Video: CityDance Ensemble

You would have thought that to meet Paul Gordon Emerson, the director of the Washington D.C. based CityDance Ensemble, I would have taken a train from New Jersey (my home state) to the capital of the U.S. while I was still living there.  But instead I grabbed a bus to Jerusalem a few nights ago.

Let’s backtrack: Paul’s interest in reviving older modern dance masterpieces and my research on these works first brought us together online nearly six years ago. We’ve kept up our correspondence over the years, reconnecting this fall when CityDance staged Sophie Maslow’s Folksay from Labanotation score (this was doubly exciting for me: my undergraduate thesis on Jewish-American choreographers highlighted Maslow’s career, and I studied Labanotation intensively in graduate school). Yet we never met face to face – until now.

CityDance is currently touring the Middle East, and as part of the Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival – which features companies from around the world performing both in the West Bank and in Israel – the company had concerts in Jerusalem and Nazareth this week. Since the Tel Aviv is only an hour away from Jerusalem, I jumped at the chance to see the company and hopped on a bus.

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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. ))

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