A finely crafted work

Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, US. Suzanne Dellal Center, Tel Aviv, August 1.

By ORA BRAFMAN
IGAL PERRY’S ‘Perfection has no dreams.’ (photo credit: SHANNEL RESTO)
IGAL PERRY’S ‘Perfection has no dreams.’
(photo credit: SHANNEL RESTO)
Suzanne Dellal’s prestigious framework “International Season” will showcase this summer a number of companies run by Israeli choreographers living abroad, as part of Suzanne Dellal’s 30th year celebrations.
New York-based Peridance Company, founded by Igal Perry 36 years ago, will inaugurate the program. Its evening included recent creations; two rather short pieces by guest artists and a full-length work by Perry which overshadowed works by his younger peers.
The evening opened with “Nightwalkers” by Yoshito Sakuraba, for 10 dancers. Among them one could immediately spot several particularly strong, interesting male dancers. Sakuraba constructed a sequence of compositional forms which interplay between calmness and intensity of movement and sound. Stylistically, the work is within the safe boundaries attributed to the mainstream genera of contemporary dance, spiced with balletic components and few pinches of hip hop to freshen up this aesthetic work.
The bar was raised up a notch with Alice Klock creation, “All Told,” proving her ingenuity from the word go, as the dancers moved in tight geometric formation, spearheaded by the company’s most charismatic dancer and there was a tingle in the air. Klock presented a different approach to body work conventions and gave more room for individuality, allowing a dancer to mesh his dramatically extravagant urges into the fabric of the choreography.
Perry, now in his mid-60s, started his career as a dancer with Yonatan Karmon’s folk dance company and spent a few years with the neo-classical Bat-Dor. Forty years ago, he decided to spread his wings, as he moved to New York and fulfilled his aspirations.
His maturity, knowledge and talent made his full-length creation, “Perfection has no dreams” into a more complex set of thematic sources and artistic expressions, made with an assured hand, often with a good inherent sense of timing. Those attributes helped him to compose varied scenes ranging from lyrical sensitivity with traces of contact-based fluidity, up to bold and intense male duet in full nudity of painful longings and poetic text.
He also found a way to stitch a section based on Israeli folk dance variations, accompanied by refined oriental style music and text by Ofer Bashan, with only faint traces of kitsch, along a touching solo, accompanied by pointed text in Hebrew. Perhaps those were tokens of his past and proof his existing ties. Perry’s urge to deal with so many issues was compelling but sometimes weighted down this finely crafted work.