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“The Film Asserts a Clear Political Analysis of Zionism, and Simultaneously Does So While Asserting That No Human Beings are Villains”: Tatyana Tenenbaum on Everything You Have Is Yours
Everything You Have is Yours Tatyana Tenenbaum’s Everything You Have Is Yours centers on NYC-based choreographer Hadar Ahuvia, specifically her coming to terms, through her chosen art form, with the colonialism and cultural appropriation that birthed the Israeli folk dances she was raised on in Hawaii (by way of Israel/Palestine) and which she still deeply loves. It’s a maddening conundrum that likewise could be applied to the Jewish state itself. As Ahuvia reflects towards the end of the intriguing doc, “Palestinians’ lives are at risk. And Israelis’ lives are at risk because Palestinians’ lives are at risk.”
And while much of the film is focused on the acclaimed dancer and educator’s process, including the uncertainty and doubt that goes into creating any form of art, Tenenbaum has smartly chosen to expand her lens to also give voice to those who are quite literally on the other side. As a founder of Freedom Dabka Group, a Palestinian-American performance troupe that, per their mission statement, “use[s] the traditional Dabka dance as a means to connect to their community, their culture and each other,” puts it, “Freedom of movement is to be human.” In this case he’s referring to the situation faced by his own parents: whereas his Jerusalem-born mom can travel anywhere, his West Bank-reared dad can’t even leave the territory. Cut to the Staten Island-based artists performing at a wedding, reveling in their shared ancestral heritage. Not unlike the conflicted Ahuvia, currently in rabbinical school and working on deepening her relationship to diasporic Ashkenazi culture (though no longer dancing Israeli folk dances).
A few weeks before the DCTV premiere of Everything You Have Is Yours (May 2nd), Filmmaker caught up with the director-cinematographer-editor-EP to learn all about turning a decade-long artistic friendship into a feature debut.
Filmmaker: Hadar is surprisingly open to allowing the camera to witness her vulnerability as she struggles through the creative process. She’s also pretty forthright in sharing her family history. And yet we don’t really get a sense of her day-to-day life offstage. Which made me wonder what boundaries she might have set. What exactly was off-limits?
Tenenbaum: Hadar is an incredibly driven artist who of course has other facets of her life, but rehearsing, performing and researching were a huge part of her focus during the years I was filming. It is how she processed her relationship to family, grief, her collaborators, and even to spirituality. Given the complex histories she was confronting, the film could have easily gone down a rabbit hole with historical information or veered more into Hadar’s life outside of dance. But that was not the film I wanted to make.
Hadar and I knew each other long before I ever started filming her. I have my own practice as a choreographer and dancer, and Hadar had actually danced in my work a few years prior. So our preexisting relationship as dancers and former collaborators opened space for immediate intimacy. I admired Hadar’s work, which was amassing a small following in our niche dance community. Like many Jews of our generation, Hadar was asking how we might confront our complicity in systems of oppression while simultaneously navigating intergenerational trauma. It was soon after the election of Trump in 2016 that I asked her if I could film her process for a short profile. White nationalism was on the rise. The world was a vulnerable place and we were all processing it in real time, much as we are today.
The first few times I filmed with Hadar, one on one, it elicited a lot of raw emotion. I was taken aback, because I didn’t know I would encounter that much vulnerability. But there it was. Hadar was incredibly forthcoming with me about her family story offstage, while onstage her work had a much more polished and controlled aesthetic. I was fascinated with these different personas and emotional valences. I wanted to tell a story that centered the body as I witnessed her and held space for her to traverse these different terrains.
While I did not initially set out to make a feature film, the material slowly expanded in scope. Hadar and I had to navigate that transformation together. I was encouraged by my partner and editor Colin Nusbaum to include scenes that would help us understand Hadar’s world outside of her rehearsals. A shabbat dinner, for example, conveyed the increasing importance of her Jewish spiritual life, which she was slowly reclaiming from her family’s more secular Zionism. As the film increasingly excavated Hadar’s personal life, one of the boundaries she asserted was a desire to share the screen with other artists and activists. She acknowledged that her political thinking had not evolved in a vacuum, and wanted to make sure her voice was not the only one being centered.
Filmmaker: Considering this is your debut feature, how do you think your background as a veteran performer and multidisciplinary artist informs your approach to filmmaking?
Tenenbaum: My own performance work explores the material and energetic connections between body and voice; sound and vibration. I have done a lot of improvisational work, so I am very interested in how our physical and energetic bodies transform through the act of being witnessed. Each encounter with my subjects was an exchange that required a lot of deep listening in order for it to unfold honestly — or as honestly as possible with a camera present. The process is actually quite similar to how I approach working with an ensemble of dancers, choreographing the conditions that can best support everyone’s artistry.
While this was my first film, I have worked for years as a dance videographer for live performance. In many cases the first time I see the show is the day that I film it, so I have a lot of experience filming action on the fly. I enjoy making instinctual decisions about how space and movement should be best translated. Some of the most striking images from this film arose from responding improvisationally to the moment. Toward the end of the filmmaking process we needed to fill in gaps and solve storytelling puzzles, so there was more planning and preconceiving. But the heart of this film was shot in an open-ended, exploratory way.
One of the motifs I get asked about a lot are the cut-out archival images staged in different environments (many co-created with my producer Brighid Greene). I wanted to incorporate Hadar’s research materials into this film in a way that was tactile and authentic to me. I started cutting up the archival images and filming myself doing it. It was meditative and it allowed the archive to be re-discovered, freed from its fixed-ness, especially the Israeli state archives that are already so loaded. People read a lot of different things into those images, and the multiplicity of meaning pleases me. This feels like a value I bring in from dance.
Filmmaker: Though this doc began as a short portrait of Hadar, who you’ve known for over a decade, you’ve chosen to likewise spotlight several other dancers: Hadar’s Israeli collaborator Mor Mendel, the Israeli American dancer and educator Ze’eva Cohen, as well as the members of Freedom Dabka Group. So why expand the lens this way, and how did you decide who else to include? How did you even get the Palestinian American dance troupe to agree to participate?
Tenenbaum: With Mor, Hadar’s primary collaborator, a moment transpired early on that keyed me into their different orientations toward Zionism. I invited Mor to film with me alone and a whole world opened up. One of my earliest cinematographic impulses was to let Mor’s voice narrate a striking movement sequence from their rehearsal together. Flipping the typical power dynamic between dancer and choreographer, Mor’s inner world becomes the context with which we read Hadar’s choreography.
Hadar’s work, which is the backbone of the film, grapples with Israeli folk dance’s appropriation of Palestinian dabka and, more broadly, Palestinian dispossession. She also explores the use and/or misuse of Yemenite culture within the Zionist enterprise. The film initially mirrored her creative process, which focused on her first-person reckoning. However, in responding to Hadar’s request that the film become more polyvocal in texture, it felt important to feature voices who could speak directly to these histories. I was also coming to understand that as a filmmaker, I could create a storytelling structure that diverged from her work.
Our creative team wrestled for years with the question of whether and how to invite Palestinian voices into this film. While we recognize and reject the systemic absence of Palestinians narrating their lives from the US media, we were also cognizant of our gaze as non-Arab filmmakers. We strove to avoid pigeonholing Palestinian artists into a secondary role, purely serving the arc of our Israeli-American protagonist.
I had been following Freedom Dabka Group’s work for several years. (They are the subjects of an award-winning short film, Coming Home, directed by Naim Naif and Margot Bowman.) I reached out to FDG director Amer Abdelrasoul, cold-emailing him to introduce myself and the project with a pitch deck that talked about Hadar’s work and some of the other featured artists. He told me that the project sounded interesting and to give him a call. He then invited us to film in the Staten Island studio, outfitted with a bespoke sprung floor, and immediately welcomed us into their rehearsal process.
We continued to take things step by step over the next year and a half, taking our cues from Amer. It was an exploratory process, and one that came together in real time as the current onslaught of violence had already begun in Gaza. Weaving Amer and FDG’s voices into the fabric of the film, together with and distinct from all the other artists, demanded a lot of thoughtfulness and trust, both of which require time. Our team felt a lot of responsibility to hold the line just right. I think we all took a risk together.
I found out about Ze’eva Cohen’s incredible work as a dancer and choreographer through the Jewish Women’s Archive and reached out to her during early Covid. Brighid had also presented a documentary about her at Dance on Camera Festival. Ze’eva knew about Hadar’s work and had seen her performance, so there was a lot to talk about. I was excited to include an artist whose work encompassed a different generation, and was actively reflecting on her legacy and her sense of identity in her 80s. During the course of our filming, her article “Reclaiming My Jewish Yemenite Heritage” was published in The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance.
Filmmaker: I also wondered if Hadar was always onboard with the inclusion of her fraught relationship with her mother and how you and/or Hadar got her mom’s consent to appear in the film. How did you navigate what is clearly an emotional minefield?
Tenenbaum: You are correct to assume this was an incredibly sensitive aspect of the filmmaking and a complex thing to navigate consent around. It is also arguably the driving force of Hadar’s story, and the reason why her turmoil is so relatable. We had a very complicated process around what to include, and it wasn’t always easy. Over the course of the seven years we filmed, a lot shifted, and it was an honor to witness that transformation within Hadar. I think it’s worth noting that some of the most powerful footage was taken by Hadar and her mother themselves on their iPhone. It has a different intimacy because I wasn’t there; it’s honest in that way.
While Hadar’s mom has yet to see the film in its entirety, we were able to sit down and obtain consent for each part of her archive. (A big shout out goes to editor Sasha Perry, who artfully edited footage of Hadar and her mother during the final months of post once we had the green light to include them.) I think she ultimately recognized the trust and admiration that Hadar and I have for one another and chose to uplift that in giving the film her blessing. I am inspired by the way the process unfolded. Sometimes change doesn’t happen within a lifetime. It’s generational.
Filmmaker: What’s been the reactions from all the various participants to the final film? Since the most vocal member of Freedom Dabka Group expresses hostility to even watching Israeli debka, I’m also quite curious to hear how he and the other dancers feel about Hadar as well.
Tenenbaum: I experienced Amer’s tone in that moment as firm or boundaried, rather than “hostile.” Amer and all of the dancers in Freedom Dabka Group were incredible hosts to our film crew. The first time Amer saw Hadar’s work was when he watched a rough cut of the film. He had a lot of respect for her journey and the message of her art. He had some feedback for the film as a whole, which we worked to incorporate through a few pickup shoots and with our final edit.
Throughout the filmmaking process we prioritized real-life relationships over sensationalized moments on camera. Each participant had an opportunity to watch a rough cut and become acquainted with the other stories onscreen. I feel everyone recognized the importance of one another’s roles and histories. There was mutual respect across the board and across difference. The film asserts a clear political analysis of Zionism, and simultaneously does so while asserting that no human beings are villains.
Hadar and several other cast members were able to meet Freedom Dabka Group when we screened the film at their studio last summer. While “getting along” is not the point — the point is ending the structures of oppression that disregard the sanctity of Palestinian life — this small reparative encounter was a tangible reminder of what we are ultimately fighting for. A future where everyone is safe and free, and see each other’s lives as indisposable and inextricably interwoven.
