Description

Dance of the Dying Roots is a stop motion animation project in which roots are set into motion under pressure. Borrowing from the choreographic language of The Dying Swan, created by Mikhail Fokine for Anna Pavlova and set to Le Cygne from Camille Saint Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals, the work shifts the focus from a dying swan to roots struggling against forced removal.

Rather than representing natural decay, the roots in this work embody tension, strain, and resistance. They bend, quiver, and persist while caught in the act of being uprooted. Their movement does not suggest a quiet ending, but an ongoing struggle to remain attached to the ground. In this way, the work reclaims fragility not as weakness, but as a condition of endurance.
 

Concept and Inspiration

The project draws inspiration from the iconic solo The Dying Swan, but reinterprets its grace and vulnerability through a different body: the root. What was once the final dance of a swan becomes, here, a choreography of pressure and attempted uprooting. The work is informed by documented realities in the West Bank, where olive and fruit trees have been vandalized, cut, and uprooted as part of broader pressures on Palestinian life, land, and livelihood.

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By translating that violence into movement, Dance of the Dying Roots reflects on the unstable space between attachment and loss. It considers what it means to keep holding on while the ground itself is being threatened, and how movement can become both a trace of harm and a form of resistance.