Public Movement, Performance, Ideology

The Israeli performance group Public Movement is featured in an article, Performing Politics for Germany by Daniel Miller (Frieze Magazine, 13/07/09). Miller describes performances in Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Lodz and Warsaw in Poland. Themes presented involve the Irgun, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and other political themes. Their performance art, which evidently doubles as political commentary, has been challenged and questioned. There was one allegation that the group is a front for Israeli militarism. Its street theater does seem rather dodgy, however you interpret it. Anyway, here's the relevant passage for us:

In choreographing Spring in Warsaw Public Movement included a quasi-Islamic prayer, a flag-planting ritual at the site where noted Jew L.L. Zamenhof invented Esperanto, a mass public kneeling before the Willy Brandt memorial (a third order of representation, as the statue was originally built in honour of the German chancellor after he knelt in front of Nathan Rapoport’s Ghetto Heroes Memorial on his visit to Warsaw in 1970) and a synchronized dance backed by Justice vs. Simian’s ‘We Are Your Friends’ (2007) in front of the memorial itself.