התרשמות של יוליה פריידין מהמופע ‘שקט בקופסה (שחורה)’ מאת איסק צ’וקרון ושחר חנין

Yulia Frydin’s Response to Sound Shelter by Isak Chocron and Shahar Hanin

You enter the space and hear the sound of a metronome. Down on the stage stands a yellow “Caution: Wet Floor” sign. Inside the warning triangle is a small pool of water. I hear the metronome, the rhythm of my own breathing, and the beating of my heart.

I knew I was about to see a performance about the search for silence. As a close friend once said to me, “You’re allergic to silence.”

The first time I ever spent a night sleeping in the desert, the absolute silence surrounding me stirred a deep sense of restlessness. My thoughts suddenly became much louder. I could feel and hear the subtle sounds inside my own body.

Now I find myself searching for moments of silence in a reality that feels increasingly busy and full of upheaval. I imagine that Isak and Shahar, the creators of Sound Shelter, were asking themselves what silence sounds like, and what actions performed with the body, clothing, and shoes sound like within that silence.

Throughout the performance, I felt as though I were watching a kind of sound laboratory. The four dancers, Tamar Rosenzweig, Ella Eisman Lieber, Daniel Ben Ami, and Shahar Hanin, investigate the sounds that movement can produce while wearing different kinds of clothing. What sounds do windbreakers and raincoats create? What about different kinds of shoes, boots, high heels, dance shoes, as they meet the floor through different rhythms and qualities of movement?

The dancers drum on their bodies, listen to the sounds their clothes produce as they move, examine the differences between the sounds made by different shoes, and eventually remove them and hang them on hooks suspended from the ceiling, as though they too have completed their role.

They are dressed like onions, layer upon layer of clothing made from different materials: nylon, sequins, synthetic fabrics. As they gradually peel away these layers, the remaining sounds become increasingly exposed: physical effort, breathing, and the sound of the heartbeat.

Tamar sways in a large skirt, the fabric rustling with every movement. Then she removes it and repeats the very same phrase. Now, all that can be heard is the sound of exertion, her breath escaping her body.

One particularly beautiful and poetic scene finds Daniel and Shahar sitting close together, each placing two fingers on the other’s pulse. Through the opening and closing of his fist, Shahar demonstrates what he hears in Daniel’s heartbeat. Nearby, the dancer Ella seems like an extension of that pulse, translating its rhythm into movement.

The entire performance feels like an ongoing investigation, almost childlike in its curiosity. Again and again, it asks what else can be discovered through the body, what sounds emerge in complete silence, and what happens to the body when music takes over.

For example, Tamar lowers herself into a split, then repeatedly rises and sinks back down, exploring how many times she can repeat the action and how the impact of her body in that position sounds in absolute silence.

Even when classical music enters the performance, it still feels like part of the experiment. How does it alter the movement quality of each dancer, each responding from within their own body and movement history? It was at this point that I began wondering about the creators’ relationship to music. I wasn’t sure whether they were surrendering to it or observing it from the outside, and that question stayed with me throughout the final section of the work.

The curiosity the performance sparked in me did not end with the applause. I wanted to understand where this research into listening and silence had begun, so I spoke with Isak Chocron about the creative process.

What was the starting point for the work?

Honestly, the idea for the performance began with a fairly accidental moment. During COVID, there were all kinds of videos of dance premieres replacing cancelled live performances. At one point, Shahar was watching a dance piece and was completely captivated by it, until he realized his phone had been on mute. The moment he turned the sound on, the dance suddenly affected him much less. That tension became something he wanted to explore together with me and the dancers.

At first, we wanted to create a performance in which sound would be completely isolated for the audience. But the research we were doing in the studio, which gradually unfolded during the war, led us toward different exercises that used silence as raw material in the search for something more human and more alert. In the end, we abandoned the gimmick that had originally sent us down this path.

What interested you during the process? What were you trying to investigate?

At first, I do not think we really understood why we were so drawn to this idea. Over time, we realized that, for us, silence is almost an impossible task. That realization led us to search for a kind of radical listening, listening to everything without hierarchy. To what happens intentionally, what happens accidentally, what is heard, the sound of what is seen but remains silent, the wind, our thoughts, or the music stuck inside our heads. Everything became equally important.

We first tried opening our ears outward, toward the sounds entering through the studio windows, and later inward, toward the body trying to hold both the silence the space demands and the noise or symphonies bubbling inside it.

As the war continued, the longing for silence, or even the desire to achieve silence, suddenly felt like a collective prayer that could never really be fulfilled. It also became a kind of wake up call against numbness and emotional fatigue.

We felt that all the emotional baggage, the injustice, the personal and social noise had become another layer making our exercises more difficult. Technically, we were investigating silence itself, what forms it can take and what possible ways there are to achieve it. At the same time, we kept piling layers of noise and emotional weight onto ourselves and trying to remove them, even though they never truly disappear.

That is where the whole sequence of undressing and removing the clothing came from.

We wanted to make dance that feels accessible, in the sense that we, as performers, are constantly trying to project the stream of thoughts passing through our minds. Music that each dancer privately chose for themselves at a particular moment in the performance, or the sound of the audience in that famous video of Baryshnikov dancing The Nutcracker, which Tamar made us watch during one of our rehearsals.

What inspired the work?

We had a very intuitive and rich moodboard. Many of the references dealt with sound or conducting. We studied the movement vocabulary of different conductors and different conducting qualities, inspired, of course, by Xavier Le Roy, but also by watching conductors online.

There were also many inspirations that came from Instagram. For example, just before the premiere, we cut a section that was almost directly inspired by a video of a cheerleading team challenging one another to improvise dances to melodies they invented on the spot.

At the beginning of the process, we were looking for an experience similar to Dana Rotenberg’s Moving Through the Ear, but eventually we found ourselves moving closer to The Show Must Go On by Jérôme Bel.

For me, the strongest inspiration is a memory of seeing Maguy Marin’s May B in Israel. There are long stretches of darkness during which you hear the dancers before you can see them, until your eyes slowly adjust. It was a challenging and surprising viewing experience that made it possible to perceive things differently.

And finally, perhaps the most significant inspiration throughout the work is a duet by two musicians who sit side by side, breathing, groaning, and vocalizing together. It accompanies much of the performance. In our piece, it takes on an almost dramatic, even threatening quality, whereas in its original context it is almost ridiculous, very formal. It was fascinating to discover how completely something can change once it is removed from its original context.