On my first full day in Israel nearly two and a half years ago, I made a pilgrimage to the Suzanne Dellal Center.  Although I didn’t yet grasp the scope of the complex’s activities, I had heard that this was the epicenter of the Israeli contemporary dance scene, and that was enough to make me wander through the maze of Neve Tzedek’s streets until I finally found the right spot.

Throughout my first year of research, as I attended scores of performances and classes at Suzanne Dellal, my admiration and appreciation of the center only grew.  And now, as I visit the center daily, I am no less astonished by the activity it supports.  Classes, rehearsals, performances, and festivals keep the studios and theaters of Suzanne Dellal busy from nine in the morning to late at night, year-round.  Indeed, the numbers published by the center are remarkable: each year, the Suzanne Dellal Center boasts an astonishing 600+ performances and welcomes approximately  500,000 visitors. And since its establishment in 1989, the center has presented over 1,200 premieres – most of which are dances.

Throughout 2009, festivals and photographic exhibitions celebrated the Suzanne Dellal Center’s twentieth anniversary, calling attention to the center’s extraordinary contribution to the field of dance in Israel.  Although it’s now 2010, the celebration of the center’s activities is continuing: on February 23, Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar announced that the Suzanne Dellal Center would be awarded the Israel Prize, one of this country’s highest honors.

Chaired by Dr. Hadassah Shani, the selection committee commended the center.  “In its 20 years of activity, the Suzanne Dellal Center has caused dance in Israel to take off,” they acknowledged. “The many and varied artistic endeavors of the center have spawned a new generation of artists, creators and performers, in the arena of artistic dance. Creative excellence on the center’s stage has broadened, and continues to broaden, the circle of dance lovers [in Israel].  The center’s activities opened the gates of the world’s most important dance to the Israeli dance scene and made it possible for Israel’s artistic dance to make its stamp in the international arena.  This is a prize for initiators and supporters of the vision that became reality.”

The Minister of Culture and Sports, Limor Livnat, added, “The Suzanne Dellal Center is one of the most fascinating and unique centers in the field of dance in the entire world. In the 20 years since its founding, the center, under the direction of Yair Vardi, has turned into a center of pilgrimage for creators and dancers from the country and from the world.  The Suzanne Dellal Center brings us much pride, and the bestowing of the Israel Prize expresses the great appreciation that we have for the center and for Yair Vardi.”

The Israel Prize will be given to the Suzanne Dellal Center by President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Speaker of the Knesset Reuven Rivlin, President of the Supreme Court Dorit Beinisch, Mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat, and Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar.  The award ceremony will be held at the Jerusalem Theatre on April 20^th, Israel’s Independence Day, and will be broadcast live on Channel 1.

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• Interview with Yair Vardi: A View of Israeli Concert Dance from the Top
• Photodance Exhibit Celebrates 20 Years of Dance at Suzanne Dellal
• Tel Aviv’s 100th + Suzanne Dellal’s 20th = The Big Stage
• Remembering Big Performances at Suzanne Dellal’s Big Stage

Related Links

• Suzanne Dellal Center

The flyer for the Anna Sokolow centennial exhibition in Tel Aviv. Courtesy Henia Rottenberg.

Attention dance history fans: this year is the centennial of choreographer Anna Sokolow’s birth, and her artistic achievements are being commemorated around the world, including in Israel.  In this guest article, Hannah Kosstrin, who recently visited Tel Aviv to research Sokolow’s work here, reflects on Sokolow’s influence on dance in Israel and highlights upcoming centennial celebrations.

Celebration in Pictures: Anna Sokolow Centennial at the Dance Library of Israel

By Hannah Kosstrin

A new exhibit at the Dance Library of Israel celebrates the life and work of Anna Sokolow (1910-2000), whose centennial is celebrated this month.  Sokolow, an American-born Jewish choreographer who worked internationally and considered Israel her second home, carved out a space for herself in the Israeli dance landscape.  She first came to Tel Aviv in 1953 on the recommendation of Jerome Robbins and with the support of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, where she worked with Sara Levi-Tanai and Inbal Yemenite Dance Group (Inbal Dance Theatre).  In the early 1960s, she established her Lyric Theatre.  This company was active for months out of each year, and toured cities and kibbutzim throughout Israel.  Later, she choreographed for Israeli companies including Batsheva Dance Company, Bat-Dor Dance Company, Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, Chamber Theatre, Springboard Dance Company, and Habima.  Her work touched many dancers and teachers who remain prominent in dance in Israel, including Paul Bloom, Galia Gat, Rena Gluck, Yaron Margolin, Moshe Romano, and Rena Schenfeld, and Ze’eva Cohen and Margalit Oved, who work in the United States.

With the Lyric Theatre (1962-1964), Sokolow continued to develop her performance form that she termed lyric theater, a combination of dancing and acting that blurred the lines between disciplines and created works wherein performers drew from both movement and acting bodies of knowledge.  Such works include Rooms and Dreams, originally created in the U.S. and then performed by the Lyric Theatre, and Forms and Poem, for which Sokolow worked closely with Israeli dancers to mount.  Sokolow was concerned foremost with truth in movement and with honesty in dancers’ performance. Using elements of the Stanislavsky Method that she garnered through a trip to Russia in 1934 and work with Elia Kazan and the Actors Studio in New York through the 1950s, Sokolow drew from performers’ own experiences to craft their characters within the context of each work.  Sokolow trained in Martha Graham’s technique through her work with that company during the 1930s.  Many of Sokolow’s dances from the 1930s-1940s show a strong Graham influence in her own movement via initiations by torso contractions and spirals through the back.  Sokolow’s dances from the 1950s onward, however, feature pieces crafted from movement and gestures found in daily life, from running to grasping hands to slamming against a wall.  Her work also presents quieter, vulnerable moments with arched backs and reaching arms, all while retaining the immediacy of movement coming from the “gut.”

Sokolow is known for making dances of social comment, and for reflecting humanity in the most inhumane of situations.  Dreams (1961), an evening-length group work, contains vignettes of harrowing concentration camp scenes leading to a dignified and wrongful death, while In Memory Of…543246 (1973), a solo for Rena Schenfeld, is a portrait of a Holocaust victim.  And the Disciples Departed (1967), a collaborative work with director Thomas J. Knott for American television, comments on the Vietnam war, racism in the U.S., and the rape of Kitty Genovese.  Rooms (1955), Sokolow’s landmark piece that cemented her place as a canonical concert dance choreographer, exposes loneliness, urban alienation, and unrequited desire.  The work is set against Kenyon Hopkins’ jazz score that alternates between driving adrenaline and stark atonal punctuations.  Earlier, in the 1940s, Sokolow made dances with Jewish themes and about Biblical heroines to stand in solidarity with Jews worldwide during the Holocaust.  The most well-known of these dances is Kaddish (1945), a memorial for Holocaust victims in which Sokolow defied contemporary gender conventions by laying tefillin around her arm.  Sokolow kept her Jewish identity at the core of all of her work, and her time in Israel fed and reinforced this connection.

The exhibit at the Dance Library of Israel commemorates Sokolow’s career through photographs and other ephemera, and it runs through September 2010.  The Dance Library of Israel is located at Beit Ariela, 25 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard in Tel Aviv.  More information is on the Beit Ariela library’s blog.

For information about Sokolow Centennial celebrations outside of Israel, please visit:

• Sokolow Dance Foundation
• Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble

Hannah Kosstrin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Dance Studies at The Ohio State University (OSU). Her dissertation project focuses on Anna Sokolow’s work from 1927-1961. It is supported by the OSU Melton Center for Jewish Studies, the P.E.O. International Sisterhood, and the OSU Department of Women’s Studies Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Graduate Studies Grant for Research on Women, Gender, and Gender Equity. She has performed, choreographed, and taught in Boston, MA and Columbus, OH, U.S.A.

Video: Promo for Arkadi Zaides’s new Quiet

As guest writer Brian Schaefer wrote in his article, for most visitors from abroad, International Exposure is a veritable “crash course” in Israeli contemporary dance.  For me, however, International Exposure serves another purpose.  Since I’m now intimately familiar with both the scene as a whole and with the artists themselves, this festival provides an unparalleled opportunity to consider developments in the field over the last year.

While Brian rightly noted that the vast majority of works in International Exposure did not overtly address the Israeli context, a few works did tackle issues in Israeli life – and as someone who has seen the vast majority of contemporary dance created in Israel since 2007, I can vouch that this is a notable shift.  Out of all the dances I watched during my first two years in the country – a number which easily surpasses 100 and probably nears 200 – I can probably count the number of works which explicitly examine Israeli culture and society on less than two hands.  Most of them, such as Renana Raz’s We Have Been Called to Go, were works that had premiered in previous seasons; while I saw this dance on stage, I had to seek out other works such as Yasmeen Godder’s Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder on DVD.  Indeed, when I saw Hillel Kogan’s Everything at Exposure in January 2008, its focus on Israeli machismo was such a revelation because it was the only new work I had seen which openly examined an aspect of Israeli identity.

So it was absolutely astonishing for me to watch as not just one but a handful of the offerings at International Exposure unmistakably explored Israeli society. Two of these dances had premiered just weeks earlier in the Curtain Up festival, and while they both took the relationship of the individual to the surrounding Israeli society as their main theme, they approached the subject from different personal perspectives and aesthetics.

Noa Dar’s Anu.  Photo by Tamar Lamm.

In Noa Dar’s trio Anu (Us), one dancer – perhaps dressed to look younger in pigtails and a skirt – is initiated into the group, first observing her two fellow performers and then modeling herself after them until she becomes a participating member.  Though at times the context is universal, there are several scenes which bear the recognizable imprint of Israeli culture.  Gathered center stage in a tight circle, the trio performs a speeded-up mishmash of Israeli folk dance steps; occasionally, one dancer breaks out of the group, causing the others to pause, but then the three immediately resume their folk dance at an even more frenetic pace.  Another powerful section references the army service which is compulsory in Israel.   Juxtaposing stylized miming of military actions (loading, aiming, and shooting guns; throwing grenades; scoping out a building and breaking in; strip searching a suspect) with sweetly tranquil classical music, the scene is chilling.

Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor’s Big Mouth.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

Whereas Anu follows the process of indoctrination into society, Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor’s Big Mouth considers the reverse process of an individual critically considering this group mentality.  The strains of an Israeli folk song set the stage even before the curtain rises, and the tone is further established as the three dancers (Sheinfeld, Laor, and Keren Levi) begin by turning their backs on the audience and striding in unison around the perimeter of the space.  Gradually, the trio’s regimented marching is punctuated by Israeli folk dance steps – a mayim here, a three-step turn there – and eventually, Levi tries to break out of this seemingly never-ending pattern with her own idiosyncratic movement.  Later, to the swelling melody of an Israeli military hymn, Levi stands downstage and slowly opens her mouth wide until her face is distorted in the shape of a silent, terrible scream; this simple yet virtuosic act leaves a haunting imprint even after the booming music dies down and Levi’s face returns to its normal state.  Despite the tenderness with which Sheinfeld and Laor cradle Levi during their final trio, keeping her perpetually aloft while passing her back and forth, the emotion which prompted such an agonized cry clearly lingers, prompting her to leave the group at the close of the work.

Besides Anu and Big Mouth, two other brand-new works showcased in International Exposure 2009 also seemed to be colored by the political and social dynamics within the Israeli context.  Rami Be’er’s choreography has often explored Israeli life, and his Infrared, which the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company premiered in November, seems to follow in this pattern.  Though much of the choreography itself is more abstract, the work opens with a man’s voice solemnly intoning a poem (written by Be’er) about soldiers in a garden and with one dancer slowly emerging from what appears to be a body bag.  Meanwhile, Arkadi Zaides’s Quiet, which was presented in a studio showing as a work-in-progress, features a mixed cast of Jewish and Arab performers and effectively plays off the tensions between these two groups.

After two years of barely seeing any choreography explicitly grappling with the Israeli context, I couldn’t help but wonder why so many dances were now openly invoking this subject and its intense undercurrents.  Could it perhaps be that, after the war in Gaza last year, some choreographers felt compelled to reexamine their surroundings?  What other political and personal factors were at work?

Noa Dar’s Anu.  Photo by Tamar Lamm.

In a conversation with Noa Dar prior to the premiere of Anu, she said that her latest work stemmed from her experiences as “a mother and also as a citizen” of Israel.  While Dar talked about how her young children’s education was already “printing on them their future and the future as soldiers,” she also recounted her experience at a protest against the incursion into Gaza in 2008, during which not only right-wing counter-protesters but also passersby cursed the demonstrators as traitors.  The choreographer further discussed the media’s one-sided account of both Gaza and the 2006 Lebanon war and brought up recent legislation curtailing the rights of Arab Israelis.  “This work came out of these experiences, out of this fear that this country is getting more and more closed,” Dar acknowledged.  She continued, “It’s about the uniformity that Israeli culture brings and trying to explore how to survive it, to go against it but still be inside, to be able to comment on it, to try to change it.”

Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor’s Big Mouth.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

While these recent developments spurred the creation of Anu, Big Mouth emerged from somewhat different roots.  Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor choreographed the dance during a period when they were frequently away from Israel; sometimes they were on tour with previous works, and at other times they were in the Netherlands where they collaborated on the new trio with Amsterdam-based Israeli dancer Keren Levi.  Sheinfeld remarked, “Somehow I think it affected this work; it made the piece somehow with reference to the Israeli culture.”  Laor chimed in the conversation, noting not only the physical distance of the three collaborators from Israel during the creative process but also other events which caused the artists to consider issues of nationalism and group identity.  While Big Mouth does include specific allusions to the Israeli context, Sheinfeld reflected that ultimately, “the way that we treat the subject is the personal level, is the individual, and how an individual acts in a group.”

Arkadi Zaides’s Quiet.  Photo courtesy of Arkadi Zaides.

Meanwhile, in the publicity for Quiet, which premieres this weekend at Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv, Zaides explains the backdrop for his latest work.  He writes:

“Quiet arose from a real sense of emergency; in light of the growing violence and mistrust between communities in Israel, constantly subjected to states of shock which never allow the space needed for reflection, and thus never allow for change. In such an environment it felt acute to create a platform which allows for an open and honest communication; a place where it is safe to let one’s demons out and set them free; where the irrationality of response is examined and emotions are bravely explored; where a broad perspective is sought and where trust is continuously built.”

With these works’ diverse reference points and perspectives, they are welcome, thought-provoking additions to the Israeli contemporary dance scene.

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• International Exposure 2009: A Perspective from Abroad (Guest article by Brian Schaefer)
• International Exposure 2009: Showcasing Israeli Dance (Preview)
• Curtain Up 5: Noa Dar Hosts Maya Brinner and Irad Mazliah
• Curtain Up 6: Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor Host Noa Shadur
• Arkadi Zaides: Community Connections and Stunning Solos
• Noa Dar Discusses Her Dance Career (Podcast)
• Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor: An Interview with Dramatic Dancemakers (Podcast)
• Viewing an Israeli Vision with Diasporic Eyes: Renana Raz’s “We Have Been Called to Go”
• Dancing through the Intifada: Yasmeen Godder’s “Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder”

Related Links

The works mentioned in this article are currently performed throughout Israel.  To find out about upcoming concerts and to learn more about the artists, visit the websites below:

• Arkadi Zaides
• Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company
• Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor
• Noa Dar

The Curtain Up 2009 poster.  Courtesy of Ora Lapidot PR.

The annual Curtain Up festival has figured prominently in my understanding and appreciation of Israeli contemporary dance.  Every autumn, this festival presents a fresh harvest of premieres by some of the field’s most promising choreographers.  I have now attended Curtain Up twice, and both seasons introduced me to some new faces and showcased the latest creations by choreographers whom I was already following.

As the buzz about this year’s 20th anniversary celebration grew, I wanted to find out more about the history of Curtain Up.  I talked with each of the six headlining presenters in this year’s festival, veteran choreographers who received support from the festival earlier in their careers.  They related their own personal pasts with Curtain Up, but wanting even more of an overview, I decided to go straight to the founder of the festival: Nilly Cohen, who directs the dance division of the Ministry of Culture.

Nilly’s retelling of Curtain Up’s history traces the rise of the Israeli contemporary dance scene.  “20 years ago, there were not so many choreographers in Israel,” she remembers.  “There were only three dance companies, and all the young choreographers, all the fringe simply didn’t exist.  And this was the main target for my initiative.  I [wanted] to build the next generation of choreographers in Israel.  That was the aim 20 years ago.  And now we can see that this aim succeeded.  Now we have many choreographers and many dance companies.”

Nilly continued, “I [initiated] Curtain Up 20 years ago because of the bad conditions for the choreographers.  They didn’t have the money to make their creations, to do the performances, to do the public relations, the marketing, and so on.  It takes [a lot of] money to do this, and they were very young; they were beginners in this profession.  And it was very difficult.  So I initiated this stage to give the young choreographers all the conditions to make their art.”

Then as now, Nilly explained, the government stepped in to help independent choreographers.  “We give them the money for the creation: for the costumes, for the dancers, for the lighting, for the design,” she elaborated.  “Besides this, we give them free the [concert] halls, Suzanne Dellal in Tel Aviv and the Jerusalem Theatre in Jerusalem . . . We do the public relations for them.  And we also give them the income.”

This generous public support spurred the flowering of Israeli dance, fostering its growth from a small pool of struggling choreographers to a vibrant scene featuring both an array of full-fledged companies and a seemingly multiplying set of individual artists.  Nilly recounted with pride, “I began [Curtain Up] 20 years ago, and then many creators were born on this stage and developed.  They developed to be dance companies like Vertigo Dance Company, like Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak’s company, like Noa Dar’s dance company, like Yasmeen Godder and many others.”

As this significant anniversary of Curtain Up approached, Nilly said, “I thought that the best thing to celebrate 20 [years] is to show what is the fruit of this stage.  And the fruits are all of these dance companies, so I invited them to perform on this stage this year.”  She added that she also was pleased to offer these now mature choreographers the chance to curate the festival by selecting emerging choreographers to join them on their respective programs.

Below is my preview of Curtain Up 2009, which was originally published in the Jerusalem Post as “Celebrating Creative Choreography.” My next few articles on Dance In Israel will zoom in on each individual program, with excerpts from my interviews with the choreographers and photographs of the new works.

* * *

Celebrating Creative Choreography

Participating in the annual Curtain Up festival, the country’s major platform for new works, is a rite of passage for Israeli choreographers.  Reflecting on her history with the festival, choreographer Noa Dar explains, “It really was my school and my initiation program for my choreography.”  Now Dar and other veteran choreographers are returning to Curtain Up for a special 20th anniversary season and they are initiating a new generation of dancemakers into the circle of Curtain Up participants.

As in past years, Curtain Up 2009 boasts several programs of hot-off-the press choreography.  Yet this year, there is a twist.  Each of the six concerts is headlined by an established choreographer who in turn selected one or two emerging choreographers to join the bill.  The result is a sumptuous spread of Israeli contemporary dance featuring both the field’s most acclaimed artists and some of its freshest rising stars.

Nimrod Freed’s Subtext.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

Nimrod Freed of the Tami Dance Company chose both Anat Grigorio and Dafi Altebab to join him in Curtain 1 because they are “authentic, passionate and creative in an unusual way.”  Freed’s Subtext, Grigorio’s Daydream, and Altbeb’s Under the Rug all imaginatively uncover and probe the hidden sides of life.

Noa Wertheim’s Mana.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

Curtain 2 is enlivened by the electrifying energy of Vertigo Dance Company and its younger division, the Vertigo Ensemble.  Performed against a strikingly geometric black-and-white set, Noa Wertheim’s new Mana explores the essential differences between men and women. Danced with verve by the Ensemble, Elad Shechter’s Roni casts a broader gaze at the dynamics of control in contemporary life.

Yasmeen Godder’s Love Fire. Photo by Tamar Lamm.

Yasmeen Godder was a frequent presenter in Curtain Up during the early 2000s, but her premiere in Curtain 3 marks a dramatic departure from her previous works.  LOVE FIRE, a duet danced to classical waltzes, reconsiders romanticism and includes a “performative installation-based response” by visual artist Yochai Matos.  Iris Erez, who regularly collaborated with Godder as a dancer, unleashes her own choreographic power in the trio Numbia.

Ya’ara Dolev’s BLOSSOM.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

The clean lines, precise angles and graceful curves of the body take center stage as the Tel Aviv Dance Company performs two works in Curtain 4.  Waves of movement wash over the dancers in BLOSSOM, a premiere by the company’s co-artistic director Ya’ara Dolev.  Guest choreographer Michael Miler also displays what Dolev describes as a predilection for “pure, clean movement in space” in his Number 6.

Noa Dar’s Us.  Photo by Tamar Lamm.

When Noa Dar selected Maya Brinner and Irad Mazliah for Curtain 5, the three choreographers talked about uniting their program with a common theme. Dar says that Brinner’s Red Ladies, Mazliah’s Unter den linden, and her own Us deploy unique perspectives on “difference versus conformity and stillness or stuck positions versus mobility and change.”

For Curtain 6, the team of Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor joined forces with dancer/choreographer Keren Levy to produce Big Mouth.  Using their personal relationships to Israeli society as a jumping off point, the trio investigates the conflicting desires of belonging to a group while maintaining one’s self-expression.  The program is rounded out by Noa Shadur’s Into the Night, which compares the reality of death with its melodramatic theatrical representation.

Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak’s Trout. Photo by Asaf Ashkenazi.

Traditionally, Curtain Up hosts an additional program by a well-known group, and this year’s guest concert is guaranteed to make a big splash.  Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak’s Trout, which premiered in 2008 in Norway, floods a black-box stage with water to create an otherworldly setting where dancers mix with musicians from the experimental Kitchen Orchestra.  It’s a magical way to cap off Curtain Up’s celebration of creativity.

More Information

Curtain Up runs from November 24 to December 7 at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv and from December 8-14 at the Rebecca Crown Auditorium in Jerusalem. Tickets (100 NIS for most shows) are available at 03-5105656 (Suzanne Dellal Center) and 02-5605755 (Rebecca Crown Auditorium).

For listings of Curtain Up performances, please visit the Dance In Israel Calendars page.

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• Israeli Dance: What’s Happening in November
• What is Israeli Dance? Two Festivals Hold Some Clues
• Curtain Up 1: Nimrod Freed Hosts Anat Grigorio and Dafi Altebab
• Curtain Up 2: Vertigo Dance Company and Noa Wertheim Host Elad Shechter
• Curtain Up 3: Yasmeen Godder Hosts Iris Erez
• Curtain Up 4: Tel Aviv Dance Company and Yaara Dolev Host Michael Miler
• Curtain Up 5: Noa Dar Hosts Maya Brinner and Irad Mazliah
• Curtain Up 6: Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor Host Noa Shadur
• Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak’s Trout

Related Links

• Suzanne Dellal Centre
• Jerusalem Theatre
• Nimrod Freed
• Vertigo Dance Company
• Yasmeen Godder
• Michael Miler
• Noa Dar
• Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor
• Inbal Pinto Dance Company

What is Israeli dance?

This is a question that I have contemplated ever since I arrived here, and as I sat in the audience at many performances during the Tel Aviv Dance 2009 festival, this query resurfaced. The vast majority of dance I have seen in the last two years has been Israeli dance – that is, by my loose definition, dance made in Israel by Israeli choreographers – but most of what I attended during this festival came from abroad.

As my eyes readjusted to fresh work from unfamiliar choreographers and, at times, unfamiliar cultures, I couldn’t help comparing the characteristics of these foreign productions to those of Israeli-made work.  By watching dance that was, by virtue of its far away origin, not Israeli, could I more definitively identify characteristics of Israeli dance and the Israeli dance scene?  As I sat in the darkened theater for show after show, I asked myself repeatedly, “Could an Israeli choreographer have made that work? Would an Israeli choreographer have made that work, and if so, would I have perceived it differently?”

Beijing Modern Dance Company.  Photo by Wang Zhe.

This last question echoed in my mind, growing louder and louder, as I watched the Beijing Modern Dance Company’s program at the Suzanne Dellal Center.  More so than in the other performances I saw, I felt that this program’s two works were rife with cultural references specific to the country in which they were created.  In the fourth section of Hu Lei’s Unfettered Journey, dancers clothed in elegantly draped fabric flowed across the stage with fans in their hands.  Throughout Gao Yanjinzi’s Oath, a figure wearing what appeared to be traditional Chinese dress beckoned dancers representing parts of the natural world onstage to music that at times sounded distinctively Chinese.  Had an Israeli choreographer’s name been attached to either of these works, these elements would not have been allusions to his or her own culture but instead marks of appropriation (and here I do not intend to attach a negative value to that often loaded word; this simply denotes a different process and point of connection to the elements incorporated)

While these overt references to Chinese culture set my mind in motion, it was the physicality of the dancers in the Beijing Modern Dance Company which triggered even more complex thoughts about what characterizes much of Israeli contemporary dance.  Throughout my conversations with Israeli choreographers, many of them asserted that there was something distinctive about the physicality of Israeli dancers; there was a certain emphasis on weight, force, and power, along with a liveliness and rawness to their energy which several people connected to the pace and nature of Israeli life.

Sometimes, immersed in this scene, it’s possible to forget that another way of moving exists.  So there’s nothing like watching companies from abroad to sharpen my understanding of the physicality used in Israeli dance.  Whereas Israeli dancers are often unleashed and explosive, the Chinese dancers were refined and measured.  Whereas Israeli dancers often project a sense of solid strength and weighted groundedness in deep, low positions, the Chinese dancers assumed these postures with the poised agility of a martial artist.  Whereas Israeli dancers may display and even revel in effort, the Chinese dancers exuded ease.  “Yes,” I thought to myself as I sat in the darkened theater.  “Maybe a particular physicality does characterize much of Israeli dance and distinguish it from dance from other countries.”

While these musings re-entered my mind as I watched foreign companies in Tel Aviv Dance, they’ll likely remain ever-present as I attend a very different festival later this month: Curtain Up.  Every year, Curtain Up sheds light on Israeli dance by showcasing several programs worth of premieres by independent choreographers.  Throughout the twenty years of its existence, the festival has not only provided a platform for numerous artists to explore new choreographic ideas but also offered them a boost to prominence, thus shaping the landscape of the larger field.

Publicity for Curtain Up 2009.  Courtesy of Ora Lapidot PR.

In honor of the festival’s twentieth season, Curtain Up 2009 will offer an extraordinary opportunity to survey the scene through a special project spanning the generations of Israeli choreographers.  Six well-established artists who were previously supported by the festival – Nimrod Freed, Noa Wertheim of Vertigo Dance Company, Yasmeen Godder, Yaara Dolev of Tel Aviv Dance Company, Noa Dar, and Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor  – were chosen to create new works for this special Curtain Up.  They also became curators of the festival, in turn selecting one or two emerging choreographers to premiere work.

After refreshing my eyes and my mind with Tel Aviv Dance’s international medley, I’m looking forward to re-immersing myself in the world of Israeli dance during Curtain Up.  Who knows what insights will surface in the theater this time around . . .

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• Tel Aviv Dance 2009 Mixes Global and Local Dance
• Israeli Dance: What’s Happening in November