Showtime: Janco’s imaginary beasts

A new exhibition, called “Imaginary Animals,” opened at the Janco Dada Museum at Ein Hod at the beginning of the month.

By BARRY DAVIS
Jewish music cartoon 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Jewish music cartoon 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Janco’s imaginary beasts
A new exhibition, called “Imaginary Animals,” opened at the Janco Dada Museum at Ein Hod at the beginning of the month.
The show, which is curated by Raaya Sommer-Tal, includes largescale oil works that Romanianborn Israeli Dada art movement co-pioneer Marcel Janco produced in the 1960s and ’70s.
The paintings feature amorphous figures that border on the abstract.
The paintings are all based on a finely balanced composition and highlight the biomorphic element that was central to Janco’s oeuvre, and his tendency to draw inspiration from the natural world around him. The imaginary animals in the pictures in the exhibition are more lyrical and poetic representations of the animal world than actual definable beasts, and suggest a lost Garden of Eden.
In addition to the exhibition, the museum is offering a children’s activity called Animals and Smiles, whereby kids can create their own works with their own imaginary animals. Imaginary Animals closes at the end of April.
For more information: (04) 984- 2350 and www.jancodada.co.il
Wee dance from Germany The Wee Dance Company from Germany will make its debut in this country, when it performs its awardwinning work Butterfly Defect at various locations around the country.
The shows will take place between February 18 and March 6, starting at the Warehouse 2 venue in Jaffa, with further dates at Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, Sha’ar Hanegev, Hatzor Haglilit, Hadera, Jerusalem, Tiberias and Upper Nazareth.
Each show will include Butterfly Defect paired with a work by a local choreographer. The latter include Heroes by Yossi Berg and Oded Graf, We Love Arabs by Hillel Kogan, The Diplomats by Renana Raz, La Famalia by Yoram Carmi and Women’s Quarters by Dafi Eltabab.
For more information: (03) 902- 1563 and www.choreographers.org.il
Magical summer of love
The Magical Band will be front and center at the ’60s Summer of Love bash at Berale Music Club in Tel Aviv, which kicks off at 10:30 p.m. on February 21.
The blast from the past group will perform a string of hits from the golden era of peace and love, when hair was worn long and often festooned with flowers. The numbers in the lineup include songs by The Rolling Stones, The Mamas and Papas, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, The Who and Bob Dylan.
For tickets and more information: (04) 636-9993/4 and www. beraleberale.co.il
Thinking about fabric
The “Woven Consciousness” exhibition will open at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv on Monday.
The show, which is curated by Irena Gordon, takes in the work of textile designers, visual artists and multidisciplinary creators, and feeds off the concept of the central role textiles play in the search for new, vibrant and revolutionary avenues of expression as well as practical use in the world of design and art, and the way in which the substance’s boundaries are examined and breached.
The exhibit puts forth new perspectives on the dimensions of time and space as perceived in textiles; consideration of the social, political and cultural aspects embodied in fabrics; and the way in which textiles are integrated in our mind-set, as both tangible substance and abstract concept.
For more information about Woven Consciousness: (03) 641- 5244 and www.eretzmuseum.org.il
Acting in the red
The seventh annual Clipa Aduma (Red Shell) international progressive visual theater and arts festival will take place in Tel Aviv and Haifa from February 19 to 24. The performer roster includes artists from Japan, the Czech Republic and Germany, as well as some of our most promising young performers.
The program of this year’s event, which was initiated and is overseen by the Clipa Theater in Tel Aviv, includes the Upside Down show by the Do-Theater troupe from Germany, which features a bunch of strangely shaped imaginary figures that come from a laboratory where experiments take place in an attempt to produce the perfect human being. Meanwhile, the Krepsko group from the Czech Republic will perform Fragile, based on the character of Laura from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and Butoh master Taketeru Kudo of Japan will join forces with Clipa founders Idit Herman and Dmitry Tyulpanov in a performance of Men in the Port of Haifa. Herman will also present a workshop on improvisation for dancers and actors.
For more information: (03) 639- 9090 and www.clipa.co.il