A technique marked by strong physicality and a combative display of energy is one of the salient features of Israeli contemporary dance. The confrontation and clash between bodies, ideas, emotions and beliefs is part of the history of the people of Israel, an indelible history that for better or for worse cannot fail to influence art. It is no coincidence that Nir Ben Gal, a choreographer who, together with his artistic and life partner Liat Dror, closes this year's edition of the festival with his company, recalls how in Israel everything is permeated by the feeling that in order to win, it is necessary to fight. Whether the shows have a direct relationship with political and social reality - think again of Interrogation by Dror/Ben Gal, created after the assassination of Rabin, in the hope of change - or whether they are born as pure dance, they must deal with this cultural matrix, a matrix with a strong identity, also relevant in the approach to movement. The festival dedicates two evenings to Israeli dance. The first, entitled Persona - Dancing one by one, is a proposal by the Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theatre in Tel Aviv, a structure that has been active for years in the international promotion of the country's choreography. The show, composed of seven solos that debuted in June at the Israel Festival 99 Jerusalem, is a showcase of new authors, studied on the comparison of dancers unknown to Italy. Let's see their individual paths. Noa Dar (The Dragon Princess), winner in '96 of the Young Choreographers Award of the Ministry of Education and Culture of Israel, danced with the Batsheva2 Company and the Tamar Dance Group, founding the Noa Dar Dance Group in '93. For her solo, played on the looseness of the joints, she is inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke. Amir Kolben (Countdown) danced for the Batsheva Dance Company and the Israeli Ballet and teaches at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem. His solo, to music by Luciano Berio, is a piece of dance theater, which exploits the union of movement and word. Yossi Yungman (Huaquito) was born in Argentina and joined the Batsheva Dance Company in 1990. Fundamental to his style of movement, fragmented and punctuated by energetic explosions, was his study with Kazuo Ohno in Japan.
Rina Schenfeld (Woman in White) has a slightly different story than the other young protagonists of the evening: she was one of the founders of the Batsheva Dance Company with which she danced leading roles in pieces by Martha Graham, Glen Tetley, Jerome Robbins. In 1979 she founded the Rina Schenfeld Dance Theatre, creating about thirty solos and group works.
Niv Scheinfeld (Alpha Beta), born in 1972 in Kibbutz Hanita, danced for eight years with the Liat Dror Nir Ben Gal Company. His style, highly energetic, is characterized by circular movements driven by the torso.
Sharon Eyal (Duet) danced with the Batsheva Dance Company from 1989 to 1996 and with the group of the Finnish Tero Saarinen, from which she derives her taste for broken and vigorous movement.
The evening closes with Rami Levi (Solo), an author who combines the physicality of street dance with large, rounded movements of the torso and arms, perhaps thanks to having danced at the Cullberg Ballet from 1991 to 1994. Levi has significant European experience behind him. From 1989 to 1991 he danced in Tours, France with Jean-Christophe Maillot, later moving to the Cullberg and, from 1994 to 1996, to the Spanish National Dance Company. He then founded his own group in Barcelona, joining the Batsheva Dance Company in 1998.
The second Israeli dance guest performance sees one of the country’s most significant groups on stage in Rovereto: the Liat Dror Nir Ben Gal Company. Both raised on kibbutzim, Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal are husband and wife. After completing their military service, they got married, and at the same time began attending the Rubin Academy of Dance and Music in Jerusalem.
Their first choreographic tests date back to 1986: the success was immediate, so much so that in that same year the couple won an important Israeli award: the Gertrude Krauss Prize. Among the pieces created in the 1980s, it is worth mentioning Two Room Apartment, a duet on the psychological barriers created by contemporary society that placed two separate spaces on stage in which to dance the rituals of daily life. Created in 1987, Two Room Apartment won the Grand Prix of the Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Bagnolet the following year. In 1991 the couple debuted with their first group show: Circles of Lust. With this work, which put on stage an entire generation searching for itself between Intifada and Zionism, greed and a desire for tenderness, the Liat Dror Nir Ben Gal Company was born. Questioning the reasons for the creation of social and political barriers, the couple created Figs in 1993, a piece in which the dance feeds on the opposition between great physicality, marked by strong impulses of energy, and moments of calm, of stasis: an opposition to be read as a sort of metaphor for the social climate of a country torn apart by divisions and contrasts. Friendship, jealousy, amorous obsessions are the themes of Anta Oumri (1994) and again love, dreams and desires fill the dance of The Land of Rape and Honey (1996) with emotion. The aforementioned Interrogation from 1997, created after the shock of Rabin’s assassination, was followed in 1998 by the show staged in Rovereto: The Dance of Nothing. Mounted during a three-month residency at the Centre National L’Esquisse in Angers, The Dance of Nothing is a love story that reinterprets the drama of Romeo and Juliet in a contemporary key. “The dancers,” explains the company, “live the love story as it develops from the first glance to the moment of marriage. As love grows, other people begin to interfere in the relationship: family, friends, the Church, the State. The result is an insatiable desire to return to the beginning, nostalgia for that first moment when feelings were free from religious, political and family constraints.” The show therefore questions freedom, the relationship between two young people, a possible symbol of the conflicts that society and politics bring into play between Palestinians and Israelis. The Dance of Nothing explores the individual struggle against barriers, praises openness, social awareness, and the hope of reconciliation. “Israel defines itself through its enemies,” says Ben Gal, a reality of conflict against which to launch messages of peace and generosity through dance.
