Continuing Not to Die – Choreographed and Performed – Michal Shahak

Dance Performance at Bombyx cosponsored by Beit Ahavah

“Continuing Not to Die” is a piece that was created in 2024.

At the beginning of the war, something strange happened to me. My body, which I study, probe, and investigate as a source of self-understanding and creative inspiration, seemed to vanish and go silent. I didn’t want to continue to move. Something I was born with, went into exile. I had no choice but to accept this exile from my embodied self, which was foisted on me as an undeniable fact. I had to continue living with that. In the darkness of exile from embodied selfhood, difficult things happened in my body. It was as if something was taken and was gone. Inside this absence, this piece started to percolate.

Having no access to my body as a source from which to mine material, inspiration arose from texts, poems, and images. It was a different process

of creating. From a kind of bodily exile, something was distilled and choreographed.

This work deals with an attempt to meet the feelings that have evolved since the onslaught of the last war. For many Israelis, Israel’s situation

today is one of crumbling common denominators, values, ways of life, and connective tissues. The preoccupation with transitioning from living to existing, and the questions it raises, created a desire to give this feeling the right to exist — a dignified dying.

The piece refers to and dialogues with the legal rights of the dying. Original music composed by Maya Belsitzman. Artistic advice by Ayelet Ulman.

Michal Shahak, MA, DMT, is an Israeli Senior Somatic Experiencing® (SE) Practitioner and a faculty member for the School for Body-Mind Centering® (BMC). Holding degrees in Dance and Movement Education (BA) and Dance-Movement Therapy (MA), Michal brings thirty years of global teaching and clinical experience to the fields of somatic movement and trauma recovery. She taught in BMC training programs across Europe, Brazil, and the US, and

maintains a private clinical practice in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv integrating BMC, SE, Dance-Movement Therapy, and somatic practices.