Revert to Manual | Sigal Bergman

During my residency at Kelim Choreography Center I developed a dance piece that examines my professional background and different modes of body practice that have stayed with me over time. For the past fifteen years I’ve been creating dance pieces while teaching the Alexander Method and dance improvisation. In this piece I chose to blur the lines between these three areas to bring forth something new. I wanted to enable the audience to experience their physicality as a means for personal growth and transformation. Thought changes movement, and movement changes us, the thinkers. The body changes thought and thought changes us, the movers.

This piece was developed in two phases. I first created ‘Revert to Manual’, a dance solo that premiered at the ‘Diver’ Dance Festival in 2018. I performed the solo in the classic format of stage and audience, and explored how the performance can also be a class, which has the power to heal. I continued to develop the piece for the ‘March Hare’ Dance Festival in 2019. This time I challenged the traditional relationship between stage and audience, inexplicitly inviting viewers to examine their physicality during the event, while I myself examined the information I wanted to share and the interaction with which to communicate it best.

TIMES END 10 | Einav Rosolio and Eva Shubstarska

In our dance piece ‘TIMES END 10’ we examine the concept of the inevitable end. We explore the attempt to extend it, the details that comprise it, the aesthetic and fantasy it embodies. We searched for different ways we can depict the elusive and dramatic nature of ‘the ending’, gave it many different names, embellished it. We chose Hollywood’s obsession with catastrophe as our starting point, studying how suspense built through sound and movement creates the pathos we are all accustomed to. We practiced the physicality of the moments prior to the end. The piece will show during the ‘March Hare’ Dance Festival 2019.

Joy, Part I | Asaf Aharonson

“Joy, Part I”, is a dance piece created during the second phase of Asaf Aharonson’s research this past year. The piece tries to find a foothold within multiple materials and a respite from restlessness. Asaf experimented with writing while observing others dancing with their eyes closed. The resulting texts were characterized by sharp transitions from one image to the next, deriving from the desire to create a textual space rich with information but which ultimately lacked unity. Alternatively, the texts were characterized by an insistence to go back and forth between a unified and a scattered quality.

Participating: Asaf Aharonson, Tami Leibowitz, Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Louise Trueheart

Mass|Iris Erez

Time and space are dynamic quantitative elements, according to Stephen Hawking. A body moved by force alters space-and-time, which in turn influence the way force interacts with an object/body.

Five people echo their surroundings with their bodies- each responding according to their own personal/historical experience to the shared present moment, transforming into prototypes of beings inseparable from their surroundings; body-environment as one interconnected entity. By doing so they raise questions about themselves, their surroundings and different ways of existing between these two coinciding forces. Their actions challenge the role of art, specifically of performance, which aspires to create human contact that moves and stirs people.

Can we adopt insights from the world of physics into the personal, political and philosophical aspects of our lives?

This is a multifaceted experiment; we examine how our bodies, which are inevitably influenced by our environment, have the power to counteract its impact on us.

This project evolved from Iris Erez’ research on her dance solo “Local/Not Easy”, in which she explores, through her own experiences, how locality influences our lives. This time Iris took five young dancers to examine how our physical choices in time and space can instigate change in locality, despite its deterministic nature.

Participating: Or Ashkenazi, Dor Frank, Maya Tamir, Matan Daskal, Zuki Ringart

Dramaturgy and artistic consulting: Sharon Zuckerman Weiser | Sound: Kim Taitelbaum | Production: Sigal Dahan | Many thanks to Kelim Choreography Center for their support.

Supported by ’Mifal Hapais’ artist fund 2018. The piece is a development of “The Makers” a site-specific dance piece which showed in the Bat Yam International Festival of Street Theater and Art 2018, recipient of the “Tights” residency at the Mandel Cultural Center.

Making Sense| Shira Eviatar

‘Making Sense’, a dance piece that is a confluence of various materials, an offshoot of a previous creation. This work examines the choreography of the creative process. What is the object of the creative process? What is revealed in the gap between the creative process and the dance piece that has evolved into a separate entity? This work examines disappearance, presence, omission and connection as fertile points-of-departure for creation. Does the present moment comprise particles of potential from the previous moment? Does the choice-not-taken stumble into the present and shape it?

During my studies at Kelim Choreography Center in 2015, I presented dance materials in the ‘March Hare’ Dance Festival, which later evolved into my work ‘Body Mandala’. Some of the original materials weren’t incorporated in the piece, and have been asking for resolution ever since. In 2018 I started working on a new dance piece together with Anat Amrani, Evyatar Said, Anat Vaadia and Eyal Bromberg. This piece raises questions regarding the meeting point between content and form, symbols and existence, the defined and the elusive.

She Stone Sea, let us play; I am a wave and you are floating, I am a severed stem and you are dreaming, I am a jungle animal and you are in love, you are a footprint in the sand – I am a warrior, you are a tree-root and I run away, you are nature – I am the memory.  A body sculptured, as a living still-image. In a world of stillness we emerge; breaking a silence, forgetting the stillness, returning to it – naturally. We become nature, a breathing object, an abstract, an animal. Cutting loose from the self we are a primal, universal body, fulfilled with longing and permission; to experience the moment, as life itself, anew.

Idea, choreography and performance: Maya Matilda Carroll and Ornit Mark Eitan | sound and music: Roy Carroll | dramaturgical assistance: Maya Wienberg

Premiered at March Hare Festival 2018, Kelim Center

Supported by Kelim Center for Choreography and Mifal HaPayis (the Israel State Lottery)

Photo: Yair Meyuhas

Special Thanks to Anat Danieli, May Zarhy, Sharon Zuckerman Weiser, Danya Zemer

Two Room Apartment

Six years after Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor created their adaptation to Nir Ben Gal and Liat Dror’s piece “Two-Room Apartment” from 1987, the duo return to examine it from a new perspective.

In Richard Linklater’s trilogy “Before Sunrise”, “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight”, the protagonists, Jesse and Celine, rendezvous every nine years to reflect on love and life. Similarly, we return to this piece because we want to see each other with new eyes. Intimacy manifests differently in the studio and in our home, our own two-room apartment. Through this piece we explore the changes we experienced since we first created it six years ago: changes in our minds, bodies, relationship – and in our perceptions of space, stage and audience.  Above all, we return to this piece because we want to dance and perform together again. This time, our research led us to work with another piece of Dror and Ben Gal, “The Third Dance” from 1990.  Self-reflection through others’ works allows us to touch upon sensitive topics, free of ego. It allows us to examine our lives as partners and creators of contemporary dance in Israel.

This piece was co-produced together with Centre Chorégraphique National de Rillieux-la-Pape, France, and Pumpenhaus Theatre, Munster, Germany.

The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

Premiere: 2018

Shira Eviatar produced a new solo piece for the dancer Evyatar Said, in which she continues to explore how bodies of knowledge are expressed in the physical body.

Eviatar and Said met in their neighborhood, Kerem HaTeimanim, Tel Aviv, at a mutual friend’s home. They decided to continue in the studio the organic conversation that developed during this encounter, to further delve into their shared curiosity of the presence of cultural traditions in the contemporary body/mind. The piece outlines a personal cultural landscape: movements, dances, rhythms, gestures, values, and ways of thinking and communicating that are all part of a language acquired while growing up. In public this language was negatively labeled as “different”. Onstage, Said emigrates from his home, weaving and unraveling physical memories, sensations and feelings and celebrating the chance to create an independent existence.

The piece premiered in the ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ Festival and was supported by the ‘Tights: Dance and Philosophy’ Artist-in-Residence program, and the Mifal HaPais Council for the Culture and Arts.

The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

In this piece I explore the connection between art, fatherhood and disability. Paralyzed from the chest down, I am dependent on technology (my wheelchair). My body can be divided into 3 parts: the able top part, the paralyzed bottom part, and assistive technology, my wheelchair. For my children’s sake I try to put aside my circumstances and find playfulness and imagination within my limitations. In the safe space of Kelim’s studio I create movement, on my own or with others, and using my body, I experiment with movement in space.

. The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

Tamar Lam and David Kern’s piece “Dog Walkers” comes into being at the confluence of dance, performance, and live music, while adhering to an organizing principle that allows the piece to be structured and fluid at the same time.

Scattered throughout the space are objects that allude to a specific cultural context: a deck of cards and a cigarette lighter, a guitar and ukulele, books, microphones, plaid shirts, cowboy hats, and two large cardboard dogs. Sentimental folk songs play in the background. The objects, like the movement, have a reciprocal relationship with the semi-fantastic/humoristic and semi-realistic narrative that gradually unfolds. At certain moments, the movement leads the performers to a specific object, whose identity is then defined through the performers’ bodies’ interaction with it. At other moments, an object functions as a visual and conceptual anchor for movements or for spoken words. Thus is created a partitura of intimacy -love, yearning, and separation – that bridges the interstices of emotional perception and sensory experience.

(Idit Suslik, The Contemporary Eye)

The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim and premiered in 2017 at the ‘Zirat Mahol’/ ‘Dance Scene’ Festival

‘The Voices’ is a collaboration between May Zarhy and Michal Oppenheim Landau. This time they brought together an ensemble of women dancers and singers to explore the space between the media of music and dance, comparing between the tangibility of voice and that of movement. The result is a choir that is not confined to the medium of voice alone, but flows between body, voice and vibration, and aims to create a third medium that is neither song nor dance, yet both at the same time.

. The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

All the energy and all the noise are concentrated in this place, a ceaseless flow of people and activity. I came to Israel from Brussels to develop my ideas. I don’t know what I was thinking, but it doesn’t work that way (here). I couldn’t escape reality. The studio’s walls weren’t thick

enough to hold back energy from bursting in. I couldn’t ignore the noise.

(Even if) I swallow a mushroom to sharpen my consciousness, the pain only intensifies. To where did I think I was escaping? I am here, and yet I feel the flow of pain even stronger. All my preparations, the things and objects I brought with me, even soil from just outside the building, all look wrong inside the studio. They pale in comparison with this town’s energy. I don’t know what I was thinking, but it’s not working. I must be in constant motion here.

I got stuck in a loop. This studio is one, big sound box. Every five minutes an airplane passes overhead. I decided I must utilize the sounds and noise bursting in to survive this experience. When I stepped outside the studio I started to understand what was going on around me. It scared me. The studio is in the town’s industrial zone, adjacent to a strip of land where there once was nature and now only a few scrubby, stubborn plants remain. I visited the last sand dunes that will soon be taken over by trucks and concrete, and gazed up into the sky, only to find the aircrafts, whose noise was infiltrating the studio’s walls, transporting passengers to Europe and America. Everyone dumps their garbage on this little strip of land, which is turning into a brown-field. If everyone does as he pleases, then so must I.

This is a psychedelic frontier, an existential residency in ‘Kelim’. This work is an environmental sound pollution piece; this is surviving the noise.

The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim.

‘Yesh Beze Tom’/’Naive’ was created as part of the ‘Dance and Community’ program at the Kelim Choreography Center. The piece premiered in the Bat Yam Festival in August 2017.

I wanted people of different ages and backgrounds to come together in this piece, to connect between the young and old and between professional and amateur dancers. The collaborative nature of this work’s process allowed the different participants to share their knowledge and approaches. Using the sandy beach of Bat Yam as our venue, we created a piece which combines emotions and movement, light and darkness, performance and ritual. The performers dance together in circles that repeatedly form and disperse, becoming a ‘tribe’ and then dividing into smaller groups. At times, the onlookers may catch a glimpse of a movement/gesture that alludes to caring, closeness, intimacy, eagerness, or playfulness, which grants the piece an air of naivety.

. The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

End of the Wall

‘End of the Wall’ is an instant composition piece, created collaboratively by a group of artists from Israel and India. In this work the artists explored ways to communicate and create together by overcoming their geographic distance and cultural differences.

We chose to look at each other’s daily lives in the private and public spheres and share the personal and social challenges each reality presents. Technology allowed for communication and initial connection, and highlighted the similarities between the two groups, as artists who face the political and religious complexity and tension inevitably produced in traditional societies comprising different ethnic groups and communities. Technology blurs the differences between our cultures, religions and social classes.

The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

A new piece by Avner Miriam Amit and Keren Ben Altabet in collaboration with Or Avishay, Faye Shapiro and Yonatan Levy.

In this piece we continue to explore the themes of breath, voice and sound boxes, and, indeed, the basic materials of life itself; the beating of the heart, birth, and connection. During our research certain questions arose, such as: What sound does an audience make? We discovered that listening, as a performative tool, can change a space.

Premier: ‘Hare’ festival, Kelim, 2018

.The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

‘Alfa’, a movement piece, opens and closes in an embrace. The duet is a compilation of moments that evolved through our ongoing search for aesthetic movement, through physical exploration of certain inhibiting perceptions – and the potential to develop genuine closeness, despite these perceptions. Our point of departure was our yearning for intimacy, alongside our difficulty to engage in it. During our creative process we returned to intimate moments in our lives, examined them, experimented and played with them – and then “tried them on” again, stretching them to their limit.

The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim.

Many thanks to: Ophir Yudilevitch, Oren Laor, Danielle Cohen Levy, May Zarhy, Maya Levy, Niv Sheinfeld, Sigal Dahan, Anat Danieli, Sharon Zuckerman Weiser.

I recently rediscovered ‘Limpopo’ by Russian children’s poet K. Chukovsky, the story of a doctor on a mission to cure Africa’s animals (translated to Hebrew by Israeli poet Nathan Alterman). The book and the story became the inspiration for this piece and the blueprint for my work process.

As an actor in physical theater for children, I am fascinated by the young audience’s deep understanding of abstract movement and literary language, and by the shared creative process with the children.

Together with circus artist Fyodor Makarov and choreographer Anat Danieli, I explored and developed movement for this piece. Bezalel Borochov composed music for chosen excerpts from the text.

After two months of work I presented the piece and included the children from the audience in the performance. The children wore costumes and used objects they had created in a workshop preceding the performance. I was delighted to learn that the children were neither deterred nor restricted by the sophisticated prose, but, on the contrary, enchanted by it. The poems freed them from a fixed narrative, and there was no limit to the creativity they displayed in their prop creation, stage presence and exploration of abstract movement.

.The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

Premier: ‘Hare’ festival kelim, 2018

BALAGAN BODY

A dance piece about bodies in states of emergency by Patricia Carolin Mai

BALAGAN BODY is a transnational Dance Production between Tel Aviv and Hamburg and deals with the Chaosbody that explores the body as an archive populated with personal and cultural memories. A dancer from Tel Aviv and a dancer from Hamburg will investigate how people process the transition between exceptional conditions and normality in the long term. Interviews with people in Tel Aviv and Hamburg form the basis for the choreographic research. How do people deal with sudden attacks? How do extreme states translate into the body? What distinguishes a body that is exposed to a permanent threat from a body that lives in relative safety? Together with two musicians the four artists enter into a physical and acoustic dialogue and become an unpredictable, at the same time threatened organism – a delicate construction, somewhere between normality and emergency. BALAGAN BODY is a Israel | German Co-Production of Kelim Choreography Center and Kampnagel – Internationales Zentrum für schönere Künste Hamburg.

Supported by: Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg, Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V., Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, Rudolf Augstein Stiftung | Coproduction: Kelim Choreography Center ‘Artist in residency’ program, Kampnagel Hamburg Special Thanks to: K3 Choreography Center|Tanzplan Hamburg and Seoul Dance Center Korea

‘BeTwixt’ is about transitional space, which is characterized by change or transformation. It is the bridge between one state coming to an end and the beginning of a new one, a space full of possibilities and potential. In this space nothing is defined. Everything is just coming into existence: personal, cultural and social identities, the context in which the “I” operates. During the piece, each one of us enters different states. At times we create an image/idea together, but everything is always changing. Nothing is constant, as we are busy ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. This piece is an experiment in how to adapt to others – the other who is opposite from me, complimentary to me, or similar to me. In this piece we want to reflect on how to establish and maintain communication. What is the space/place in which we move together, which allows us to cross borders and brings us together? It is an invitation to take time to really look at the ‘other’ and see ourselves in them.

. The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

פוסט סטטוס فوسط سططوس Post Status

A collaborative artistic-political event, that deals with the ability to communicate at times of war.

This work investigates post-traumatic mechanisms of the Israeli society; the rising levels of verbal violence during heated violent times; and, in particularly, the ability of the body to offer empathetic discourse even during war time.

The work has been inspired by Facebook statuses I posted during the last war (Operation Protective Edge, July-August 2014). The action of the body vis-à-vis text is investigated through means of somatic practices, such as Yoga, the Alexander Technique, BMC (Body Mind Centering) and dance improvisation.

Body movement gives space to the rise of personal memories, as well as political ones.

The residency period is dedicated to working with this works’ collaborators; as well as to bring together the scenographic, dramaturgical, technological and compositional aspects into one coherent event.

Ido Feder (Israel) and David Marques (Portugal)…
In collaboration with Fransisco Camacho (Portugal) and Tamar Shelef (Israel)

This piece begins with an “arranged royal marriage”. Two great performers – Camacho and Shelef – who signify great local cultures of dance and also received international acclaim, will join together for the first time on stage. Feder and Marques desired this artistic and royal combination so they can create the last part of their trilogy about the figure of the ‘bête de scène’ (stage animal). In the past, they have researched the figure as the tension between truth and fiction and later as the tension between a live event and a photographed image. Now, they investigate it’s authority.

PALE FIRE is an evening length solo dance performance. It draws inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov’s extraordinary poem, Pale Fire, that appears as a text-within-a text in his novel of the same name, published in 1962. The poem, considered one of the most beautiful in the English language, deals with artistic creation and inspiration, with ageing and death, memory and artistic appropriation. The tension between the poem’s rigorous, almost mathematical, structure and its exuberant flights of fancy, are striking, serves as a rhythmic and thematic basis to my dance piece; I have also appropriated a few of the poem’s images into my work as well. The piece, like the original, is my own fictional autobiography, mixing movement, imagery, spoken word and song. Like the poem, my piece aims to create a house of mirrors in which fragments of my true self appear intermittently. As part of this series of reflections, my niece Lia Bergman, the daughter of my identical twin, joins me in the performance, playing a character that links my own past with the future embodied in her playful and youthful persona.

. The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

in this piece I build events around the figure of the New York musician Moondog, and his recordings: Homeless by choice, blind, avant-gardist with a classical education, a performer who wandered around town dressed in a Viking costume, singing his songs in the streets and gaining him an audience doing so.

As Moondog, I challenge the establishment structure of public space: Shortcuts, private experiences and marginal areas are used as practices that escape systematization and form eludes close relationship between the real and the embodiment.

. The piece was created as part of the ‘Artist in residency’ program at kelim

מרכז כלים שמחים לארח את הכוריאוגרפית טליה בק במסגרת תכנית ‘שהות אמן’ 4#, לקיום תהליך מחקרי לעבודה חדשה. בתהליך זה משתפת בק פעולה עם השחקן הפיסי הותיק צביקה פישזון והאדריכלים ליטל פולקמן ונדב ביגניץ.

“המפגש בין הגופים השונים של שני הפרפורמרים, המקפלים בתוכם, זהות, פרקטיקות, היסטוריה, תרבות, גיל ומגדר שונים, מסקרן ביכולתו לחשוף, לזקק, לאתגר ולגלות את הגוף האחר כמו את הגוף שלי עצמי, המדבר את עצמו, היסטוריה, זיכרון, שגרה, יצר. גופים חוויתיים המתערבבים, טועמים ומטעימים זה את זה. טקסטורות פיזיות ורגשיות מרובות רבדים המגששות, מתפרקות כל אחת לעצמה, לתוך השניה, ולתוך החלל. החלל והמרחב גם הם מתקפלים אל תוך הגופים ומייצרים טופוגרפיות שונות ומשתנות התורמות גם הן ליצירת התוכן.”

ON LINE

This piece deals with the phenomenon of the computer as an inseparable path of communication in modern life relating to its expression in the private and public realms. The work exposes our ongoing desire to place ourselves within a subjective reality constructed by us. By using the medium of Skype, selectively, we place and frame objects and by doing so, we influence the quality of our discourse. The form of communication creates the sound while voices echo and nourish it. Using a computer and conducting oneself with it during the performance reflects the molding of a body which bares the shapes that are derived from the cross-breeding of these two entities. We are interested in capturing the moments in which the line between human body and the body of the machine is breached.

Choreography and performance: Yuli Kovbasnian
Creative performer: Tamar Ben Cnaan

“space-ballet” emerged out of the fascination of working with objects; observing, acting with and responding to their qualitative features, as well as the space they create or in which they are found. The interaction between the body, object and space exposes movement, image and story-telling potentials, and unravels the object as a body in itself as it moves (and being moved), transforms and transmits feelings. Thus, “space-ballet” is a choreographic work for human and non-human bodies, and more precisely for two dancers, four (rather large) pieces of nylon, two mint candies and a documentation of a man-made grove.

The choreography advances step by step, unfolds through precision and rigor, builds up layer by layer. Initiated actions reveal movements and rhythms, which assemble into an almost serial sequence of images. Each image is independent from the previous one but holds a common denominator, emphasizes the characteristics of each body and makes visible its poetic potential.

הכוריאוגרפית תמי לבוביץ החלה את תכנית שהות האמן (רזידנסי) שלה במרכז כלים. עבודתה תציג בבכורה במסגרת פסטיבל “הרמת מסך” 2015.

Zarhy, an Israeli choreographer who has been working in Germany in the past years, presented her works in numerous theaters and festivals worldwide, created, among others, within the collective MAMAZA (which was founded by Zarhy together with Ioannis Mandafounis and Fabrice Mazliah – former dancers of the Forsythe company). In the creation which Zarhy developed within her residency in Kelim, she asked to create a space, which allows intimacy and non-threatening physical proximity between the performer and the viewer. How can a piece of dance, as well as a piece of music, today be virtuosic today? One that embraces the technical, physical, vocal skills of the dancer and the singer, in order to create the settings for an experience, which derives from this virtuosity and intelligence carried within it, to unfold.

The piece “YES” was created in collaboration with Michal Oppenheim and had its premiere in the Diver festival in September 2015.

שהות אמן עם הכוריאוגרפית בשמת נוסן התקיים בין פברואר-דצמבר 2015 (בתקופות זמן שונות).

שהות האמן הסתיימה בשתי הופעות שקיימה בשמת עם יצירתה החדשה Emotions in Vitro במרכז כלים בחודש דצמבר 2015.