Inbal Dance TheaterSuzanne (world premiere) by Emmanuel Gat Suzanne Dellal Center, Tel Aviv, August 3
The Tel Aviv Dance Festival opened on a high note with Suzanne, commissioned by Inbal Dance Company from Emmanuel Gat, world-renowned Israeli choreographer, residing in southern France for the past fifteen years. Gat has a successful dance company there, yet this is the first time he agreed to create an original work for an Israeli dance company since he wisely had left for greener pastures. The current Inbal company is a relatively new offspring of the original Inbal, founded in 1949, and has a promising future.
It was a pleasure to see how the company’s dancers felt so comfortable performing Gat’s movement perceptions which are based on intelligence, humanitarian approach and free-spirited artistic building blocks.
The cast includes eight dancers, each with specific attributes and varied dance backgrounds. They gave a decent fight for Gat’s own company with its personal diversity, sense of fluency, and a captivating mixture of their elegance and nonchalant attitude.
Gat often chose revered classical music to accompany his dance works, yet, his Salsa-based miniature is well remembered too. For Suzanne he remixed fragments from Nina Simone’s live-recorded performance at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City in 1969, the year he was born. Her deep warm voice is mesmerizing and sometimes overpowering. Her singular renditions to timeless hits such as “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” or bites from “Hair,” impose a measure of friction between powerful emotions and moods of the music, which at times fights with the movement for attention. At the same time, the dance, kaleidoscope-like effects, elegant rhythms or emotional landscapes are compiled by different rules.
Even so, Suzanne will be remembered for the refined achievement of Inbal dancers, their execution of complex timing cues needed for flawless smooth transitions from endless disintegrating structures on the stage space and unexpected regrouping compositions. Their power as a group is their intimacy and ability to function as a team, never too busy with what they have to do at the moment to notice what each one is doing around them. It seems that Gat saw them as well and appreciated who they are and made for them a tailored dance that caused them to shine under the stage lights.