There’s something fairy tale-like about the Suzanne Dellal Center complex, even just arriving at the courtyard or the well next to Inbal Dance Theater feels like stepping into a princess’s palace. Being there, even for a moment, feels like a bubble separate from the city. And with all the support of 1|2|3, every princess immediately levels up to a queen.
So I went to take a peek at the next generation of dance royalty.Read more
I think of Boutrous’s wheat field as a particular site of memory, an object that is like the gun that appears in the first act to remind both the performer and ourselves of the place we come from.Read more
We won’t ever know the real effect of walking in and out of this war but in the film Puppet Party, Galina uses his many talents to convey the fractured pieces of himself unraveling and being unraveled. Read more
Waiting Places by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber is unarguably beautiful. Its beauty shines like a dew drop rolling from a rosebud, or the reflection of soft sunrise’s rays glimmering on the sea. Highly skilled and expressive dancers perform exquisite choreography, screened in black and white. The women’s long hair and dresses move along their athletic bodies, the men’s heels mark the fast tempo of the passing of time. The craftsmanship of everyone involved: the dancers, the choreographers, the camera and editing, and of course the music, is impressive and inspiring. I’m still left waiting, though, for something else. Something that perhaps was never intended to be part of this particular piece, yet without it the work feels incomplete. Read more
Maybe the real question the piece is asking isn’t “If there were no war, what kind of dance would happen?” (as the program states), but rather: How can one keep dancing in the middle of a war? How can we dance not about the war, not for it, not in service of it, not in protest of it, but also not with our eyes closed to it? Is it possible to continue making good dance theater, while still being self aware of what’s happening around us? Should we? And what about creators who don’t want to engage directly with the war, what is their place right now, in this heartbroken moment of sand and stone?Read more
This is a very different story than the ones we know, but perhaps it’s the only one that dares to get close to the truth. A story that places primordial emotion center stage, and the yearning to draw near to it, where even failure becomes a kind of success. I leave the performance moved by a work of art that continues, with devotion and faith, to try to return to the beginning of things. Read more
A gold piece of aluminum-plastic like material meanders playfully into the performance space. The kids in the audience, including my munchkins, are fully engaged with this mysterious entity as it makes its magical entrance. Hidden within the globule of gold are the wonderful dancers Noa Chen and Dikla Rejevsky. Noa emerges first with wondrous elasticity and fluid movements.Read more
Maya Brinner’s beautiful piece, ‘Home Work,’ embodies every sense of this learning curve while weaving motherhood into the tapestry seamlessly. We learn to dance by dancing. We learn to mother by mothering. We’re all in this delicious state of learning.Read more
This is a dance performance for children that is exactly what it should be: simple, beautiful, and intelligent. It is a show that treats children as the intelligent beings they are, and does not compromise on high standards of movement and material.Read more
It’s hot and humid, stifling in every sense, and it feels that especially now Yasmeen Godder and Dikla’s audacious creation brings us back to that primal connection of dance, singing and playing music..Read more