Different, together

Zuzu, a new dance initiative, pairs professional artists with members of Enosh – The Israeli Association for Mental Health.

By ORI J. LENKINSKI
Zuzu dancers 521 (photo credit: Courtesy Zuzu)
Zuzu dancers 521
(photo credit: Courtesy Zuzu)
It happens to everyone. Watching an exemplary athlete leap across the field or seeing a ballerina propel herself through the air ignites a spark of desire. Even if we are not capable of performing those physical feats, the longing for movement exists in all of us.
“Everyone has a body,” says choreographer Ron Amit. “It’s a very simple idea.And everyone can dance. When I see you moving, I can imagine what it would feel like to move that way and I can understand how you feel.”
On August 2, Amit and his partner, Shiri Capuano Quantz, unveiled an unusual performance entitled People by their one-year-old endeavor the Zuzu – Balance in Motion Association. The performance took place in the gallery of the Amiad Center in Jaffa.
The cast was unlike most ensembles to take the stage under the umbrella of a dance show, and the arena was not the predictable proscenium stage.
However, for Amit and Quantz, breaking away from the accepted guidelines of the dance community offered a chance to get straight to the heart of the form and, possibly, to pierce through the fourth wall.
Amit, a former member of the Batsheva Ensemble, has spent the past several years performing his own choreographies and teaching dance in a long list of cities.
“I’ve been all over the world in the past few years, and I’ve seen that the same difficulties exist for dance everywhere.
Dance is so far away from society,” he explains.
During a recent trip to New York City, where he was invited to teach his form of improvisational movement, he came upon an acting workshop at The Juilliard School. Unlike the discourse in dance studios, these actors were challenged to take an honest look at their limitations as performers and then to break through them.
“They were focusing on what stops them from being performers who live in the moment,” he says. It was during these classes that he realized a change in approach was necessary.
Back in Israel, he met Quantz, who had been practicing a combination of holistic physiotherapy and dance for several years. Her choreographies had appeared on stages throughout the country, but it was the process of creating dance pieces in the studio, rather than the performance itself that grabbed Quantz.
“I work with groups and individuals on the connection between body and soul,” she says. “In my work , movement comes last. The main thing is to conduct deep research of each personal story, of the individual living in society.”
She and Amit quickly discovered that they had similar beliefs about the challenges faci n g dance practitioners and their audiences.
“People don’t understand dance, they can’t connect with it,” she says. “And yet everyone uses their body every day.”
The two assembled five professional dancers, as well as a group of members of Enosh – The Israeli Association for Mental Health.
The groups met individually and together in the studio for sessions that included conversation, acting exercises, movement and improvisation.
“The dancers were not used to working the way that we work,” she recalls. Though they chose performers who could carry their weight on stage and wow an audience, she and Amit were not interested in being dazzled by high kicks or dizzying turns.
“ Our dancers are virtuosic, but that’s not what we emphasize. I’m not interested in the circus that is dance. I don’t want to be amazed by technique.
We want to be amazed by something else, by the realness of a person’s presence,” says Amit.
“We asked them to connect to themselves before they started moving.
Anything that was not authentic was immediately visible,” adds Quantz.
The pair asked to the psychiatrically disabled to communicate what was going on inside their minds – the emotions and thoughts that they felt they couldn't share with the world.
“It created a kind of microcosm in the studio, where the work connected to daily life. We were working on providing tools that would go beyond dance,” says Amit.
“Sometimes we would just listen to them talking to themselves, and it was fascinating. For the show, we didn’t tell them what to say or how to move, just when to begin.”
Though the backgrounds of the participants varied, he and Quantz were proud to see the lines between dancer and non-dancer blurred.
“We aren’t trying to say that the two groups [professional dancers and the psychiatrically disabled] aren’t different, only that they can and do exist together,” she says.
With the premier of People behind it, Zuzu hopes to continue to expand to reach new groups of participants and untapped audiences.
“We’d like to continue to perform, not just with these guys but with other groups and to join more artists to our endeavors,” says Amit. “I think dance can change the world. I see how dancers all over the world can understand each other without a common language or background. I think that connection can happen to anyone.”