Room to dance

The Room Dance Festival gets back to basics.

By ORI J. LENKINSKI
The Room Dance Festival (photo credit: PR)
The Room Dance Festival
(photo credit: PR)
Dance productions come in all shapes and sizes, from massive numbers performed by hundreds to two-minute solos. Choreographers use anything but the kitchen sink, from props and sets to lighting and costumes, to help convey their vision to the audience.
And while fireworks and ice rinks can enhance the viewer experience, sometimes it’s nice to go back to the basics. For this reason, the Room Dance Festival exists.
Established in 1989, the festival is exactly what the title implies – an event that takes place in a room. In the interest of presenting dance in its simplest, purest form, the Room Dance Festival presents a platform that is without a theater and without props or sets. The participating artists enjoy close contact with their audience, often performing right next to their guests.
This weekend, the annual Room Dance Festival will take place at the Teiva Theater in Jaffa, followed by performances in the Leo Model Hall at the Gerard Behar Center in Jerusalem. Curated by Amos Hetz and Lior Avizoor, the program is divided into three evenings. As a starting point, Hetz and Avizoor presented the notion of restaging or recreation of older dance works.
“In this year’s festival we ask to look at current dance works through the lens of our memories of existing dance pieces,” write Hetz and Avizoor in the festival’s program. In recent years, the blurb continues, more and more dance artists feel the need to respond to the enormous work of previous artists, to make a connection between current dance work and personal and collective archives.
Program A consists of three works by Shelly Palmon, Talia de Vries and Bosmat Nossan with Ido Feder.
Program B includes new works by Amos Hetz, Anat Shemgar and the Kaleidoscope Project.
Program C features works by Nir Vidan, Keren Hoffman, Shir Brandes, Jonathan Ron, Laura Kirshnbaum, Christina Ciupke and Anna Til.
The Room Dance Festival takes place on December 12 and 13 at the Teiva Theater and on December 17, 18 and 20 at the Gerard Behar Centre, For tickets, visit www.tixwise.co.il/ heder.