A man and a woman. It’s even not odd. The stage is empty but I am at home.
They shake hands. There is an agreement. Partnership is a business that must be maintained out of desire.
Let the games begin.Read more
How can one even write about body, movement, language.
To hold something intangible. Fluid. Present-
And in an instant it becomes something different more forceful than what was.Read more
‘Environmental dance,’ is a term used to describe movement which meditates on the human body’s relationship to landscape and the environment. Backley-Astrachan’s dancers personify icy archipelagos, an especially poignant depiction in light of what has been recently coined the ‘anthropocene,’ or the geological age during which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment.Read more
Kids is a staged documentation of sorts of the death of Liu’s mother. Throughout the piece, recorded conversations between Liu and his late mother are played. These talks touch on her impending death, on memory and on family history. Like life, they don’t always follow a clear path.
The audience, though illuminated, were in no way motivated to do anything. To participate in something, one must act. Here there was no action, only the clarification and emphasis on our inactivity.Read more
Maybe what we’re really asking of our audience is, hey, can you hold this for a second? Just as I often ask my husband to hold my bag when I run to the washroom or a friend to grab my jacket while I search for my wallet. Can you hold this?Read more
I’m very different in normal life. I feel the same inside but I present something else, I come out as something else. In real life I’m very hesitant, unconfident and on stage I’m not. On stage, I lose it.Read more
I am grateful to have differentiated, through this experience, between criticizing (Bikoret in Hebrew) and visiting (Bikoor). Neither good or bad, I allow my thoughts and feelings to manifest here in the context of being a visitor.
Shira and Anat Amrani took the beauty and virtuosity of two adamantly non-European forms – belly-dancing and Yemenite folk dance – and stripped them back of decoration, historicity and cultural context. They used what was left to craft a truly brilliant piece of contemporary performanceRead more