This is one of the posters starting appear around the city (this one at 5th Ave N/R/W train stop). This is a great event at City Center (all tickets $10!!!) The shows are in Sept. Everything from Shen Wei, ABT, Cunningham, to Oregon Ballet Theater and much much more. A great mix, the right price, and a SUPERB venue. One of these days, we hope SYREN will get on the bill! In the meantime, we are enthusiastic supporters.
Lynn and I have been back in the studio… Just “jamming” right now. Doing a bit of barre together, then she teaches me some new class excercises and combinations she has been creating…which feels great to be told what to do a bit! This week we did a pretty long imrov together to some Brahams mostly (Sonatos for Cello and piano Opp. 38, 99 and 108… and some work by James Newton Howard). Felt AWESOME to just move that BIG and free! Can’t believe we will be in studio with new company members in a few weeks re-staging “Pelleas” and getting “Abravanel” back up and running (we just booked a gig at Ethel Walker School in CT for November) and “Dig” excerpts ready for DanceNow Festival at DTW. Oh and somewhere in that I am starting a new piece for the company that we are trying to have the Artemis Chamber Ensemble play live for!!! So so excited.
And, I have yet to see a copy, but I hear there is a little mention of us in Dance Spirit Magazine for September. Page 150 to be exact!
Lots of really great stuff… But for the 3 hours in the studio, it sure did feel good to forget about running a company and remember where this whole thing started… Just dancing in a studio with Lynn…
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!
MEGAN KURASHIGE San Francisco Conservatory of Dance San Francisco, California USA BIO | POSTS
Hello!
So, the last time I wrote, I mentioned a performance I was getting ready for, but didn’t actually say much about what we were doing. That was because I didn’t know! When my friend called to see if I’d be interested in a “dance theater” piece that was about sleep and dreams and possibly involved screaming, I thought: well, that seems a bit weird, but it could be fun. There are three of us who are only in the one piece, so it wasn’t until our first performance that we actually grasped what the whole evening is about, whether it would be good or bizarre or awkward.
So… it’s really good. If you’re in SF and have time this weekend or next, head to CELLspace (this weekend) or Yerba Buena (next) and check out Dandelion Dancetheater.
Dandelion is hosting three weeks of physically integrated dance, joined by several artists from Madrid, Montreal, and the (completely awesome) local company, AXIS. The programs are different each weekend, so I’ll only talk about the program I’m in, but I’m sure the Yerba Buena shows will be equally fantastic.
The piece I’m in is called DORS. It’s an excerpt from a longer work by Jacques Poulin-Denis. Here’s a picture of Jacques:
Hm. He looks a bit stern there, but he’s very nice, very funny, and a very, very good dancer. The piece begins with Jacques standing in the dark, holding a small light, and talking about a dream. Quiet disturbances break out and escalate until people are leaping out of the audience, yelling and running through the space, acting out dreams and nightmares. I’m one of three dancers who float across the space like detached sleepwalkers (we improvise with our eyes closed—very exciting when you feel someone race past you at high speed).
Dandelion does this fantastic piece called oust. What blows my mind is how many talents everyone has. People sing and dance and play instruments and speak. It’s like watching some bizarre, slightly cracked, circus that lures you in with a strange spectacle and then suddenly starts talking about all the things that make you uncomfortable.
photo: Hiroki Saito
And a fabulous picture of Eric Kupers, who choreographed the piece (and plays a drum in it…):
photo: Luiza Silva Nadia Adame does this wonderful duet in a chair in oust. She also dances in and choreographed a piece for her own company called 9 dias y 20 horas a la deriva.
photo: Paloma Parra
My favorite piece though, the one I’m really excited to talk about and really, really want everyone to see, is Les Angles Morts. It’s a duet for Jacques and Melanie Demers. I’m not even sure how to describe it, except to say that it made me cry. It says something to you, but without being literal, without pointing out or explaining. It goes from the eye straight through to a place that recognizes it as both familiar and strange. Melanie and Jacques are both so extraordinary, so committed and honest in their movement, that they shook me all over. Melanie does this solo that ends with her walking backwards with a paper bag over her head, gesturing with her arms, and you are hypnotized by every small move that she makes because they are all so carefully considered… Such wonderfulness!
So, if you’re in SF, come see our show. Or keep a lookout for Dandelion, Melanie, Jacques, and Nadia, and if you get the chance, go see them!
Well, the company is hard at work creating a new piece that is set to the “Pelleas et Melisande” suite by Sebelius. We have just two weeks before it premieres! It will be the first time SYREN has worked with live musicians, so we are thrilled and a bit nervous at the same time.
The company has never worked so fast, with only four weeks to get the piece done. Our heads are spinning in 12’s and 3’s, but we are really getting somewhere, and I think that after Thursday’s rehearsal we will have a solid dent in the beast!
Check out what Lynn and Lindsay were rockin with today…
