hakahaLahakah was born in the middle of the night in the ZooMUSEum. It was during the first lockdown. Like most, we were holed up in our houses: unable to become an audience (hakahal) with our physical bodies, we decided to BeCompany (lahakah) in spirit. We invited theater icons David Maayan & Smadar Yaaron to be our teachers. After all, we always seek the counsel of our sages when ceremony becomes necessary for the survival of our art. First, we took the time to simply be together, as artists using a new format and existing in an unfamiliar reality; while our cyborg-like loneliness is both sentient and digitized into something that can be consumed by an entertained audience. And then we realized: We are the company (lahakah), and we are its audience (hakahal)! We are the hakahaLahakah! In this way, at long last, we can be a self-sufficient MUSEum.

Values for this Millennium. We knew it right from the start, just like love at first sight. Together, we dived into a space that was both familiar and ancient, inter-generational and eternal; a space of collaborative artistic research. We investigated the art of the ongoing experience; we insisted on the welfare of our being, we thought about "objective art" and creation of reality, we danced sacred dances, and we talked at length about “the Beginning” and about family. The vision was clear and everything was powerful. No matter what, we will take the form of a dance festival.

We came out of the first lockdown. We were already assembled and eager to dance the journey of the Muses, despite the isolation imperative. Our bodies trembled with anticipation of the first meeting with the audience, who is now (the) hakahaLahakah itself. We found shelter in an exotic greenhouse, slated for demolition, in a garden in Tel Aviv. “See through me”, it whispers, and we answered her call unhesitatingly. Equipped with ancient values, the hakahaLahakah attended to a ritual of grief within the boundaries of the greenhouse. To complete the task, we were assisted by a young greenhouse specialist, cinema artist Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, who helped us reconnect with our romantic and ironic nature. Tapping into the zeitgeist, the dance ritual will pay a dreamy visit to the cinema studio.

We continued onward to a residency in Avital Geva’s Greenhouse in Kibbutz Ein Shemer, the most ready-made-in-Israel place in the history of art. Geva’s Greenhouse isn’t trying to duplicate the world, but rather to shape it. Its desperate, avant-garde gesture helped us deal with our inability to control the climate and the theater of the Anthropocene. In fact, these singular times have opened up a portal through which we sense the transformation that lies within our powerlessness. We are reminded of the paradigm of extinction as we fall into the happiness of existing in a greenhouse whose days are numbered, a greenhouse that governs our utopian fantasy about art. Thus, this Green MUSEum, cultivates our movement toward a multiplicity of experiences – experiences of the crises of nature, art, and the place we call Israel.

The times are strange and defy chronological perception, and we go up the hill of Al-Shaykh Muwannis. Our angst-ridden bodies, thrown into the capsule, unable to deny the constituting authority of the metaphor of nature – hoorah, a new patron! And yet, we remember that nature is only a metaphor, sometimes an illness, sometimes a god, sometimes a greenhouse. In the Nature MUSEum hakahaLahakah begins the long climb back to culture, to meet what remains of it. There we try to exist as avatars in the cautionary tale of the natural history of man. Our pilgrimage, which must atone for our unique position as artists-of-the-body, those who are almost extinct but at least who will not allow themselves to be captured.

The pack packed a pact to curate survival, to protect it, to celebrate its sadness. Survival and beauty are once again good friends. Further, Further, surrounded by stuffed animals and guided by instructions for saving the ocean, we crawl after Zelma, our mythological guide in the various museums of natural disasters. We persist in our desire to be micro-sculptures and generate telepathic ceremonies for our impending transformation. Now, culture’s guilt regarding its natural ruthlessness is a compass for orienteering in our new habitat. We performed a school of choreography as we danced the reality of becoming a company. We devoted ourselves to investigating the economy of creation, as each one of us gave his heart over as a companion to our mutual fragility.

It’s the second lockdown, and fear and suppression rule the streets. hakahaLahakah is armed with the pact it made with the melancholy of human nature. The art museum is closed and the belief in art is lost among the living, who, in their bourgeoisie manner, conflate culture and art. hakahaLahakah, on the other hand, already feels the accumulation of the natural power of being a MUSEum in its own right, but is still desperate to once again touch the delicacy of the format of the Art MUSEum. And there, waiting for hakahaLahakah, is Michal Helfman’s exhibition at the municipal museum, which opened in order to be closed with the outbreak of the pandemic. There, a Grey Cell, a habitat that both keeps and surpasses the tension between the white cube and the black box. Thus, we choose to enjoy. hakahaLahakah presents a cabaret for the dance of death: NO GO NO SHOW.

hakahaLahakah is used to being an illegal lover, an invasive species, used to fondle the artistic pantheon on the side. But at a time when everything is closed, everything is actually open. Just at a time when coming together is forbidden, each dancer in hakahaLahakah can commune with the exhibition. How exciting. hakahaLahakah can exercise its savagery, and this is, in fact, the unshakable victory of Terpsichore’s interpretation of the act of art in the age of vulnerability. Now, just when the fading of democracy is palpable to us all, she screams in an empty museum: “We may run through your corridors, but we swear our allegiance to you, oh Museu-cracy!”

Artists shout in the streets. They manage to gather an audience in the capital, on Balfour St., and combine carnival and protest. "Revolution, democracy!" They shout, and so do we. But deep within our hearts we hesitate in embarrassment - "Is this Jerusalem Syndrome?" Either way, if we are doomed to get stuck here, we need to dive deeper into the Dionysian MUSEum, thus our convoy was led by the official Minister of the Banquet: party-line Kok Schok TLV. Together, we sought meaning in this place. We started at the "new club" on Balfour st., as the youth called it, dressed in white and hoping to catch the Syndrome. But something isn't right, after all, if something needs to be shouted it ought to be: "Extinction Rebellion!"

We were determined to enter the messianic gesture of the Eretz Israel MUSEum, that something of our soul would remain after the body is gone. Therefore, we decide to return to Tel Aviv. There in the city of sins we dare to ask each other in despair: "Is it in fact extinction rebellion, or rather rebellion (itself) extinct?” Quickly and naturally, we dive into the depths of the syndrome, so we might succeed in realizing the Museu-cracy, and exist between the olive trees and the stars.