Performance ticket

PUBLIC MOVEMENT – Emergency Routine

First-Step Training, Work in progress

Ticket for an exclusive performance on the 26 April between 12 am - 5 pm.

Once you have booked a ticket here, we will email you to with a time slot between 12am- 4pm and details of the meeting point.

Please note that the training includes some movement and some physical exercise.

About the Performance:
New modes of security alert morph city centers into potential battle zones. ‘Emergency Routine’, commissioned for Reading International explores new choreographies in the field of counter-terror. It analyses and demonstrates bodily techniques which in recent years are being trained and traded jointly by countries and special units.

The urgency to return to a ‘body to body’ encounter is staged as a meeting between an audience of one and a Public Movement delegate, a counter-terror expert. It will be performed in a building at the University of Reading, exploring and deciphering its architecture and its potential function in an imagined Emergency Scenario.

This exchange of knowledge, raising questions about borders between defense and offense, obedience and protest, order and chaos.

‘Emergency Routine’ activates urban areas as both civic arenas and training grounds, where all bodies play a role, knowingly or not.

About the artist:
Public Movement is a performative research body based in Tel Aviv, which investigates and stages political actions in public spaces. Their current interest in counter-terrorism is an organic progression of the group’s study on state choreographies. For the past 12 years, the group collaborated with state institutions in Israel, Asia, and Europe. Among them are the Special Forces of the Heidelberg Police, Heidelberg Fire Fighters, Special Forces of Vienna Police, The Rescue Unit of the Israeli Army, the Finnish Counter Terror Unit, Veteran Honor Guard of the Taiwanese Army, etc.

Their projects, often a work in endless process that never becomes a finalized “performance”, research how methods which are used in combat training, states of emergency and counter-terrorism, create and form new public choreographies. Their study, collection, and categorization of physical forms of ordering of the subject, a “Choreopolis” of sorts, enables them to produce counter civil forms of demonstration, assembly and resistance through local- specific participatory projects.

The format of a one on one performance was recently developed by the Public Movement as a form of “training” which entails a transference of information, turning the participant into an agent, a carrier of shared corporal knowledge. Through this form of private non- performance, a more critical, intimate knowledge emerges, enabling reciprocal learning between the performance body and the active audience.

“Preparedness proposes a mode of ordering the future that embraces uncertainty and ‘imagines the unimaginable’ rather than ‘taming’ dangerous irruptions through statistical probabilities. The archival knowledge of the past is replaced by the enactment-knowledge of continual rehearsal of the performance to come”. ( Claudia Aradau, radical Philosophy 161, May/June 2010).

The performance forms part of (Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies, a series of workshops, performances, and an exhibition, interrogating the relationship between artistic practices and protest movements via the performative scores of collective bodies and voices. 23 April -2 June 2019.

Public Movement presented its first solo exhibition in Italy in 2018, in Vistamare studio gallery, Milan. In 2017 the group performed Rescue in the European Capital of Culture, Aarhus. In the same year in Artport they premiered The Interview , which was later activated in CCA Tel Aviv and Beit Hagefen, Haifa. In 2016 Public Movement presented Debriefing Session II and Choreographies of Power in the Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 2015 the group’s solo exhibition, National Collection , took place at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and in the same year the book Solution 263: Double Agent , written by Alhena Katsof and Dana Yahalomi, was published by Sternberg Press. Public Movement was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize at the Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev in 2014. The group performed in the Asian Art Biennial, Taipei; Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz; Berlin Biennial; New Museum Triennial, New York; Performa, New York; Gothenburg Biennial, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw; the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon; and the Theater Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin. Public Movement was founded in 2006 by Omer Krieger and Dana Yahalomi. The latter became the sole director in 2011.