Is there such a thing as Israeli contemporary dance? The answer is yes. And it is worth adding that the phenomenon is exploding beyond the territories and culture of origin. A choreography whose tip of the iceberg is one of the groups rediscovered this year by European billboards. This is the Batsheva Dance Company, founded in 1964 by Martha Graham and directed since 1990 by the much sought-after “new talent” Ohad Naharin, an author whose many creations appear in the repertoire of the Nederlands Dans Theater, the Cullberg Ballett, the Grand Ballet de Genève. With him, the names of the moment are Rami Be’er, resident choreographer of the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, and the duo Liat Dror and Nir Ben-Gal, founders of their own company and long known in Europe for their work with the London Contemporary Dance Theater. But Oriente Occidente has chosen to go further and push itself to discover the new talents of Israeli dance, most of whom grew up with the authors and companies mentioned above.
The duo founded in 1992 by Noa Wertheim and Adi Sha’al is called Vertigo. The formation of this pair of dancers includes the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance and the Jerusalem Tamar Dance Company for Noa, the Emek Hayarden Dance Studio, the Kibbutz Dance Workshop, Batsheva and Jerusalem Tamar for Adi. Among the choreography teachers of both, Ohad Naharin. Their first work was born in February 1993. It is entitled “Vertigo” and is the opening piece of the Rovereto evening from which the two young dancers-choreographers gave life to the homonymous formation. “We took the concept of Vertigo – they say – from the idea of flight and we projected it within an international relationship of a couple”. With the second piece on the program entitled “Contact-Lenses”, a multimedia duet that plays on the relationship between dance and video (images of the rehearsals of the same piece were projected at the same time as the dance), Vertigo won this year’s audience award at the Groningen photography competition in Holland.
Second guest, Ido Tadmor, a thirty-year-old who grew up with the Bat-Dor Dance Company, the Batsheva and, in the United States, with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. With the Batsheva Dance Company he danced leading roles in choreographies by Naharin, North, Itzik Galili and many others. A performer with considerable technique, Ido Tadmor was awarded the Yair Shapira Award for best dancer in 1990. The two pieces on the program, “Seven last words” (a solo signed and danced by Tadmor himself) and the Hezy Leskley duo “Sawing the gold plates” are exemplary of the talent of this young artist, who, having come to dance at 19, was quickly sought after by renowned companies and choreographers.
Finally Inbal Pinto, born in 1969. Mixed training between dance and visual arts that saw him dance in 1991 with the Batsheva Dance Company and study graphic design at the Bezallel University of the Arts in 1992. “Dio-Cann” is a creation balanced between painting and choreography. “It illustrates – says the author – the mental aspiration of the painter and the physical contact between painting and canvas”. The four dancers outline their bodies on a large canvas measuring 220x780 centimeters, hanging at the back of the stage. In a sort of “action painting” (the body covered in paint becomes a brush creating traces on the canvas), Inbal Pinto signs a work under the banner of contamination.
