Vertigo Dance Company in Noa Wertheim’s Mana. Photo by Gadi Dagon.

With a studio in Jerusalem rather than Tel Aviv and another home base in the form of an Eco-Art Village on Kibbutz Netiv HaLamed-Hey, Vertigo Dance Company is certainly far from ordinary.  But what makes Vertigo even more of a standout is the exceptional artistry and socially conscious vision of its artistic directors, Noa Wertheim and Adi Sha’al.

From the very start, the couple’s striking choreography made an impression on the local dance scene. The pair’s first duet, Vertigo, drew not only from Sha’al’s own experience in the air force but also considered the feeling of dizziness within the context of personal relationships; the work garnered them the 1992 On the Way to London award from the British Council. The following year, their multimedia duet Contact Lenses won the first prize in the prestigious Shades of Dance festival for emerging choreographers.

As Wertheim and Sha’al expanded the ensemble of their Vertigo Dance Company, they became known for making daringly athletic work that explored deeply human issues.   The company’s repertory also shattered the conventions of traditional concert dance.  The Power of Balance (2001), a collaboration with British choreographer Adam Benjamin, integrated the group’s regular roster of dancers with disabled dancers.  Placing mankind’s relationship to the environment at its core, Birth of the Phoenix (2004) abandoned the theater for the outdoors, with the dancers performing on a dirt ground under a geodesic dome.

In June, Vertigo performed a trilogy of recent works – the iconic Birth of the Phoenix, the supremely energetic White Noise (2008), and the magnificent Mana (2009) – at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem. Now the company is bringing these three stellar dances to the Suzanne Dellal Center as part of the SummerDance 2010 festival with performances running from August 2 to August 4.   As a bonus, the performance of White Noise on June 3 will be followed by a meeting with the artists.

Want to learn more about this unique group?  Here are several videos with footage of interviews at the Eco-Art Village and the dances from the trilogy as well as Vertigo and Noa Wertheim’s appearance at the TedxTelAviv event.

Below is a video about Vertigo Dance Company’s Eco-Art Village, with brief clips primarily of Noa Wertheim’s Birth of the Phoenix.

In this next video, artistic directors Noa Wertheim and Adi Sha’al as well as some of Vertigo’s dancers talk about working in the Eco-Art Village. Many of the dance excerpts are from Wertheim’s White Noise.

Vertigo and Noa Wertheim were part of TedxTelAviv, which was held on April 26, 2010 at the Jaffa port.  The video below includes an excerpt from White Noise, followed by Wertheim discussing her move to the Eco-Art Village and her philosophy. The video closes with an excerpt of Mana.

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• Vertigo Dance Company: Art, Environment, Community
• Curtain Up 2: Vertigo Dance Company and Noa Wertheim Host Elad Shechter
• Vertigo Dance Company in Noa Wertheim’s Mana
• Vertigo Dance Company: A Conversation with Choreographer Noa Wertheim

Related Links

• Vertigo Dance Company
• TedxTelAviv
• Suzanne Dellal Center

Adi Sha’al and Noa Wertheim of Vertigo Dance Company. Photo by Eyal Landesman.

(This podcast was initially produced for Israel Seen in 2008.  You can subscribe to this podcast using the iTunes software by clicking this link to the podcast feed.)

As I have traveled through Israel’s dance circles, I have run into Noa Wertheim and Adi Sha’al many times: at Vertigo Dance Company’s concerts at the Suzanne Dellal Center, at contact jams, and at a performance of Noa’s work on students from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.  With their company, their school in Jerusalem, and their growing artist village on Kibbutz Netiv HaLamed-Hey, this dynamic couple is a powerful force in the Israeli contemporary dance scene.  They’re also revolutionary in their community-centered and environmentally-conscious approach to dance.

Video: Vertigo Dance Company’s Birth of the Phoenix

In this interview, held in the spring of 2008, Noa talks about raising a family while directing a company, building the Eco-Art Village, choreographing the site-specific environmental dance Birth of the Phoenix, and engaging in “tikkun olam” – healing the world – through her work.

Noa Wertheim’s White Noise. Photo by Gadi Dagon.

When we spoke two years ago, Noa was mounting her White Noise, and in the fall of 2009, she premiered her Mana at the Curtain Up Festival.  Along with her iconic Birth of the Phoenix, these two works are now being performed by Vertigo at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem.

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• Vertigo Dance Company: Art, Environment, Community
• Curtain Up 2: Vertigo Dance Company and Noa Wertheim Host Elad Shechter
• Vertigo Dance Company in Noa Wertheim’s Mana

Other Podcasts on Dance In Israel

• Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak: An Interview on Imagination
• Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor: An Interview with Dramatic Dancemakers
• Interview with Yair Vardi: A View from the Top
• Renana Raz: Choreographing Israeli Culture and Beyond
• Sahar Azimi Speaks about Choreography and Contemporary Dance
• Shlomit Fundaminsky: An Interview on Improvisation and Israeli Life
• Noa Dar Discusses Her Dance Career
• Andrea Miller: From Gaga to Gallim Dance
• Interview with Barak Marshall: Dancing between Israel and America (Part 1)

Related Links

• Vertigo Dance Company

*This post was made possible thanks to a Fulbright student grant funded by the U.S.-Israel Educational Foundation and hosted by the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

When I called Adi Sha’al and Noa Wertheim, who direct the Vertigo Dance Company, they had just landed in Israel after an appearance at the General Assembly of The Jewish Federations of North America in Washington D.C.  There they had presented an excerpt from Wertheim’s Mana, which will be officially premiered in Curtain 2 along with Elad Shechter’s Roni.  I chatted with the couple about their U.S. trip and their experience with Curtain Up.

Noa Wertheim’s Mana.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

Dance In Israel: How was your time at the General Assembly?
Adi Sha’al: People were very moved by Vertigo’s performance, and people came [up to us] afterwards, after they were clapping hands for a long time and standing up – some people even with tears.  We also talked about our social vision of the company and the Eco-Art Village . . . And we also did workshops and created connections with dance companies in D.C.

Noa Wertheim’s Mana.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

DII: What is your relationship to Curtain Up?
AS: It’s been a good relationship.  Vertigo [Dance Company] has been around for 17 years now, and all of our first shows were under this title, under Curtain Up.  We owe a lot to this institute.

Elad Shechter’s Roni.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

DII: What drew you and Noa to select Elad Shechter to be the choreographer for this program?
AS:  Elad used to be a dancer in our company, so we’ve known him for several years now.  Once Nilly Cohen [director of the dance department in the Culture and Arts Administration] and the people at Haramat Masach came with the idea of coaching, we said basically the only one that we can really coach and we can say that it will be real for us is somebody that we know, somebody that we have a dialogue with.

Elad Shechter’s Roni.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

AS: In a way, we are marking here two companies.  One is the main company which Noa is doing a piece for, and the other one is the young company, the Vertigo Ensemble, which Elad is doing a work for, and it’s [all] happening in Vertigo’s studios under the umbrella of Vertigo’s production.  And we [work with] the same co-artists.  Ran Bagno is making the music for both pieces; he’s a musician we’ve been working with together many years now.  Danny Fishof, he’s our lighting designer; he is doing the lighting design for both pieces, Mana and Roni.  And the costume designer is Rakefet Levy; she’s doing both pieces.  So we feel like it’s a production house called Vertigo, and it’s very exciting for us to do these two things together side-by-side in the same evening.

Noa Wertheim’s Mana.  Photo by Gadi Dagon.

DII: Noa, can you tell me a bit about where Mana came from?
Noa Wertheim: I like to work from the movement, and I never have a clear idea, but I do have a certain attraction to something.  This time, the line and the circle came straight away.  After I was dealing with Ra’ash Lavan [Noa's previous work, White Noise], where gravity was so important, it was different to work with the shapes.

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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 2009: Celebrating 20 Years of Israeli Premieres
• Curtain Up 1: Nimrod Freed Hosts Anat Grigorio and Dafi Altebab
• 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

Related Links

• Suzanne Dellal Centre
• Jerusalem Theatre
• Vertigo Dance Company

Video: Then: Ronit Ziv’s Rose Can’t Wait, from the 1999 Shades of Dance Festival

On my way home from “Then and Now,” a special opening program of the Shades of Dance (Gvanim) festival, J.S. Bach’s Air on the G String played on my iPod.  Immediately, images from a black-and-white film of choreographer Doris Humphrey’s Air for the G String flashed through my mind. Humphrey’s dance has not only been immortalized on film but stayed alive in reconstructions from Labanotation score; it’s a powerful reminder that choreography doesn’t need to be shelved a few years or even many decades after its premiere.

This was an appropriate vision after a concert which not only celebrated the new but paid tribute to the old.  Opening a festival devoted to emerging choreographers, “Then and Now” featured excerpts of four dances which, in the days when the festival doubled as a competition, won the coveted first prize.  Selections from Nir Ben Gal and Liat Dror’s Two-Room Apartment (1987), Noa Wertheim and Adi Sha’al’s Vertigo (1992), Barak Marshall’s Aunt Leah (1995), and Ronit Ziv’s Rose Can’t Wait (1999) shared the stage with excerpts from the choreographers’ latest dances.

These works were met with an extremely warm reception, and I’m sure that the choreographers’ own performances contributed to the excitement.  The prolonged unison and matter-of-fact manners of Nir Ben Gal and Liat Dror, the high-speed actions and reactions of Noa Wertheim and Adi Sha’al, and the daring physicality of Ronit Ziv and fellow dancer Noa Rosenthal were riveting to watch – especially because, in the case of Nir & Liat and Noa & Adi, these choreographers no longer perform on a regular basis. (( Barak Marshall, who is now based part-time in L.A., was not in Israel for this performance. ))

Yet part of the thrill was the return of these older works to the stage. Other than Aunt Leah, which was restaged at the Inbal Dance Theater in autumn 2008, these dances are not in active repertory.  Some devoted, longtime dance-goers may have remembered these works, but for many audience members, this was the first chance to see the highly original and even audacious dances which propelled these choreographers into the upper echelon of Israeli contemporary dance.  The showing was also an extraordinary opportunity for me to reflect on the trademark styles and artistic development of these choreographers, to better understand their more recent works which have graced the stage in the last two seasons.

There simply aren’t enough occasions to see older works here in Israel.  A few of the larger groups like the Batsheva Dance Company and the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company have happily shown some repertory from decades past (albeit sometimes in excerpt form, as when Ohad Naharin recombines parts of various pieces in Deca Dance).  Yet most choreographers who work outside of these institutions are primarily putting their most recent works onstage, perhaps because of more limited resources and a series of festivals which spur the creation of new works.  If the choreographers themselves don’t mount their earlier dances, no one else will.  The country does not have an established repertory company whose mission is to celebrate Israeli-made choreography both past and present.  Nor is there a network of university dance departments which might reconstruct earlier dances or invite choreographers to set their older repertory on students, as there is in the U.S.  (( There are many fine high school dance departments in Israel and they do often bring in independent choreographers, but these departments are rarely if ever staging older works from the 1980s and 1990s. ))

If this system continues unchanged, the early – and in some cases significant – works by Israel’s contemporary choreographers may be lost.  But I believe this is avoidable.  While modern dance’s roots in this region stretch as far back as the 1920s, the real blossoming of Israeli contemporary dance is not that distant.  It is far easier to unearth a dance made twenty years ago than one created eighty years ago.  Indeed, the Israeli artists who, during the 1980s and 1990s, triumphed in establishing a thriving independent dance scene are still active in the field and capable of setting their early choreography given the opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly in favor of celebrating the new.  The constant push for creation advances the art form forward; to only perform older work would lead to stagnation.  Yet I believe that the field could benefit from the revival and repeated performance of earlier works, which can educate and inspire audiences and dance professionals alike.

I hope that Shades of Dance will make this opening performance of old and new works a tradition so that we can witness the power of choreographic breakthroughs firsthand.   Twenty years from now, perhaps audiences will be treated to another viewing of Shaked Dagan’s We Are Going Back, Michael Miler’s The Speed of Light, or Ronen and Tami Yitzhaki’s This Time, which premiered in this year’s festival and caught my eye.   And I wish that more support – be it through festivals, dance departments, or other funding mechanisms – will enable choreographers to restage their acclaimed earlier repertory sooner rather than later.   Dances which merit a place in history also deserve to live in the bodies of dancers and the eyes of viewers.

Video: Now: Ronit Ziv’s La Femme A, La Femme B

Related articles on Dance In Israel:

• Behind the Scenes at Gvanim: Shades of Dance Festival
• Vertigo Dance Company: Art, Environment, Community
• Tel Aviv Dance 2008 (about Barak Marshall’s Monger)

Michael Miler’s The Speed of Light will be performed in program 1 of Shades of Dance.  Photograph by Eyal Landesman.

Last Saturday night was chilly and wet, but despite the discouraging weather conditions, I bundled up and trekked down to the Suzanne Dellal Center.  Choreographer Micheal Miler of Haifa’s Sigma Ensemble had invited me to a rehearsal for the Shades of Dance festival (called Gvanim in Hebrew).  Shades of Dance is mounted biennially, and since last year was an off year, I had effectively been waiting to attend the festival for over a year and a half.  A little rain wasn’t about to stop me from this special sneak peak.

Since its inception in 1984, Shades of Dance has showcased artists who are relatively fresh to the field of choreography.  It has helped launch the careers of some of Israel’s best-known choreographers including Yasmeen Godder, Inbal Pinto, Emanuel Gat, Ronit Ziv, Barak Marshall,  Renana Raz, Shlomi Bitton, Anat Danieli, Itzhik Galili, Sally-Anne Friedland, Yossi Yungman, Tamar Borer, Liat Dror and Nir Ben-Gal of Adama, Noa Wertheim and Adi Sha’al of Vertigo Dance Company, and Yoram Karmi of Fresco Dance Group.

Perhaps this is why my anticipation of this festival feels different: I can’t help but wonder what new choreographic voices will be revealed this year.  A mind-boggling 80 dances were submitted to the festival’s selection committee, composed of artistic director Hanoch Ben Dror with Ya’ara Dolev, Sally-Anne Friedland, Renana Raz, and Niv Sheinfeld.   I’m looking forward to seeing what sets the 10 chosen works apart from their competition when the 15th Shades of Dance festival opens this week.

Left to right: Shaked Dagan’s We are going back is in program 3; Anat Va’adiya’s Ashetish is in program 1.  Photographs by Eyal Landesman.

If the rehearsal I saw was any indication, this year’s festival has a batch of promising choreographers with very diverse aesthetics.  Michael Miler’s The Speed of Light is one of the most abstract works I have seen since moving to Israel, and it is thoroughly absorbing.  Clad in dark skinny jeans and colorful athletic jackets, Miler and seven other talented dancers maneuver skillfully through a sophisticated movement vocabulary.  As they swiftly skate across the floor and slide to the ground, they appear to be constantly gauging the changing formations of their fellow performers.

The relationship between dancers Adam Ben Zvi and Idan Porges in Shaked Dagan’s We are going back is equally engaging.  At times the well-matched men create a stop-frame effect with their cleverly-timed partnering; at other times they move hypnotically in slow motion.

The other two pieces I saw at Saturday’s rehearsal were worlds apart from each other in their tone. While choreographer/dancer Anat Va’adiya established an unsettling mood for her solo, Dafi Altebab used text and motions from a flight safety presentation to humorous effect in her trio’s quirky scenario.

Dafi Altebab’s new work is in program 3.  Photo by Eyal Landesman.

While I wish I could have stayed for the remainder of the rehearsal, I left early to attend another performance at the Home Port festival.  I suppose that after waiting a year and half to attend Shades of Dance, another few days is bearable!  The festival opens on Wednesday, March 18 with with excerpts of old and recent works by former Shades of Dance participants Nir Ben Gal & Liat Dror, Noa Wertheim & Adi Sha’al, Ronit Ziv, and Barak Marshall.  Then three programs shown back-to-back on Thursday night and Friday afternoon will present the new works from this year’s harvest.

Here are a few more sneak peaks of what will be onstage in the three programs of Shades of Dance 2009:

Anat Meirav’s is in program 2.  Photographs by Eyal Landesman.

From left: Galit Hazor’s Blind Spot is in program 3; Tami and Ron Yitzhaki’s work is in program 2.  Photograph by Eyal Landesman.

Shir Medvetsky’s solo is in program 3.  Photograph by Eyal Landesman.

From left: Ron Amit and Mor Shani’s Lu Carmela; Or Marin’s vanishing point. Photographs by Eyal Landesman.

Related links:

• Dance In Israel’s Events page (with concert information)
• Information on the festival from Suzanne Dellal (in Hebrew)
• Ayelet Dekel’s preview of Shades of Dance in the Jerusalem Post

A sign pointing towards Vertigo Dance Company’s studio on Kibbutz Netiv HaLamed-Hey.

With a wealth of theaters and studios, Tel Aviv and its surroundings serve as the logical home to most of Israel’s choreographers and dance companies.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jerusalem is a distant but growing second center.  But it’s not only Israel’s urban areas that attract dancers.  Scattered across the country’s more rural landscape, three unique dance communities are thriving: the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company and Galilee Dance Village in the north, Adama in the desert south, and the more centrally located Vertigo Dance Company.

I ventured out of Tel Aviv to visit each of these company/communities during my initial survey of Israeli contemporary dance, and I will share the sights from my journeys with photo journals.  This week we’ll start with my trip to Vertigo Dance Company‘s Eco-Art Village on Kibbutz Netiv HaLamed-Hey.  I first published this photo journal of my trip to the Eco-Art Village on The Winger on May 23, 2008.

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Vertigo’s building.

Vertigo’s gorgeous, spacious studio.

A view from the studio – farm equipment and all!

It’s not often that you gaze out the window of a dance studio and see tractors with bales of hay – but during my visit to the Vertigo Dance Company on Sunday (May 18, 2008), that’s exactly what I saw. Located in Israel’s Elah Valley near the town of Beit Shemesh, Kibbutz Netiv HaLamed-Hey is home to the new Eco-Art Village, an intentional community of environmentally-friendly artists pioneered by Vertigo’s directors Noa Wertheim and Adi Sha’al.  While Vertigo still maintains a studio and school in Jerusalem, its original home, the company now rehearses in the peaceful environs of the kibbutz.

When I was there on Sunday, I observed a rehearsal of Noa’s latest work, Ra’ash Levan (White Noise). The dance’s movement vocabulary – with influences from ballet, release technique, contact improvisation, and martial arts – kept me focused on the activity within the studio despite the temptation to look out the windows at the unfamiliar and beautiful surroundings. I returned to the Eco-Art Village on Tuesday for a school performance of Birth of the Phoenix. Premiered in 2004, Birth of the Phoenix is a site-specific work in which the company dances on a special dirt floor under a geodesic dome that is re-constructed for each show (the group has performed the work hundreds of times in Israel and abroad). Like White Noise, this work is extremely athletic with plenty of floorwork, soaring jumps, and partnering – and seeing the dancers throw themselves (at times literally!) into such full-bodied movement on a dirt floor was inspiring.

Here are a few photos to give you a sense of the setting for Birth of the Phoenix:

Me outside the geodesic dome for Vertigo’s Birth of the Phoenix

Inside the dome before the performance.

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Want to know more about some of the dances I mentioned in this post?  For more on White Noise, you can visit Vertigo’s site about the production and read Henia Rottenberg’s in-depth article about the dance.  Visit Vertigo Dance Company’s main site to find out more information about The Birth of the Phoenix. Finally, stay tuned to Dance In Israel for more articles on Vertigo and for an audio podcast with Noa Wertheim!

*This post was made possible thanks to a Fulbright student grant funded by the U.S.-Israel Educational Foundation and hosted by the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

(Improvisation at the Ramat Aviv Mall – Hila Carmel’s video of Lior Ophir’s performance in public spaces class during the 2007 contact festival)

In a mere two months of writing this blog, I have already posted about three festivals (Tel Aviv Dance, Machol Shalem, and Curtain Up). On December 16th, yet another festival will begin: the Israeli Contact Festival.

Whereas the other festivals focus on performances, this three-week festival centers on participation, with people gathering from around the country – and the world – to take part in contact improvisation classes, workshops, and jams. Last year I went to both the opening and closing jams, and I wrote about them for my own blog on December 4, 2007.  Below is my report from the field and another video from the 2006 Greenhouse, so read on . . .

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(Photo: Vertigo’s studio, the site of the opening contact jam)

Most of my dancing and concert-going has remained within the city limits of Tel Aviv-Yafo, but on Friday November 23, I traveled to Kibbutz Netiv HaLamed-Hey near the town of Bet Shemesh for an evening of dance. Vertigo Dance Company recently opened a beautiful studio as part of the Eco-Art Village there, and their second company performed excerpts from Birth of the Phoenix at the opening the three-week International Contact Improvisation Festival. There was a wonderful communal energy in the open space, with visitors from around the world sharing in a vegetarian spread, enjoying the youthful energy of the Vertigo 2 dancers, joining in physical mixers led by Vertigo’s co-director Adi Sha’al, and jamming until the wee hours when some of us returned to Tel Aviv and others curled up into sleeping bags at the back of the space.

Participants in the contact festival traveled around Israel for a week before settling into Tel Aviv last Thursday for a round of workshops, master classes, and evening jams. Monday night (December 3, 2007) was the final jam in the city, and I joined a large crowd – maybe 200 people? – for this event, held in a large gym in the Kiryat Shalom neighborhood of Tel Aviv. A set of witty improvised performances kicked off the evening around 8:30 p.m., and after a massive group warm-up, we jammed to live music that was at times mellow and at times energizing. The crowd thinned by the time I left at 1:00 a.m., but there were still duets spread out through the space with no sign of stopping.

* * *

Some participants moved to the Galilee after their week in Tel Aviv to live and dance together for the “Greenhouse” portion of the festival.  While I did not make it there myself, you can get a feel for the festival’s special spirit by watching Fernando Feder’s video from the 2006 Greenhouse below.

(Fernando Feder’s video from the Greenhouse during the 2006 contact festival)

Read “Making Contact: Contact Improvisation in Israel” for more about this topic.

(Hillel Kogan’s “Everything” will premiere in the 2008 Curtain Up Festival)

* * *

“Another Op’ning, another show
In Philly, Boston, or Baltimo’
A chance for stage folks to say hello
Another op’ning of another show.”
-Lyrics by Cole Porter for the musical Kiss Me Kate

It’s time for another op’ning of another show – again, and again, and again (and again) – in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem this month. The 2008 Curtain Up Festival will bring 4 programs worth of premieres by independent choreographers to the Suzanne Dellal Center and The Lab (HaMaabada) during December.  Michael Getman, Maya Levy, Rachel Erdos, Tomer Sharabi, Maya Stern, and Hillel Kogan will each present new works, as will the collaborative teams of Sahar Azimi and Odelya Kuperberg; Yossi Berg and Oded Graf; and Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor with the participation of Ronit Ziv.  The entire festival opens at Suzanne Dellal on December 3 with a special presentation of Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak‘s Shaker, which recently toured the United States.

For a listing of this year’s Curtain Up performances in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, please visit Dance In Israel’s Events page.  You can read both Helen Kaye’s preview and Ori J. Lenkinski’s preview of the festival in the Jerusalem Post and view the Suzanne Dellal Center’s Hebrew program of Curtain Up.  Finally, I’ll leave you with “Another Op’ning, Another Show,” which I wrote for my own website on November 20, 2007 after attending last year’s Curtain Up Festival.  Make sure to click below and view the rest of the post; there’s another video to whet your appetite!

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(Hillel Kogan’s After the Bolero was a highlight of the 2007 Curtain Up Festival.   Kogan, who is also the rehearsal director for the Batsheva Ensemble, performed in the work along with Ariel Freedman and Iyar Elezra, who recently moved from the ensemble to the main company.)

Right now in Tel Aviv, it’s another opening of another show every night at the Suzanne Dellal Center. Along with the wintry weather (rain and 60-something degree days), November brings the Curtain Up Festival (הרמת מסך), a showcase of fully produced works by young Israeli choreographers. This year there are three separate bills, each featuring 2-3 pieces; each program runs twice at Suzanne Dellal before touring to Jerusalem at the end of the month. The mood has been suitably carnival-like, with a lively 14-piece brass band ushering the full crowd into the theater prior to some of the concerts (though on Friday night during Shabbat, the pre-show entertainment consisted of a much quieter quartet of dancers shifting stones around the plaza).

The entire extravaganza kicked off on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 with Vertigo Dance Company’s Vertigo and the Diamonds (ורטיפו והיהלומים) by Noa Wertheim (נעה ורטהיים). Wertheim and Adi Sha’al (עדי שעל), Vertigo’s directors, had presented work at the Curtain Up festivals when they were beginning their careers, so they came full circle with this performance. With lively music performed onstage by the Diamonds and six remarkably athletic dancers, Wertheim’s work – exploring the dynamics within human relationships – was a crowd pleaser. The audience also enjoyed the onstage dance party at the end.

Over the course of the next three evenings, I saw seven works by the next generation of Israeli choreographers: Ronit Ziv (רונית זיו), Oded Graf and Yossi Berg (עודד גרף ויוסי ברג), Aviv Eveguy (אביב אבגי), Michal Herman (מיכל הרמן), Hillel Kogan (הלל קוגן), Odelya Kuperberg (אודליה קופרברג), and Maya Levy (מאיה לוי). All the works featured casts of three to four dancers, though Kuperberg’s work included an extended cast of pedestrians who entered and exited the stage space throughout the performance.  Like Vertigo and the Diamonds, most of the dances explored human relationships in varying contexts, with the dancers manipulating each other in intricate partnering patterns.

While such a rigorous schedule of dance-watching was a bit tiring, thankfully the works were generally well-constructed and all of the performers were spectacularly committed and engaging.  I found Ziv’s contribution – with a title meaning “Mirror” in Hebrew, but written with reversed lettering – particularly compelling, with a marvelous usage of props including a mirror and teacups.   Meanwhile, the zany humor in Kogan’s After the Bolero (אחרי הבולרו) was a welcome addition to the serious tone of the second Curtain Up program.  As a tall, headless man in a suit attempted to speak – and then, as four highly energetic performers blurted out wild dance phrases punctuated with vernacular dance movements – I laughed and cheered along with the rest of the audience.

*This post was made possible thanks to a Fulbright student grant funded by the U.S.-Israel Educational Foundation and hosted by the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.