exercises have a direct effect on the physiological stress response by slowing down the heartbeat, improving the supply of oxygen and restoring a sense of control.
- Collective exercises at the beginning of the workshop and upon request promote solidarity and demonstrate that self-regulation does not have to take place in isolation, but can be embedded in a supportive social framework.
Positive effects
- Interruption of escalations: When people are given the opportunity to reduce stress through simple exercises, the likelihood of an escalation of emotions or aggression is reduced.
- Promoting mindfulness and strengthening empathy and sensitivity: The openness and sensitivity conveyed at relaxed events promote an attitude of mindfulness, care and mutual respect, which in turn reduces pressure and helps to make situations more respectful and less conflictual. Physical exercises that are calming bring people back to the present, making it easier for them to focus on the issues at hand rather than being overwhelmed by previous pain or fears. When emotional tension decreases, people are better able to listen and empathize with other perspectives.
- Reduction of stress and tension: The opportunity to move freely, take breaks or go to a room to retreat reduces the pressure which allows discussions to be more respectful and less conflictual.
- Inclusivity: Relaxed events are explicitly aimed at people with different needs, such as neurodivergent people or people with chronic illnesses, as well as those who have experienced trauma. This means that those who would not normally participate in such discussions due to their often-intense dynamics can also be included.
Many people process complex (political) topics in different ways – be it through movement, asking questions or periods of rest. Relaxed events offer space for diversity without judging it. This allows for a more constructive and diverse dialog on complex topics.
- Awareness of power dynamics: By focusing on accessibility, sensitive communication and flexibility, participants become aware of hierarchical structures that often occur within discussions about political issues.
2. Three questions for Ahmad Dakhnous and Johanna Voß
The very first exercise of the “My Glasses – Your Glasses” workshop combined many central aspects of your work. It played a central, supporting role in the one-day workshop. It was also intended as a tool for the participants to use in their own work contexts. How does the exercise work and what is particularly important to you about it?
We very often open our workshops with the “My Glasses – Your Glasses” exercise, as it enables participants to get to know themselves and others a little better and thus contributes to a favorable and empathetic atmosphere. During the exercise, participants reflect on why they look at Israel and Palestine the way they do. They consider which personal events and experiences have shaped and influenced their perspective on and feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The exercise is divided into three parts:
- Self-reflection: At the beginning, the key question is asked: “What personal experiences and events have shaped my perspective on and feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” The participants are invited to draw a symbolic pair of glasses on a piece of paper and answer the question for themselves in keywords.
- Small working groups (groups of 3-4): In small groups, the participants talk to each other about their “glasses” and get to know the perspectives and experiences of others. The focus is on non-judgmental listening. Together, they consider similarities and differences and what kind of experiences were particularly formative. It is important to emphasize here that each person only shares what they want to share.
- In a third step, everyone comes together and reports on their findings from their groups. This is about evaluating and reflecting on the method. Central questions could therefore be: What was it like for you to think about your own “glasses”, to tell the group about them and to hear about the “glasses” of others? Were there any similarities or differences?
The exercise is particularly suitable as an introduction to the workshop, as it offers the opportunity to reflect on and share different perspectives, even those that may be very dissimilar to one’s own. In this context, it is important to realize that experiences that are associated with strong emotions can significantly shape and change perspectives. Reflecting on this creates a basis for mutual understanding among the participants.
This exercise also helps to distinguish between positioning, (actively taking a stand, potentially reflecting on one’s own position in social circumstances) and positionality (assigning a person to a certain position based on external characteristics).
Important to note during implementation:
- Willingness and the sensitive handling of identities: Willingness must be explicitly emphasized. Participants must not be pressured into sharing personal experiences or aspects of their identity.
- Allowing for emotional reactions, as it is about personal experiences
- Intervening only in the case of discrimination, otherwise enabling an open and judgment-free space.
The workshop was aimed at dance mediators and dance educators, i.e. professionals who work with and mediate through the body. In your experience so far, what role can the body play when pursuing the goal of “opening to different perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” within social discourses in Germany? Can you share your observations with us, including specific examples?
Talking about Palestine and Israel is not easy for many people for a variety of reasons – we also feel this in our workshops. We meet people who are unimaginably worried about their family members or friends who are struggling to survive in the Gaza Strip and people who have felt alienated from local society since October 7th because they are shown neither empathy nor solidarity and anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Semitism are becoming increasingly normalized. However, people who are connected to the crimes of National Socialism through their family or collective biography are also often reluctant to speak out. So there are an incredible number of emotions in the room – anger, fear, sadness, shame, despair and uncertainty. These emotions manifest themselves in our bodies. For example we might freeze up, hold our breath, get a lump in our throat or suddenly feel very hot.
In our educational work, we encourage participants to be aware of their feelings, express them and reflect on them against the backdrop of social dynamics, because emotions are often not as individual as we think, but are shaped by society. We do this, for example, by working with photos of faces, through creative methods or with small physical exercises – although unfortunately we do not have people trained in bodywork in our team – it would be nice to receive further training and incorporate these impulses more strongly in our work.
The fact that emotions (and bodies) are considered within political education is a rather recent development. For a long time, emotions were perceived as disturbing and should be excluded. This also had to do with the widespread idea that the body and mind, emotions and reason were separate spheres. Politics was seen in the sphere of the
spirit. This localization was also a sexist, racist and classist instrument for expelling women, racialized people and workers from the political sphere by labeling them as “too emotional” and “irrational”. But there has been a shift in thinking in recent years and people have come to realize that emotions are indeed political. They influence how we perceive the world, which values we hold and therefore also which political convictions we carry, and the decisions we make. This “emotional turn” has led a new direction in political education in searching for ways in which emotions can be incorporated into learning or how they can be made the explicit subject of political education.
What have you taken from our shared experience of the workshop regarding the field of dance mediation? What role did the small somatic exercises that we introduced and that accompanied us throughout the day play for you?
We learned about the concept of the “Relaxed Event” from you, which was very inspiring for us. The concept is all about making events as barrier-free and inclusive as possible so that neurodivergent people, for example, can also take part without any problems. To this end, Agnieszka offered various seating options, organized a room for us to retreat to and agreed with us in advance that we would plan plenty of long breaks. There were also lots of mood toys in the middle of the room that you could squeeze, knead or jump on to relieve tension. At the beginning of the workshop, Agnieszka showed us three physical exercises that accompanied us throughout the day and were repeated whenever there was tension or heaviness in the room, or we needed to “vent”. It would be very exciting for us to integrate more of these elements into our educational work in the future and to plan and organize our events in a more “relaxed” way.
3. The perspective of two participants
What motivated you to take part in the workshop?
Martina Maria Helmke: I’ve been working with friends for some time now, especially those from the creative and bodywork fields, and have come to the point of recognizing the silence in relation to Israel and Palestine as a verbal one and to understanding the need for other forms of expression and perception to activate…? Yes, to do what actually? To counter or diffuse the pressure of responsibility that I feel as a – German – dance and theater educator. To perhaps also find less hurtful, less rational, possibly more human and emotional paths of encounter and debate. Spaces that are created in community dance or in a therapeutic dance context work, among other things, because of a central message: there is no right and no wrong. This is a premise that, in the face of uncountable deaths and acute suffering is difficult to bear. And I’m not sure myself whether it’s the right approach at the moment. Does it activate or paralyze? What do I need to know about, and which perspectives should I be aware of in order to work through, with, and from my experience in the dance field? And – who is actually giving me this assignment?
The workshop appealed to me due to its specific target group and its explicitly multi-perspectival approach. When I read the call-out I was simply grateful for this opportunity. I was grateful for the opportunity to concretely address a politically acute theme, that within our body-focused, sense-oriented fields, we perhaps did not yet really know how to address, but which, in truth, we were all shaken by and which has us literally screaming for physical-emotional expression. The experience of this war already has an immensely destructive physical and mental impact. How will we, as body- and creative practitioners – sooner or later address it?
Anonymous participant: I participated in the workshop because, on the one hand, I have a personal connection to the conflict between Israel and Palestine and I am seeking out spaces in which I can discuss it beyond my immediate personal context. On the other hand, I am currently particularly interested in exploring and learning about mediation and conflict resolution strategies as well as non-violent forms of communication.
What moved you most during the workshop and made a lasting impression?
Martina Maria Helmke: On the one hand, I was surprised and enthused by the workshop’s framing, namely as a “relaxed workshop”, and some elements directly influenced my own practice in Hamburg – a big thank you for that! The understanding, attention, openness, curiosity and the desire of all of the participants for both confrontation and understanding also impressed me.
My defining keyword for the experience of this workshop is “multi-perspective triangular constellations”. The idea of a triangle through which we leave the bipolarity of perspectives and create space for a third position. Three perspectives that together form a center, create a space that I can look at. I find this idea everywhere – in my notes and in my encounters on site.
The three-way conversation about our (biographical) perspectives on the topic Israel-Palestine was eye-opening and world-opening for me. How the stories behind our attitudes and reactions are so diverse and complex and yet so obvious and understandable! And how it can be bonding to simply be given permission to tell these stories and allow them to stand side by side. Another triangle was that of social perspectives in the German-language discourse on Israel-Palestine: post-national socialist, post-migrant and post-colonial. I also found this very conclusive and I am grateful to the speakers for this analysis. Although I could clearly see the hierarchization in the German political discourse, I did not feel put under pressure to give one or the other more weight. For the time being, it was already enough to see it. I understand the approach of the Trialogues, the talks offered by Shai Hoffmann and his colleagues, as a way of making visible these positions, which do not necessarily contradict each other. I felt invited and challenged to adopt different perspectives in a self-determined way and to derive from this consequences and attitudes – both in connection with and also independent of me personally.
Anonymous participant: After the workshop, I had a moment of critical reflection with the moderators, which I wasn’t able to share with the other participants, and I feel this might be an appropriate space in which to do so. I noticed that some participants (though not the moderators) drew on U.S. American discourse on race to discuss the Palestinian struggle, for example mentioning “Black Lives Matter” and “White Supremacy”. While I understand the intention to draw parallels with discourses that play a big role in how we view and understand the world today in Europe, I believe that conversations around systemic racism are deeply tied to specific historical, cultural, and political contexts. Applying the U.S. framework to entirely different situations can obscure the unique complexities at hand, making it even harder to meaningfully address and unpack the realities we are discussing.
Have you thought about how you could further use and apply the experience and knowledge from the workshop in your mediation work and dance practice?
Martina Maria Helmke : Yes 🙂 I think it would be exciting to physically bring this idea of a multi-perspective triangle into the space, to find out what poles have in common with lines and to emotionally charge an interior space which I can look at from the perspective of all three points. What experiences and biographies, what images and stories that reveal current and old traumas manifest themselves in the respective poles? How do I establish a connection, what does that require of me, how narrow or wide is the path? And to what extent can the interior, as a space for expression of feeling, become a place of encounter? How is anger directed at me seen from one perspective or another? How is that for grief or despair? And how important is it to know from which pole this feeling has just arisen? Do I recognize myself in it? These are the first ideas for an experiment for which I currently lack capacity. For the moment, I would like to continue working in the context of dance experience on the topics of contradiction and empathy as well as with courage and a tolerance for mistakes. This includes healing through encounter and embodiment. After the workshop, I realized once again that I know very little about what the participants of my courses know and think and feel about politically stirring topics. I have not yet dared to “open the floodgates” for fear of not being able to hold the space – perhaps that would be the next step. For the time being, the workshop has at least given me more courage, clarity and honesty with myself and I think that this should in any case be the basis from which to work in this field.
Anonymous participant: One of the most significant frameworks introduced by the workshop leaders was: “You can say the wrong thing.” Within a workshop, I found this to be a crucial tool to foster a space in which different opinions can coexist, and where participants can trust that any difficult or uncomfortable moments will be addressed in a constructive, non-violent way.
Another key takeaway for me was the first exercise we did in small groups, “Meine Brille / deine Brille” (EN: My Glasses / Your Glasses). This exercise provided a structure for self-reflection and encouraged us to examine our own personal histories and how they shaped our current opinions and beliefs. It also created an opportunity to listen to others’ perspectives without judgment.
Biographies
Agnieszka Habraschka is a consultant, dramaturg, and production manager specializing in accessible and anti-ableist cultural work/performance art, Aesthetics of Access, and intersectional anti-discrimination. Until March 2024, Agnieszka worked as a production manager for the network project Making a Difference. Agnieszka is neurodivergent, has non-visible disabilities, and has lived experiences of migration and poverty.
Ahmad Dakhnous is a consultant for political education with a focus on racism and anti-Semitism, flight and migration, processes of arrival and Israel/Palestine. He studied education, economics and political science with a special focus on the conflict in the Middle East. He grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and has lived in Germany since 2016.
Johanna Voß has many years of work experience as an educational consultant for political education with a focus on anti-Semitism, racism and discrimination. She studied Public History, European Studies and attended the Honors Program for Peace and Conflict Studies in Haifa, Israel.
Martina Maria Helmke (37) has been working for several years in Hamburg in the fields of education and project management, as well as a Community Dance Practitioner (AdkB Remscheid) and an inclusive dance educator (Lola-Rogge-Schule, DanceAbility®). Her particular interest lies in the connection between collectivity, empathy and dance. Since June 2024, she has been training to become a dance and movement therapist.