2012
Between the Seen and the Unseen
Production: Efrat Barak
Lights: Shachar Werechson
Jerusalem 26-29/11 Leo Model
50 years ago, the Judson Dance Theater (NY) opened new doors for the moving body and turned improvisation into an acceptable mode of performance. During these same years, Noa Eshkol developed EWMN (Eshkol-Wachman movement notation) and used it to compose her works, generating a score and teaching it to her dancers. While the Americans raised the banner of improvisation, Noa Eshkol raised that of written planning.
This year in Room Dances Festival, we wish to present dances that revolve around the relationship between the different modes in which dances are composed. Those are works that refer to the tension between composition and improvisation; between the pre-defined dance to the one that is composed on stage, in real time.
Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theater” serves as a theoretical foundation for this work, and the dances are a response to it. The ideas discussed in this essay are still debated in the dance world today, just as they were many years ago: the beauty of a marionette which is utterly controlled by the laws of mechanics, and the natural grace of the animal, contrasted with self-conscious man – the magic of innocence and its loss in reason.
Talks: Liora Bing-Heidecker, Amos Hetz, Gay Hoffman