Phil Collins - They Shoot Horses

It all started I suppose with my writing to Jack Persekian. Jack is the director of the Al-Ma’mal Foundation in Jerusalem. But still, I didn’t know whether he’d be interested in my idea to organize, execute and film a disco dance marathon in Ramallah, which would afterwards be exhibited as a real-time video artwork. In fact, I thought he’d hate it. Something so dumb and frivolous which spoke precisely about exhaustion, collapse and heroism but in a palette of Pop Idol colours.

When we think about Palestine it never seems to be in reference to modernity, or culture; in fact, it’s relentlessly positioned as uncivilised. The disco dance marathon would instead be a way of looking at beauty under duress, entertainment in place of routine indignities. Ten days later and I’m standing in a community centre over the road from the local mosque with Iman Hammouri, the director of the Popular Art Centre, holding auditions where I play Beyonce and Joy Division over and over. And the dancers are heart- stoppingly beautiful. They take your breath away - shy and awkward but when they rock, they really flip out.

I choose nine and I filmed two groups over successive days dancing to the same soundtrack, from northern soul to acid house, from Love Hangover to Xanadu, from 10am to 6pm without breaks. Or so I thought. I take the role of cheerleader, DJ, cameraman, bouncer. I’m like a one-man band but with more to do. Have you ever tried to dance for eight hours? It’s a killer. There’s a kind of madness or cabin fever which slowly descends upon a group. It’s insane. In the finished film they do aerobics, they do folk dancing to Gina X. Someone starts dry-retching at Aretha Franklin. They do belly dancing to The Smiths. Later on, they fall asleep to Fame. They’ve almost had it, stumbling about like drunks, bags under their eyes as Irene Cara rattles on in the background. It’s halfway through a Bananarama song in the second hour when we hear the first call to prayer which punctuates the video as we turn the music off and wait until it’s appropriate to put Primal Scream back on.

I’d also not counted on the power cuts. On the second day, the whole of Ramallah goes down. We’re left sitting in a shuttered room with everybody telling me how this is completely normal, and would I like a piece of fruit? Except that I’m getting back on the plane the next day and I know that half the dancers have to get through checkpoints which close at nine. Of course I did have the piece of fruit, and also a silent nervous breakdown. The end of each day had me in tears. The dancers showed such fortitude, resilience, grace and, most importantly, had better, sharper moves than any I’d ever seen. I wanted everyone who saw it to fall in love with them, to admire their perseverance, and to wonder why it should seem odd to us if they knew the words to Althea & Donna’s Uptown Top Ranking. The last track they dance to is quite rightly Olivia Newton John’s Xanadu. For me there really is a heroism to live in a place it’s impossible to leave, to be split from families, imprisoned by a Berlin wall and, maybe worst of all, to be forgotten by a world which refuses to understand you.

Phil Collins (2004)
Text from Artist-in-Residence Archives