Vertigo, a Jerusalem-based dance company, expands its repertoire to include eco-friendly performances
By JOSEPH R. HOFFMAN14vert224(photo credit: Vertigo)Extract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
Sixteen years ago, two talented 27-year-
old dancers decided to create a dance together and fell in love in the process. The result was Vertigo, today a renowned Jerusalem contemporary dance company. Adi Sha'al, a former air force pilot who today sports long curly hair that frames a ruggedly handsome face, teamed up with perky and petite Noa Wertheim, whose no-nonsense close-cropped black hair, highlighted by undisciplined wisps of long blond locks, mirrors the interplay between her down-to-earth approach to dance and a lightness of being.
As Sha'al, whose dance experience was honed at the Kibbutz Dance Company (in Ga'aton in Israel's north) and at the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv and Wertheim, a graduate of Jerusalem's Rubin Academy of Music and Dance and a member of the Jerusalem Tamar Dance Company, worked on their joint creation, it was becoming increasingly obvious that a duet was in the making, and not just professionally. The romantic passion that the pair, he from Haifa, and she, a Brooklyn native who was brought to Israel at the age of 4 with her parents (her father, Baruch Wertheim, was Israel Television's first director of English-language programming) began to feel for each other "made me dizzy," says Sha'al. "I didn't know if I was up or down, which is the definition of 'vertigo.' It was the same feeling I had as a pilot trying to control a plane."
Their "out-of-control" love gave birth to "Vertigo," which at first was the name of their dance and subsequently the name of their company. Sixteen years later, the married couple has continued to give birth to Yonatan, 9, Nof, 6, and Daniel, 3. Their latest creation is an eco-village where the company will combine their living and professional quarters (see box on page 38).
Since its inception in 1992, Vertigo has had an extraordinarily successful run. The eight-member dancer troupe has performed continually both in Israel and abroad, and recently has become Israel's first dance company with an ecological focus.
"From the beginning, we were interested in social concerns," says Wertheim, who is director of choreography. "We deal with issues of education, the disabled, troubled youth. From there, our interests began to include the environment. Our aim is to call attention through dance to the threats to our planet of pollution, undisciplined growth, destruction of natural habitats and wastefulness of natural resources."
The goal, Wertheim says, "is to fix things by getting the spectator to see the earth as a partner in the creative process, not as something to be dominated. We want to create a dialogue between humans and the environment."
The dialogue starts with their unique staging. "Being herded into a theater and told to 'sshh' and wait patiently for the lights to go out, the curtain to go up and the outside world to be turned off is how most dances are performed," says Wertheim. "The only sounds you hear are the muffled traffic noise and the whirr of the electricity-draining air conditioner." She claims that the natural world has been shut out, which causes a "disconnect" between the audience and the stage. "Because once the lights go down, you could be anywhere," she says.
By contrast, Vertigo's stage is nothing less than nature itself. Performed at a beach or in a forest or field, the dance is open to the elements, and varies with the time of day and season of the year. The natural backdrop becomes an integral part of the story, and candlelight replaces electricity.
The floor of their stage is mother earth herself. Raised up on a wooden base and covered with carpets is a floor of soil, peat moss and sand, which is used as the dancing surface. Above the dancers, enclosing the area, is a skeletal geodesic dome, which gives the whole setting the look of a spaceship temporarily come to earth.
The dome, 15 meters in diameter, is made of lightweight bamboo. It is a hybrid shape that reveals both grace and stability as the flexible bamboo poles also create sturdy triangles. Its dimensions are slightly larger than the floor to permit audience members to sit under the dome.
This structure was chosen because it covers a great deal of space with the minimum of raw materials, an ecologically friendly solution. Aesthetically, the dome, which looks like a half grapefruit, accommodates both stable and ephemeral shapes. Its beauty is the interplay between the sturdy triangle and the floating semi-sphere. A versatile shape, it can be either opaque or open to the elements.
A geodesic dome is also the only human-made structure that gets proportionally stronger as it increases in size. It creates what the dome's inventor, Buckminster Fuller, defined as "less is more." The bamboo poles can be assembled and dismantled with ease, leaving no scar on the environment. The audience's help in dismantling the set is requested, giving them an opportunity to discuss what they have just witnessed.
"In some ways," says Wertheim, "[outdoor theater] is a return to ancient theater, where audience and performers were exposed to the sights, sounds and weather of the natural world." She believes that this type of theater fills a desire to "turn back time" when caring for the planet was not an issue of such urgency.
The troupe's goal is to celebrate the crucial role that mother earth plays in the world of dance. "We must not behave as if we own things, we are part of this world and not its owners," Wertheim says. Adds Sha'al, "It's easy to see the connection between adam and adama," using the Hebrew words for man and earth. "You take care of the earth, and it takes care of you."
The company's signature ecological dance, "The Birth of the Phoenix," had its U.S. premiere in Manhattan's Riverside Park in 2005. Ideally, it is performed in pristine nature, but when I saw the performance, the venue was the rear courtyard of the Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theater in Tel Aviv's artsy Neve Tzedek neighborhood.
At first it seemed incongruous. Looking through the dome, the spectators could see an Italianate courtyard to the left, a row of stately palm trees to the right, and a dramatic 20-plus story apartment building in the center whose wavy façade recalls the nearby sea. But as the evening progressed, all eyes were focused on the five dancers whose high-voltage movements united all the disparate elements.
The phoenix is a mythical bird that dies in flames and is reborn from the ashes, a reference to regeneration after complete destruction. The choice of theme itself is telling. "We imagine a world that has been reduced to ashes through ecological neglect," Sha'al states. "Now we must revive it."
Extract from an article in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
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