Dance Reviews

Amir Kolben's latest creation, "The Four Seasons," is set to Vivaldi's score and was created in honor of his dance company's 10th season.

By ORA BRAFMAN
Kolben Dance Company The Four Seasons: The Eternal Desire for Change Suzanne Dellal Center August 8 Amir Kolben's latest creation, "The Four Seasons," is set to Vivaldi's score and was created in honor of his dance company's 10th season. To mark the festive occasion, The Israel Chamber Orchestra provided music for the performance live on stage. Like the Kolben Dance Company, the chamber orchestra is based in Jerusalem, and in a general way the dancers benefited from the warmth added by this fine group of musicians. To some extent, however, the special musical accompaniment also highlighted the shortcomings of the dance itself. The choreography kept the dancers in an ongoing dialogue with the music, yet tried at the same time to give the dancers an independent voice through the piece's constant structural changes and overly busy arrangement of movement. Cutting the music and having the dancers perform in silence between sequences was an interesting choice on Kolben's part, and white paper butterflies and boats added a touch of fantasy. But despite these distractions, the choreography ultimately felt overwrought, and the uninspired set and costume design ensured that, this time, Kolben missed his mark. Yossi Berg, Ronit Ziv, Oded Graff Heroes Hot Dance Festival Suzanne Dellal Center August 11 Berg, Ziv and Graff, who normally work independently, joined forces for the Suzanne Dellal Center's Hot Dance Festival, introducing three perky duets joined by related themes and a similar energy. Yossi Berg and Oded Graff have worked together before, and their two collaborative works here - "Rabbit Habit" and "Could Be Heroes" - could well be viewed as one work divided into two sections. In both works, the two dancers portray a complex relationship between two desperately lonely men, with each character impeded by his difficulty in trusting the other. The two pieces used similar choreography and emotional content and concluded impressively. Plenty of truth and integrity could also be found in Ronit Ziv's work "Deconstructing the Form," a duet she performed with dancer Inbar Nemirovsky. The duet took the form of a chance encounter between two women at a gym; one takes her boxing training very seriously while the other - Ziv - tries to exert herself as little as possible. Ziv uses humor and self-parody effectively in her work, and all four dancers here showed sufficient stage presence to make "Heroes" a most enjoyable evening.