Flora’s Dance is billed as adult puppet theater and at its heart is the story of
an abusive marriage – a dark tale, tenderly and sometimes powerfully
performed.
Flora is an old woman puppet skillfully manipulated by three
actress/puppeteers: Yifat Weiner, Moriah Ben-Avot and Orit Leibowitz-
Novitch.
Every year, Flora, in her youth a flamenco dancer, comes to tend
her husband’s grave.
She brings with her a new rose and in her basket
there is a flagon of wine and two glasses. As she carefully cleans the grave of
a year’s debris, pours and drinks the wine, she recalls the past on Ya’ara
Zadok’s set of the grave and a rose-petal-strewn surrounding.
The rose
petals are symbols both for romance and blood.
The three actresses, each
in her turn, reprise the courtship, the marriage and its ending, but Flora has
the surprising last word.
There are no actual words. In our noisy world,
absence of language sometimes speaks out more plainly. So it is here. The
actresses tell the story with their bodies, backed by Boris Martzionovki’s
soundtrack of mostly flamenco music – played too loudly for Tzavta 2’s small
space.
Flora’s Dance is basically a 30-minute tale that has been
stretched beyond its capacity so that what should be taut and passionate, like
flamenco itself, becomes slack at times.
Some cutting would make the
piece the little jewel it could be.
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