Adva Drori’s performance "Fire!" is captivating and becomes an unforgettable image. Performance at Zman Le’Omanut Gallery On a Saturday morning at Zman Le’Omanut Gallery, Adva Drori sat inside a circular structure, dressed in a knitted white dress, sewing with a sewing machine. The rounded outline of the structure was marked by a curtain-like material made of nylon sleeves, inside which lay the dismembered bodies of plastic soldiers. The floor of the structure was covered with feathers, where plastic soldiers moved among them in battle motions—firing and crawling, crawling and attacking. Their limbs made sounds, and if you listened closely, you could hear them say: "Fire! Fire!" From time to time, Drori would rise from her sewing chair and gather a few plastic soldiers from the field of feathers. Returning to her seat, she would quickly dismember them—legs, heads, arms, torsos—moving swiftly and methodically, as if she were a butcher skillfully disassembling a chicken. Every part of the body was placed into a small plastic bag, which Drori then sewed shut with red thread. These bags were stitched together to form a long chain. Once the chain was ready, she climbed a red ladder and attached the long nylon sleeve to the slowly rotating metal hoop above her, repeating the process over and over. She sewed, collected, disassembled, connected, hung, and decorated. In all of Drori’s performances, there is a repetitive, ongoing action—frying challah and stamping words on it, frying dolls, and now sewing. The success of the performance lies in its ability to tell a story through the language of the medium itself—movement, action, visuality, and duration. One of the signs of a successful performance is when the audience finds it difficult to step away. In Drori’s case, it took at least fifteen minutes to fully witness the cyclical nature of the actions—the sewing, the connecting, gathering the soldiers, creating the chain, and so on. For an audience standing on its feet, this is a significant amount of time, but they lingered, moved around, stood, and watched. There was a sense that the actions had their own logic, that the sequence of movements formed a story with direction, plot, and progression. While the activity seemed cyclical and potentially endless, Drori’s quiet industriousness—not frantic or exaggerated, just focused—made "Fire!" an unforgettable image. It was as if Penelope sat at home, methodically and persistently stitching together the absurd story of war. Ruti Direktor 23.9.2004 | Tarbut Ha-ir | City Culture