A technique marked by strong physicality and a combative use of energy is one of the salient features of contemporary Israeli dance. The confrontation and clash between bodies, ideas, emotions, and beliefs are part of the history of the people of Israel, an indelible history that, for better or worse, inevitably influences 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 festival edition with his company, recalls how in Israel everything is permeated by the feeling that to win, one must fight.
Whether the performances have a direct relationship with political and social reality—consider Interrogation by Dror/Ben Gal, created after the assassination of Rabin, in the hope of change—or whether they emerge as pure dance, they must grapple 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, titled Persona - Dancing one by one, is a proposal from the Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theatre in Tel Aviv, an institution that has been actively promoting the country's choreography internationally for years. The show, consisting of seven solos that debuted in June at the Israel Festival 99 in Jerusalem, is a showcase of new authors, designed to present unknown dancers to Italy. Let’s look at the individual paths.
Noa Dar (The Dragon Princess), winner of the 1996 Young Choreographers Award from the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture, has danced with the Batsheva2 Company and the Tamar Dance Group, founding the Noa Dar Dance Group in 1993. For her solo, played on the flexibility 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, set to music by Luciano Berio, is a piece of dance theater that exploits the union of movement and speech.
Yossi Yungman (Huaquito) was born in Argentina and joined the Batsheva Dance Company in 1990. Fundamental to his fragmented movement style, punctuated by energetic bursts, was his study with Kazuo Ohno in Japan.
Rina Schenfeld (Woman in White) has a somewhat different history from that of 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, and Jerome Robbins. In 1979 she founded the Rina Schenfeld Dance Theatre, creating around 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 highly energetic style 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 Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen, from whom she derives a taste for broken and vigorous movement.
The evening closes with Rami Levi (Solo), a choreographer who combines the physicality of street dance with broad and rounded movements of the torso and arms, perhaps influenced by having danced at the Cullberg Ballet from 1991 to 1994. Levi has significant European experiences. From 1989 to 1991 he danced in Tours, France with Jean-Christophe Maillot, then moved on to the Cullberg and, from 1994 to 1996, to the National Dance Company of Spain. In Barcelona, he founded his own group before joining the Batsheva Dance Company in 1998.
The second Israeli dance feature sees one of the country's most significant groups performing in Rovereto: the Liat Dror Nir Ben Gal Company. Both raised in kibbutzim, Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal are husband and wife. After completing their military service, they got married and simultaneously began attending the Rubin Academy of Dance and Music in Jerusalem.
Their first choreographic attempts date back to 1986: the success was immediate, so much so that in the same year the couple won an important Israeli award, the Gertrude Krauss Prize. Among the pieces created in the 1980s, Two Room Apartment, a duet about the psychological barriers created by contemporary society that featured two separate spaces on stage in which to dance the rituals of daily life, is worth mentioning. Created in 1987, Two Room Apartment won the Grand Prix at the Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales in Bagnolet the following year.
In 1991 the couple debuted with their first group show: Circles of Lust. This work, which depicted an entire generation searching for itself amid Intifada and Zionism, greed, and a desire for tenderness, marked the birth of the Liat Dror Nir Ben Gal Company. Questioning the reasons for the creation of social and political barriers, the couple created Figs in 1993, a piece in which dance is nourished by the opposition between great physicality, marked by strong impulses of energy, and moments of calm and stillness: an opposition to be read as a metaphor for the social climate of a country torn apart by divisions and conflicts. Friendship, jealousy, and 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).
Following the aforementioned Interrogation in 1997, created after the shock of Rabin's assassination, Dror and Ben Gal produced The Dance of Nothing in 1998, the show featured in Rovereto. Created 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," the company explains, "live the love story 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 questions freedom, the relationship between two young people, and the possible symbolism of the conflicts that society and politics create between Palestinians and Israelis. The Dance of Nothing explores the individual struggle against barriers, celebrates openness, social awareness, and the hope for reconciliation. "Israel defines itself through its enemies," says Ben Gal, a reality of conflict against which he aims to send messages of peace and generosity through dance.
