With the oil prices being outrageous I elected to not go far and have my first ever Summer “Staycation”. Over the past couple weeks people around me have been talking about Summer like it is already over. I have accepted that fact. The end is near and I would like to bow out gracefully.
Here are some pics of my Summer “Staycation”. I did not go too far but I had a fun and productive Summer anyways. All of the pics that I have decided to posts are all varied activities involving work, play or personal interests. Enjoy.
And
here
we go
The X-men moved to San Francisco for serious
Me on the 4th of July
Bobbi Smith from Batsheva
Bobbi and I working in my home studio
Dancers in the making
Perez Hilton and I
Joker from The Dark Knight
Patrick Lennen on the 1’s and 2’s in the studio
Artist’s Davie Crockette. You will be seeing a lot more of him real soon.
The Batsheva Dance Company in Naharin’s Virus. Photo by Gadi Dagon
In between packing and tying up various loose ends in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago, I swung by the Suzanne Dellal Center to check out Batsheva’s Gaga intensive workshop. Eldad Mannheim, who manages the Batsheva Ensemble, had told me it was full, but I don’t think I was prepared for what I saw when I walked into Studio Varda on a Wednesday afternoon. Dancers had come literally from all over the world – the U.S., Mexico, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and no doubt many other countries – to study Gaga. The participants had already taken a morning Gaga class by the time I arrived, and now they were busily reviewing material from the daily repertory class in small groups. On the day I attended the workshop, Danielle and Bosmat first led us through a tight gestural section from Ohad Naharin’s MAX. After seeing this excerpt not only in MAX but in several performances of Seder, I was quite eager to try my hand(s) at this movement (so to speak). The workshop participants had already learned the speedy sequence, and while it was challenging for me to pick up the exact gestures during Danielle’s review, I enjoyed working with some of the more qualitative instructions as she picked apart certain motions. With precise instructions about our dynamics, focus, and intent, the movement became richer; nothing less than full commitment to each moment was acceptable. We also worked on moving together as a group in a tight formation, watching and sensing each other to maintain the unison that has often impressed me when I have seen the company.
After MAX, we switched gears and turned to phrasework from “Humus,” a woman’s section from Naharin’s Shalosh. Now tinier gestures were juxtaposed with gloriously full-bodied dancing, motion was countered with stillness, and quasi-balletic poses were contrasted with quirkier movements. As in Gaga classes, we were often instructed to connect to pleasure: enjoy the feeling of our bodies as we spring into the air, find a feeling of ultimate indulgence as we sit back and cross one leg over the other. And once again, even as we surrendered individually to the fullest sensation possible, the unity of the group was key.
I thoroughly enjoyed learning this repertory, but the highlight of the day for me was the Gaga method class. I had seen this on the schedule and wondered just what was Gaga method. It turned out to be an opportunity to more thoroughly explore a few concepts outside of the typical 1-hour Gaga class with additional explanation from the teacher and discussion with other students – almost a meta-Gaga, if you will. On this occasion, Ohad Naharin himself taught the class, guiding us through an examination of the physical differences between joy and pleasure before leading us through an investigation of how to connect to a sense of plenty of time even while moving at an ever-increasing speed. We also worked as a full group and in pairs, testing our ability to quickly pick up and interpret movement. Finally we sat down and wrapped up our session, asking questions and sharing our thoughts. I walked away with much more to think about. Besides mulling over some of the recurring ideas and images in Gaga, I realized a major reason why I have been so drawn to it throughout my time in Israel: I’m a researcher, and each Gaga class is an opportunity to research movement. It’s also no wonder that I loved the Gaga method class. At some point, every researcher steps back from data collection and moves on to analysis, and while I have certainly spent a lot of time processing the classes I have taken, I have rarely been able to analyze the concepts from and experience of Gaga with other students - and with Ohad. What a way to cap off 10 months in Tel Aviv!
Ohad Naharin’s Shalosh ( Three ), which supplied some movement material for Deca Dance. Photo by Gadi Dagon.
The Batsheva Ensemble in Ohad Naharin’s Seder.
It’s fitting that I saw the Batsheva Ensemble perform the latest version Ohad Naharin’s Deca Dance at the Suzanne Dellal Center last week. You see, Deca Dance is the piece that drew me here to Israel. I wrote my Fulbright grant proposal having only seen the Batsheva Dance Company perform an earlier incarnation of this work (albeit 3 times). I hadn’t seen any of Naharin’s other dances, nor had I seen any other Israeli companies. Now - 4 years after I last saw Deca Dance, 9 and 1/2 months after landing in Israel, 2 days after finishing the term of my Fulbright grant, and 90-some dance concerts later - I feel I have come to the end of a cycle. I set out to learn about the wider field of Israeli contemporary dance, and although there is still more to explore, I have a much deeper understanding of dance’s history in Israel as well as the scope of the field today. I devoted a considerable amount of time to independent choreographers and to companies other than Batsheva, but again and again, my attention returned to the origin of my interest, the center point of Israeli contemporary dance. With many avenues of entry, my research on this company was extraordinarily rich. To learn about the past, I sorted through files of newspaper clippings, viewed old repertoire on video at the Dance Library of Israel, and heard Batsheva’s history retold by former dancers and directors. To learn about Batsheva’s more recent years, I traveled with the Batsheva Ensemble, spoke with company dancers and ensemble members, studied Gaga, and attended live performances: Ohad Naharin’s Camuyot, Zachacha, Seder, MAX, Shalosh, and Furo; Sharon Eyal’s Bertolina and Makarova Kabisa; and several evenings featuring short creations by company dancers.
And then came Deca Dance.
Just as I have changed, so too has Deca Dance, an unfixed assemblage of excerpts from Ohad Naharin’s repertory. Sure, there were some old favorites which I recognized from past versions, most notably the accumulative “Echad Mi Yodea” segment and the perennial crowd pleaser, “Dancing with the Audience” (and at this show the audience members invited onstage were more than willing to participate, with one man hamming it up to great applause). But much of this Deca Dance was built from segments of the more recent MAX, Shalosh, and Seder – none of which existed when I last saw Deca Dance in 2004 – and there was even a brand new female duet to an unusual rendering of Ravel’s “Bolero.” Having seen these later works multiple times, I found myself engaged in an interplay with this new Deca Dance : expecting certain sequencing, guessing what would come next, cataloging where I had seen each segment. The direct contrast of these excerpts next to older sections and the absence of other portions that I remembered from my previous Deca Dance viewings provided a chance to reflect on what I perceive as a shift in Ohad Naharin’s choreography towards sparer works which emphasize marvelously textured movement and finely tuned compositional forms over theatricality.
As I place Deca Dance within the context of Naharin’s repertory, Batsheva’s history, and the larger frame of Israeli contemporary dance, I realize how much I have gained from my research. I love being able to look at a dance from different angles, and with the information I have gathered, I now have a tempting menu of choices for how to view each performance. I also have had the pleasure of watching the same dancers develop over the course of the season and talking with them offstage; as I’m sure many of you know, it’s a delight to watch dancers that you know, to seek them out during the sections at which you know they excel, and to find your attention captured unexpectedly by them when they perform something with added nuance or new skill. A part of me wishes that my Fulbright could continue - after all, it’s been a dream to structure my own time and pursue independent research with few restraints! - but I am blessed with the gifts of this grant as I complete this cycle and start the next.
Riding in style with the Batsheva Ensemble on the Batsheva bus!
The theater in Kfar Saba which hosted studio Zeadim’s end-of-year performances
As a dancer who performs in a variety of aesthetic frameworks, occasionally teaches technique, stages repertory, and conducts dance history research through physical as well as traditional means, I’m always intrigued by the intricacies of training. Sometimes my inquiries are bounded by time periods. In graduate school, for instance, I cast a critical eye on the nascent techniques of American modern dance in the 1920s and 1930s. Right now, though, my inquiries are bounded by geographical space: the borders of Israel.
I started my examination of dance training in Israel by taking both Gaga classes and a variety of contemporary dance classes at studios throughout Tel Aviv-Yafo. As my body absorbs the information in these settings, I better understand the particular techniques themselves as well as the ways in which they are disseminated. Yet individual classes - and particularly the classes I take, which draw a population of working dancers and/or adults who dance for pleasure - do not provide a sense of how Israel’s training system functions, how a network of studios and schools prepare aspiring dancers for professional careers. To learn more, I’ve stepped outside of the professional Tel Aviv circuit, talked with teachers of younger dance students, and attended an array of student performances: a smorgasbord of pieces performed at the Suzanne Dellal Center by dancers from a variety of studios; a selection of works performed by students from several performing arts high schools; student compositions at the highly regarded Telma Yellin high school in Givatayim; workshop performances by young dancers who are studying Gaga with teachers from the Batsheva Ensemble; end-of-year concerts by students at the Zeadim (Steps) studio in Kfar Saba; and concerts by undergraduate students at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Here are the basics, from my vantage point:
Ballet, the foundation of many dancers’ training in the U.S. and Europe, does not have strong roots here in Israel. Without a wealth of professional ballet companies and their attached academies, the country’s dance training system for children and adolescents follows a different model. There are plenty of independent studios throughout Israel, but it seems that for teenagers who are serious about becoming dancers, the key site of training is a solid high school dance department (and I mean solid - this is not at all like my public high school in the U.S., which had two classes labeled dance that primarily readied us for swimsuit season with lots of ab work set to music). The best high school programs in Israel bear some resemblance to U.S. university programs, with courses in ballet, modern dance, composition, improvisation, repertory, history, anatomy, music, and other related subjects. It’s from here that many dancers enter the professional world, further polishing their skills in workshop groups and second companies (such as those affiliated with Batsheva, the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, or Vertigo Dance Company) or performing with independent choreographers. The university, which has such a prominent role in educating America’s modern dancers, is barely present in the Israeli training system. Two notable exceptions are Seminar HaKibbutzim in Tel Aviv and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, but their programs emphasize pedagogy rather than performance or choreography. It’s important to note that the students at these colleges are older, having spent a few years - often the most formative ones in a dancer’s life - completing army service. Some dancers get out of the military in order to train and perform during this crucial phase of artistic development.
While the nuts-and-bolts differences between Israeli dance training and American dance training are intriguing, it is what is taught in the studio itself that is most fascinating. I’m not sure how some of you trained, but until I went to college, I merely had a smattering of modern dance at Princeton Ballet and Walnut Hill’s summer ballet workshops with an extra dose thrown in through a pull-out modern dance program for high school students in my county in Jersey. Here, however - at least from the look of the performances I have seen - modern (or contemporary) dance is the name of the game. I most recently went to nearby Kfar Saba for the end-of-year performances by a local studio called Zeadim (Steps). Yes, there was some ballet and some tap on stage, but there was clearly a modern dance thrust to the training and the resulting show. The school’s director, Adi Hen-Degani, talked about the influence and inspiration of the Batsheva Dance Company, and her studio’s older students actually studied Gaga, the training method developed by Batsheva’s director Ohad Naharin. Doron Raz taught Gaga to Zeadim’s teenagers once a week and set excerpts from Naharin’s work. The 12 to 15-year-olds enthusiastically danced the accumulative “Echad Mi Yodea” section that has cropped up in various productions and that you might recognize from Deca Dance, while the 16 to 18-year olds passionately broke out into full-bodied solos in the “Arab Line” section from Virus (it has also been featured in Deca Dance). As part of the connection between Zeadim and Batsheva, the Batsheva Ensemble also performed Naharin’s Seder after each of two concerts so that families might see the progression and the possibility of where their budding dancers might be in a few years. Batsheva may not have a full school in the mold of those attached to American ballet companies (and some modern companies), but the company is building links with Israel’s existing training structures and consequently, some lucky students are making big steps forward in their abilities and artistry.
Many thanks to Eldad Mannheim, Adi, Doron and everyone involved in the Zeadim/Batsheva experience, as well as to David Dvir, Netta Blumenthal, Paul Bloom, and others who gave me a glimpse at other schools and student concerts!
The costume trunk for Seder. As a work which lays bare its compositional structure through explicit verbal explanations, repeated visual cues (like the dancers counting to four on their fingers before breaking into four counts of full-bodied movement), and combined aural and visual information (such as a series of movement accumulations performed to similarly accumulating counts), the dance’s title is appropriate: “seder” is Hebrew for “order.”
This is a bit belated, but here’s a photo journal of my May 5th outing with the Batsheva Ensemble!
It’s been a while since I’ve traveled around and performed for school audiences (I did my fair share of Nutcracker school shows with the American Repertory Ballet in the 1990s, from a tiny soldier to Snow and Flowers corps with a lot in between). But I’ve been able to live vicariously through the Batsheva Ensemble this year thanks to Eldad Mannheim, the company’s manager, who invited me to tag along with the group on a few outings. In January, I joined the Batsheva Ensemble on their trip to Be’ersheva for two morning shows of Ohad Naharin’s Zachacha, and on Monday May 5th, I again accompanied the group as they trekked to Kiryat Shmona for two performances of Naharin’s Seder.
5:55 a.m. Meet the Batsheva Ensemble at the corner of Kaplan and Ibn Gvirol in Tel Aviv. Most of the company members are already snoozing on the bus, and I quickly fall asleep too.
8:30 a.m. Arrive at the theater in Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel. Because of it’s proximity to Lebanon, Kiryat Shmona has been hit by rockets during many clashes with the PLO and Hezbollah, and the town suffered many attacks during the war in the summer of 2006. These performances were sponsored by IDB as a treat for the community’s children, who were no doubt affected by the conflict.
8:35 a.m. Breakfast! There is a long day ahead, so dancers and crew members fill up on fresh bread, veggies, cheese, tehina, coffee, and tea.
9:00 a.m. Hillel Kogan, one of the Batsheva Ensemble’s rehearsal directors, leads a spacing session onstage. Ohad Naharin created Seder for the Ensemble, and the work - which features material from MAX, Shalosh (Three in English), and Furo - debuted in July 2007. The dance can be adapted for anywhere between 12 and 17 dancers; today, 12 Ensemble members are in Kiryat Shmona to perform. Since the dancers know multiple parts and the cast constantly changes, Hillel clarifies who will be dancing each role for these two shows.
9:45 a.m. Gaga onstage, led by Hillel. As with class before Zachacha, this class includes plenty of time for the dancers to stretch and incorporates more familiar technical terminology - plié, relevé, passé, rond de jambe, etc. - than is typically included in the lessons open to the general public. I didn’t dance at all while I was in Tunisia, so I’m happy to get to move and inspired to be surrounded by such amazing dancers!
10:45 a.m. Local schoolchildren and their teachers arrive at the theater. The noise level grows . . .
10:50 a.m. Last minute notes by the dressing rooms. The dancers wear simple gray and black costumes in Seder, but there’s a twist that the audience can’t see: headphones. Part way through the work, one dancer explains (on a pre-recorded audio track) that the performers can move in unison with such precision even when the audience doesn’t hear music because they are listening to counts, beats, music, and other cues via their ear buds. Prior to the performance, the group does a sound check to make sure they are working.
11:00 a.m. (-ish - you know how school shows are . . . ) First performance of the day. Eldad gives a pre-show announcement, and the teachers try to quiet the students as the performance begins.
11:30 a.m. (-ish) The audience gets involved thanks to instructions from a dancer whose head appears on a television screen: put a hand on your heart, put a hand on the back of your neck . . . It’s not a game of Simon Sez constructed especially for young audiences - these children are challenged by the same material that adult audience members would see at an evening performance. How’s that for arts education!
12:00 p.m. (-ish) The first show is over, and the crowd goes wild!
12:20 p.m. Hillel gives notes to the Ensemble backstage while the next group of youngsters fills the auditorium.
12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. Second performance of Seder for a slightly older crowd.
1:40 p.m. The crew starts to strike the set. They’ve had a long day - at 1:00 a.m. they gathered all their equipment from Tel Aviv and made their way to the theater in Kiryat Shmona by 4:00 a.m. to lay down the white marley, put up the set’s panels, and take care of all the lighting and sound work.
1:45 p.m. Lunch and time for some fresh air, sunshine, and beautiful mountain views. From Kiryat Shmona, you can see Lebanon as well as the Golan Heights.
2:00 p.m. Back on the bus to return to Tel Aviv. Many people take well-deserved naps, but I speak with Hillel and a few of the dancers. Two-and-a-half hours is a long trip by Israeli standards, and the traffic as we near Tel Aviv makes the ride a little longer.
4:55 p.m. 11 hours later, I’m home! Almost immediately, I sit down at my computer to upload my photographs and start writing. Another day’s work . . .
Many thanks to Eldad, Hillel, the Batsheva Ensemble dancers, and the crew!
Want to learn more about the Ensemble and read about my trip with them to Be’ersheva? Here’s a link to my blog.
Still want to learn more? The Batsheva Dance Company has a new website that, while still under construction, already has a lot of great information posted. Check it out at http://www.batsheva.co.il/.
The building for Furo, which was constructed especially for the installation at Tel Aviv’s port.
At the entrance to the performance space, this board lists the pairs of dancers who will be performing each loop.
Yam and Inbar, two lovely staff members decked out in uniform who ushered on Friday.
Friday was the opening of Furo, and I made it back to the port for its first few loops (yes, I was hooked - I stayed for 2.5 cycles before tearing myself away). Besides wanting to view the work itself again, I wanted to see how the installation functioned with a real audience. As dance-goers, we’re accustomed to being ushered in together prior to the performance, which has a single fixed beginning. We watch, we clap during the curtain calls, and we get up together to exit at the end. We share an experience within a defined period of time.
With Furo, though, people are issued tickets with a general two-hour time frame. They enter whenever they arrive in that time block, and then they leave whenever they like. Consequently, there’s a nearly constant trickle of people in and out of the installation. It takes quite a coordinated effort on the part of the staff to ensure that this movement does not disrupt the performance, and I observed with interest how several strategically placed ushers reminded audience members to turn off their phones and guided viewers to empty spots in the darkened space. Some fellow viewers stayed for a few cycles, while others chose to leave after they saw all the material (I heard a few whispers of, “We’ve seen this before!”). Although each pair of performers maintains a clear-cut start and finish, each audience member has a different beginning and end. It’s still a shared experience - but it’s much more fluid.
Besides getting my fill of Furo this week, I had the pleasure of seeing the Batsheva Dance Company perform Ohad Naharin’s MAX on Wednesday evening at the Suzanne Dellal Center. The performance was electrifying, and I was overtaken by a powerful compulsion to write when I returned home. This little essay is responsible for a major case of sleep deprivation (I sat down at my computer at 2 a.m. that night!), but I hope you’ll enjoy it:
During the brief blackouts in Ohad Naharin’s MAX, I quickly tore my eyes away from the stage to steal glances at my friend Nitzan. Each time I caught variations of the same expression on his face: eyes wide with amazement and mouth stretched into an even wider grin.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a bit of a “dance dork” (a few of my friends in graduate school and I threw around this term frequently). With my penchant for dance history and analysis, I’m probably not the typical audience member. Give me a brilliantly-crafted piece and I will fall in love, counting the ways in which the choreography captures my attention and my affection. Love at first sight is possible in the arena of dance, but sometimes even the most excellent work takes a bit of time to win over my heart fully. Such was the case with Ohad Naharin’s MAX. I first saw MAX in December, and due to fatigue, I didn’t take in the dance with the freshest eyes. When I re-read my files before this second viewing, I saw that I had taken only a few hasty notes which focused on extremely satisfying sections marked by fine compositional structure. But after tonight’s performance of MAX, I’m in love. At least in my eyes, the work as a whole is indeed brilliant.
MAX’s movement is mesmerizing and wide-ranging, from tightly gestural to gloriously full-bodied, from slow and steady to sudden and speedy. At times the dancers work with a meticulous sense of control, while at other points they perform with breathtaking abandon. While inventive and well-executed movement alone can captivate me, MAX also offers plenty of compositional excitement (I told you I was a dance dork!). The pacing of this work was for me, in a word, perfect. Naharin often indulges in one compositional mechanism for longer than many other dancemakers, but the choreographic technique never overstays its welcome – it just blossoms fully. Here’s one example: a dancer tilts wildly out of kilter in a virtuoso solo and then is swept into an explosion of movement from the company, which is scattered across the stage in small groups, each of which has its own phrase; together, the ensemble paints the space with their bodies, arms and legs leaving traces of motion behind them. Out of this grows another solo, which again dissolves into the company’s grouped dancing. After only a few cycles I know what to expect, but my mind still delights in searching for the start of each solo and enjoys the wash of movement from the group. Here and elsewhere, Naharin senses the right moment for a shift and recharges my attention. Sometimes blackouts clear the slate, but more often my eyes are refreshed by extreme juxtapositions: stillness and motion; unison and organized chaos; slow and fast; small and large; smooth and sharp; full ensemble sections and trios or solos.
MAX excited me but in a different way than some of Naharin’s more overtly theatrical productions like Decadance, Zachacha, and Anaphase. Decadance, for one, is absolute fun - I’ve seen it win over several audiences easily. But MAX is in another category. It doesn’t have the theatrical elements which can engage less-seasoned audience members. There is no set, no narrative, and no characters (though for me the gestural motifs, repeated tableaux, and chanting create a sense of a tribe with its own unique rituals). There are no displays of emotion despite one usage of a smile. The dancers are dressed in simple shorts and tanks rather than more elaborate costumes. Furthermore, MAX itself is not an “easy” work. The sound score is challenging. Melodious music played by traditional, recognizable instruments is replaced by low unidentifiable sounds, grating industrial noises, deep eerie male voices speaking in an invented language and droning in counting sections, and long periods of silence. Some people might consider the movement aesthetic challenging as well; there is no attempt at the prettiness of ballet or of some modern techniques despite the inclusion of recognizable classical positions. And in a work that centers so much on composition, the choice of choreographic tools might also prove taxing to certain audience members. The frequent usage of movement accumulations, with repeated movements building into longer and longer phrases, may wear on some viewers’ eyes. So I while I loved the structure and was moved by MAX, I found myself wondering on what level Nitzan (or any non-dance dork) was connecting to the work. Were less seasoned dance viewers enjoying the work’s formal elements? Would they too be moved by the dance?
The answer: yes. The audience clapped enthusiastically for several sets of bows. And as Nitzan’s animated facial expressions suggested, he did indeed enjoy the concert. We talked excitedly about the choreography and the performance of it as we meandered back towards our neighborhood, and without my even asking, he talked poetically about how he connected to the work. MAX was, he said, “Food for the soul.” You can’t get much better than that!
