German<\/a> choreographer Kurt Jooss created The Green Table: 10 men in tailcoats bow to each other around a table and, through gesture alone, agree to send a generation to die. He called it a \u201cpolitical ballet\u201d \u2013 a phrase that, at the time, sounded almost like a contradiction.<\/p>\n\u201cThis piece is a masterpiece that every dancer, everyone who follows dance closely, knows well,\u201d the creators of All Spirits say. What pulled them toward it was not only the choreography, but the nerve of Jooss\u2019s own declaration.<\/p>\n
\u201cJooss\u2019s declaration \u2013 he was a pacifist \u2013 that this is a political ballet is pretty stunning,\u201d the program says. \u201cIt\u2019s incredibly loaded, but also almost naive. Who today can say they\u2019re making political work? And what does that even mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
There is something they admit to envying in Jooss\u2019s certainty.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis dancers knew exactly what they were doing \u2013 what message they had to carry, how to carry it. That anachronistic clarity is very appealing right now, in our chaotic times. We wanted to say \u2018yes\u2019 to it. To agree with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
But agreeing with Jooss did not mean illustrating him.<\/p>\n
Ask the artistic directors where the politics of All Spirits actually sits \u2013 not in a program note, but in the choreography itself \u2013 and they choose their words carefully.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese days, even stating the obvious \u2013 writing that we\u2019re making an anti-war piece \u2013 is an act that might get read as political,\u201d they say. \u201cBut what really interests us is the choice of how and what to move.\u201d<\/p>\n
TALIA PAZ PLAYS several mothers inside a single sequence, a role that nods, the creators say, to a Batsheva Dance Company piece created two years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as well as to the contemporary image of mothers fighting publicly for their families. \u201cTheir movements and words happen inside her body.\u201d<\/p>\n
The men in the war scene were chosen for their age, not despite it.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir bodies are soft, gentle, and they agree to touch and be held up by one another,\u201d the creators note. The image, they argue, creates \u201ca different way of looking at the militaristic experience\u201d simply because of whose bodies are doing the looking.<\/p>\n
Turning a war that is still painfully close to the present into an archetype was a risk the creators say they did not take lightly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe asked ourselves this, over and over, through the whole process,\u201d they say. \u201cWhat is this tableau doing in relation to its archetype? Where is the war present in the image? Where does the current reality stand in relation to it?<\/p>\n
\u201cLife in Israel is a school for war,\u201d they say. \u201cThe myth becomes redundant when we\u2019re running to the shelter during a siren, thinking about how to wake the kid.\u201d<\/p>\n
A palindrome, not a repeat<\/p>\n
The mirrored back-and-forth format is partly a bow to Jooss, whose own work carries a similar bleak circularity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe chose the palindromic structure partly as a nod to the work that inspired us, where the circularity delivers an almost unambiguous, very bleak message about a reality that repeats itself,\u201d they say. \u201cBut also out of a wider thought about the way the audience arrives at the theater and leaves it. The palindrome exists before and after the show \u2013 the piece isn\u2019t cut off from the reality outside the stage.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not an ordinary repetition,\u201d they add. \u201cIt\u2019s the same sequence in reverse. You experience the \u2018reverse\u2019 after the first half has already settled.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seven equal creators building one piece is, by their own account, a messy arrangement.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re in the middle of the process, still learning this structure,\u201d they admit \u2013 a structure that grew, they say, \u201cout of a desire to slice the myth into pieces and dig our hands into this painful subject together.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t really know what we were heading toward. We tried to understand whether the model resembled a joint exhibition or a collection of poems<\/a> \u2013 but pretty quickly we understood we wanted to create one whole piece, without seams, so that one thing would flow from the next.\u201d<\/p>\nThe idea underlying it: no single person decides on a war, so no single author should decide on the peace.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe meaning of the collective structure is, first of all, that it lets the audience shift angle each time \u2013 movement expression, atmosphere \u2013 through the different creators, so as to feel a bigger sum total.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hershkovits, one of the most in-demand Israeli pianists working internationally today, is the only figure on stage who arrives from neither dance nor theater. His music does not emanate from below the stage \u2013 the creators are firm on that point. It exists as a live presence within the work.<\/p>\n
\u201cNitai understood us from the first moment, even though he doesn\u2019t come from the performance world,\u201d they say. \u201cWorking with him is proof that all the arts share a common heart. He has a demanding role; he\u2019s largely the one who connects the tableaux, not only through his playing but through his presence.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been blessed to work with him,\u201d they say.<\/p>\n
The performance will premiere at the Jerusalem Theatre on August 4 and 5, at 9 p.m., as part of the Israel Festival\u2019s 65th edition. It is now running at venues throughout the country until August 20. For tickets and details: www.israel-festival.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A group of men in their seventies stand in a war scene and hold each other up. A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":569840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[107575,85,46,257684,1619,409,43,13421],"class_list":["post-569839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-dancer","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jerusalem-theatre","tag-magazine","tag-music","tag-news","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}