Idan Cohen’s Swan Lake.  Photo by Marek Weis.

During a preview of the Maholohet festival at Suzanne Dellal in June, the sounds of Tchaikovsky’s famous Swan Lake filled the air.  But what I saw on stage had no overt connection to the images which popped into my mind: a ballerina executing 32 fouettes, four petite dancers doing petit allegro with their arms interlinked, and row after row of “swans” waving their arms like powerful wings.

I was intrigued, and a few weeks ago, I sat down with choreographer Idan Cohen to hear about his contemporary take on one of the most famous ballets in history.  While the three minutes I saw of his work caught my eye, I’m now even more curious about the entire piece.  This is an unmistakably 21st-century Swan Lake, but the connections to the popular 18th-century version run deep.

This article was first published in the Jerusalem Post as “When the Cygnet Grows Up.”

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When the Cygnet Grows Up

“I think the only reason to create something has to be out of love and out of a connection,” states choreographer Idan Cohen.

Like many in the dance world, Cohen feels a strong love for and a deep connection to Swan Lake, the iconic ballet which Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov presented at the famed Mariinsky Theatre in 1895.  Celebrated choreographers from George Balanchine to Mats Ek to Matthew Bourne have put their own spins on the work.  Now with the generous support of several organizations, including Israel’s Culture Ministry, the Pais Foundation and the Suzanne Dellal Center, Cohen is unveiling his own contemporary version in Tel Aviv.

Cohen cites the choreographic history of Swan Lake as one motivating factor in undertaking this production, and he adds, “I feel I have a very deep connection both to the music [by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky] and also to the cultural place that the music and the ballet takes inside our culture, the western culture.  Swan Lake presents such a beautiful, romantic image of strong forces: good opposite evil, beauty opposite alternative beauty, animal versus human . . . all those ideas that are portrayed in Swan Lake in such a defined way – I kind of wanted to open them up and to research how we relate to those forces today.”

Idan Cohen’s Swan Lake.  Photo by Marek Weis.

Cohen’s updated interpretation marks a dramatic, decidedly modern departure from most previous versions of Swan Lake.  Both the royal court and the tutu-clad corps de ballet of swans that dominate ballet renditions are replaced by three female contemporary dancers (Reut Levi, Rita Komisarchik and Daniel Gal) who remain onstage the entire time.  Whereas many productions of the dance stretch over four acts and last three hours – a structure typical of classical ballet – his work runs for an hour and 20 minutes, with one intermission.

Yet despite differences in the technique, setting, characters and length, Cohen’s Swan Lake retains significant links to the legendary Petipa and Ivanov version.  Cohen cut some sections from Tchaikovsky’s stirring orchestral score, but unlike many other contemporary choreographers, he did not manipulate the portions he retained.  “I hope the result is very respectful to the music,” he says, “because this is the most important thing in my eyes.  The music is so brilliant and so strong and so full and so deep that you have to come with a lot of respect and modesty when you work with music such as that.”

Moreover, Cohen explains that regarding his treatment of the music, “I related a lot to the Petipa version in the sense that there’s a lot of similarities in the construction of the group parts and of the solos and how he relates to the music.”

Idan Cohen’s Swan Lake.  Photo by Marek Weis.

While Cohen’s Swan Lake also abandons the fairy-tale narrative of earlier productions, his innovative adaptation goes straight to the core of the original story for inspiration.  “What I tried to create in this piece is what I call an abstractization of the basic ideas that form the Swan Lake synopsis,” he reveals.

From the conventional first act, which features the birthday party of Prince Siegfried, Cohen extracted the concept of birthdays.  During the choreographic process, he and his dancers reflected on their own previous birthdays, exploring the idealization that accompanies these yearly landmarks.

Next, Cohen examined the traditional transformation of the enchanted swans from the second act and reversed this metamorphosis in a sharper look at human nature.  He remarks, “Instead of the animals becoming more and more beautiful or human, the people become more and more animalistic.”

Finally, the choreographer focused on the lake that claims the lives of Swan Lake‘s heroes, and he builds this into a powerful metaphor of what he calls “the lake we’re all struggling to get out of or are living in.”

Cohen discloses that as he and the dancers traced this alternative through-line, they asked themselves very personal questions. Thanks to the performers’ resulting emotional connection to the work and the choreographer’s adventurous, contemporary take on the original ballet’s themes, this Swan Lake proves particularly compelling and relevant for 21st-century viewers.  As Cohen prepares for the dance’s Israeli premiere at the Suzanne Dellal Center, he expresses a wish: “I do hope that the piece will touch the hearts and minds of the audience that is coming to watch it.”

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• “Maholohet: SummerDance2009 at Suzanne Dellal Center”
• “More on Maholohet: A Hot Summer of Dance Continues”

Related Links

• Idan Cohen
• Suzanne Dellal Center

Sheetal Gandhi’s workshop group.  Photo by Tully Chen.

Sheetal Gandhi watched attentively as three pairs of her students transformed the material she had taught into duets.  The dancers chatted with each other in Hebrew, occasionally asking their teacher questions in English.  Yet there were other unfamiliar sounds peppering their speech: bols, syllables from an Indian drum and dance language.  The dancers’ lilting chants created a mesmerizing rhythmic pulse for their kathak-influenced movement.

Meanwhile, in another studio at the Suzanne Dellal Center, Jackie Lopez – aka Miss Funk – was introducing her students to wack’n, one genre of hip-hop.  Starting off slowly, she layered arm gestures onto a full-bodied rocking action, sped up the movement, and played even more with the coordination.  After reviewing a popping phrase and moving onto a house combination, she turned to the dancers.  “I don’t want professional house dancers,” she told them.  “I just want you to feel something new.”

Trying something new is the driving force behind Bridge: Choreographic Dialogues, a unique summer workshop which creates links between the Israeli and American dance scenes.  Claudio Kogon, deputy director of the Suzanne Dellal Center, elaborated, “The point of this program is to bring people who have a unique background, to bring choreographers that could offer people here in Israel something different.”  While the Israeli dancers who participated in this workshop had years of experience in contemporary dance, most of them had little contact with either Sheetal’s kathak-flavored fusion of dance or Jackie’s rich hip-hop vocabulary.  They came, as Jackie hoped, to feel something new.

Jackie Lopez’s workshop group.  Photo by Tully Chen.

Initiated by Miki Yerushalmi and directed by Barak Marshall, Bridge: Choreographic Dialogues is an Education Exchange Project of the Los Angeles/Tel Aviv Partnership.  The project has received support from organizations in both communities, most notably the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, UCLA’s Center for Intercultural Performance, and the Suzanne Dellal Center.  To bridge the gap between choreographers living thousands of miles apart – and to bridge the gap between their respective cultures – this program has been held both in Los Angeles and in Tel Aviv.

This is the third year that Tel Aviv has hosted Bridge: Choreographic Dialogues, and both Sheetal and Jackie traveled from L.A. to teach and create short works on Israeli dancers from August 2-14.  Barak, who is also based in L.A. for part of the year, flew in to teach a week-long repertory workshop with excerpts from Monger and material from Rooster, which will be premiered this fall in Tel Aviv.  The program also featured a choreography workshop with renowned New York-based choreographer Shen Wei.  Jay Auguen’s ballet classes and Noemi Perlov’s contemporary classes rounded out the intensive’s schedule.

Sheetal Gandhi.  Photo by Tully Chen.

For Sheetal, who recently received her MFA from UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures department, the workshop has been an opportunity to explore how she can teach her unique style of movement.  Sheetal calls herself an “intercultural, interdisciplinary artist and choreographer,” and indeed, her work is influenced by diverse forms including kathak, jazz, modern dance, and West African dance.  Her creative choreography blends the complex rhythms, strikingly percussive feet, and fluid, almost calligraphic arm and hand motions of kathak with more contemporary turns, jumps, floorwork, and choreographic motifs.

Sheetal Gandhi’s workshop group.  Photo by Tully Chen.

Speaking about kathak dance, which she has studied in India in Kumudini Lakhia’s Kadamb School and in L.A. with Anjani Ambegaokar, Sheetal remarks, ”I use kathak as a way to teach the things that I do – which is the gestural language, focus, presence, rhythm, timing, musicality, and footwork.  So I would never claim to teach a pure kathak class, but I use it as a springboard.”  Sheetal was excited to share her knowledge of kathak dance with the students in her Bridge: Choreographic Dialogues workshop class.  “I love to pass it on,” she says.  “It’s a form that otherwise people wouldn’t have any exposure to.”

Jackie Lopez.  Photo by Tully Chen.

Likewise, Jackie was eager to educate Israeli contemporary dancers about what was for them an unfamiliar dance style.  Jackie is steeped in the hip-hop culture of L.A., where she has won several house battles, and she has worked with the groundbreaking hip-hop artist Rennie Harris.  “I just love it so much, and it’s my job to pass it on so this hip-hop culture never dies,” she explains.

While studying for her bachelor’s degree in UCLA’s World Arts and Culture, Jackie went deeper into her research of hip-hop dance.  Her approach to teaching reflects what she learned, from the history of hip-hop’s origins to the array of subgenres within hip-hop dance.  During the workshop, Jackie’s students found video clips of different hip-hop legends online, and she says proudly, “They come back [to the studio], and they look better, because they understand it . . . now they’re able to connect to it in their own way, and it comes more naturally.”

Jackie Lopez’s workshop group.  Photo by Tully Chen.

At the final showing for the entire workshop last Friday, both Sheetal and Jackie’s students demonstrated not only their understanding of this new material but also their enjoyment.  Delighted smiles often crept onto Sheetal’s students faces as their fluid arms traced patterns through the air.  When Jackie’s class took the stage, they exuded enthusiasm for the energetic, fast-paced movement.

Both the teachers and the students alike are looking forward to continuing these dialogues with each other and with these genres of dancing.  Jackie said that several of the dancers in her workshop will be taking hip-hop classes this year, and she herself hopes to return to Israel in the future.  “All I crave is to maybe come back and keep making it grow,” Jackie reveals.  “I can tell the students now after this, I hope you guys start practicing so if I come back next year, I’ll see stronger dancers.”

Related Links

• Suzanne Dellal Center

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in Ohad Naharin’s Decadance. Photo by Paul B. Goode

It used to be that Israeli companies like Batsheva Dance Company and the now defunct Bat-Dor toured to the U.S. with American repertory (( Batsheva Dance Company was founded in 1964 by the Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, a patroness of Martha Graham.  Graham was the company’s artistic adviser, and the group performed not only several of her works but also dances by numerous Americans and Europeans – some of who became artistic directors during the group’s early decades. )).  But Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s appearance at the Tel Aviv Dance 2008 festival marks a turning point in dance history: this American company is bringing Israeli repertory to Israel.  Cedar Lake’s programs will include excerpts from Decadance by Ohad Naharin, Batsheva’s artistic director.

Last year I peeked into Cedar Lake’s rehearsal process with Naharin by watching Tomer Heymann’s documentary, Out of Focus.  Whereas the Batsheva dancers take class daily in Gaga, a movement practice developed by Naharin, Cedar Lake’s dancers had to move away from their ballet background and immerse themselves in a dramatically different method of training and working.  This shift required the dancers to trade a traditional emphasis on external appearances for an intense process of personal and physical exploration – a major challenge for dancers reared and rooted in the ballet studio, with its ever-present mirror.

But Cedar Lake is explicitly billed as a contemporary ballet company.  Its repertory is not drawn from 19th century ballet classics but from a range of modern-day works, some of which blur the borders between genres of dance.  Thus the dancers that tackled this challenge did so with within the company’s framework of versatility and physical facility, which is beautifully captured in this video below:

Cedar Lake Demo from Caleb Custer on Vimeo.

(Readers/viewers familiar with Decadance might recognize a quick clip from the dance midway through the video.)

Cedar Lake’s performance of Israeli repertory in Israel provides a fitting opportunity to raise a few issues:

• How has Israeli concert dance evolved from its beginnings in the 20th century?
• When and how did choreography by Israelis become an attractive commodity on the global stage?  (In less formal terms, when and how did Israeli contemporary dance become hot?)
• What differences will Israeli audiences perceive when they see an American troupe performing Israeli repertory?
• More broadly, are there differences between how Israelis and Americans (or any other group) move?   Are there certain qualities which characterize an Israeli physicality?
• What else characterizes the Israeli concert dance scene?
• Why is ballet largely absent from the Israeli concert stage?
• How do we distinguish between genres of dance?  How do we label dance?

I’m afraid I’ll have to leave these questions hanging right now.  They can become much more complex and detailed, and their answers are far from simple.  But expect to find many more posts on Dance In Israel which will probe these issues!

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s performances in Israel will also include Crystal Pite’s Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue and Joe Stromgren’s Sunday Again.  You can find more logistical details about the company’s concerts in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, and Jerusalem by clicking on Events, which is located at the top of Dance In Israel.  I am just starting to place events on the calendars.  If you want to submit events, please contact us!

For more, see my related post, Tel Aviv Dance 2008, or visit Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s website. And finally, here are two more striking photos of the company in Decadance, both by Paul B. Goode: