The video performance "Phoenician Sand Dance" features the artist and a colleague on the seashore in an looped video sequence, where, to the sound of the waves beating and receding on the shore, each scoops out sand in a line proceeding towards the other along what appears to be a giant helix or figure-eight. The paths of the two “dancers” cross, but they never meet; and in their choreographed movements the participants, seen mostly in silhouette against the light, resemble the figures on early frescoes and vase paintings from the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean regions.
The title of the piece makes this allusion explicit: the Phoenicians were sailors and traders throughout the eastern Mediterranean region, who established city-states in what are today Lebanon and Syria. The Phoenician alphabet, which used symbols for sounds, also became incorporated in the early Greek and other alphabets of the region. Landau’s dance thus first and foremost evokes the ancient history of the Mediterranean; and the figures marked out by the dancers, both in their movements and in their tracings through the sand, represent a kind of primordial language.

Link to Video