Tel Aviv Dance 2024 Festival at the Suzanne Dellal Center focuses on Israeli creation

The annual Tel Aviv Dance Festival, a leading cultural event in contemporary dance in Israel, will be held this year from August 1-10, featuring 19 performances by dozens of Israeli creators, choreographers, and dancers. 

The lineup includes seven premieres, outdoor performances, open rehearsals, and special events.

For 10 days, the festival will feature a variegated lineup of performances, premiers, open rehearsals, and outdoor performances showcasing the best of Israeli dance. 

With the ongoing war, this year the festival will not host visiting dance groups. Instead, it will showcase the rich and diverse creations produced locally, with new works and premieres, alongside retrospectives and special events.

Adding to the excitement, for the first time, the public can watch open rehearsals every evening, bringing the audience closer to the creative process and the inner world of the artists. These rehearsals will take place in the central courtyard of the Suzanne Dellal Center, and entry is free.

The festival will open with a festive evening, showcasing “El Atlal” by Orly Portal, a dancer and choreographer presenting a contemporary interpretation of ancient traditions, combining elements of contemporary dance with the sounds of the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum (Thursday, August 1 at 8 p.m., at the Dellal Hall in the Suzanne Dellal Center).

Portal is a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, movement and voice therapist, and researcher of tribal dance and Moroccan folklore. She has developed a unique dance language rooted in relaxation, honoring the natural movement of the body and respecting the individual structure of each dancer’s body and mind.

Her work presents a contemporary interpretation of ancient traditions, combining elements of modern dance, contact improvisation, and Feldenkrais. Portal began her professional career as a dancer and soloist in the Kol Demama company led by Moshe Efrati, and in the Batsheva Ensemble.

Over the years she delved into the study of Arab folklore, studying Arabic music at Bar-Ilan University and traveling to Morocco to learn firsthand the traditional dances of the Gnawa and Berber tribes.

IN “EL ATLAL,” which opens the festival, Portal and her group bring a contemporary translation and the voice of Umm Kulthum. A cry is directed at the abandoned deity. In times when culture is pushed aside, the muses are silent, and the heart is heavy, and the motivation to create turns into the necessity to survive. Seeds of beauty sprout in the fragments of war.

The creation emerges from the ruins. Bodies wrapped in the shroud of life, their hands bound, stomp their feet, strike their chests, and demand freedom. This is a dance of lamentation for the loss of life and faith. “And the earth was formless and void.” 

The dancers, with their voices and bodies, sigh and seek to mend the great pain of both peoples. Two languages are woven together, their sounds merging into a shared call, revealing their original and ancient connection. The music, language, and voice blend into the dance until they reach “Tarab” – ecstatic elevation.

Disharmonious rhythms rub against sublime beauty in this masterpiece. The song about the death of love between a man and a woman becomes a story about a world that was destroyed, about the relationship between a person and their place, land, and people.

Noa Eshkol's legacy

AN IMPORTANT part of the festival is dedicated to Noa Eshkol, marking the 100th anniversary of her birth. Eshkol, daughter of Israel’s third prime minister, Levi Eshkol, was the inventor of the Eshkol-Wachman movement notation, one of the only movement notations in the world.

The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group, which she founded in 1954, will present “Warrior and Dreamer,” an intimate series of her work. In October 1973, with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War and the enlistment of Shmulik Zaidel, who was at the time one of the dancers in the Chamber Dance Group, Eshkol suspended work on the dances until Zaidel returned safely from battle. 

In this performance, the current members of her troupe aim to showcase a selection of her dances, where the theme of war resonates through both the titles and the choreography.

Choreographer duo Yossi Berg and Oded Graf also take center stage, with a program focused on their creations, featuring significant works from two decades that earned them international recognition and a layered body of work including over 30 pieces.

The program “Ritual, Fantasy, and Love” takes the audience on a journey through three of their prominent creations: “Rite of Spring #2,” “4 Fantasies and a Monkey,” and “When Love Walked In,” dealing with themes of heroism and sacrifice, compassion and love, humor, sorrow, and cultural clichés. In the context of the current situation, it is inevitable to reflect on human nature and the construction of narratives and ideologies.

ANOTHER PERFORMANCE that relates to the war and its aftermath is Stav Struz Botrus’s creation “Partings,” which brings to the forefront the poetic nature of mourning, where different forms of parting – personal and collective – intertwine, binding each other in a fate of shared grief and memory.

Contemporary choreographer Hillel Kogan operates at the intersection of dance and performance. A veteran choreographer and dancer in the contemporary dance scene, Kogan visits the world of flamenco dance and music as a tourist in “Thisispain.” He engages in a sharp dialogue with the Israeli flamenco icon Michal Nathan, addressing questions of national and artistic identity: What is Spanish and what is Israeli? What is European, what is folklore, and what is high art? All of this while questioning the concept of identity itself.

The performance “Zift” by Sol Dance Company (August 6, at 9 p.m.) dives deep into the human psyche, where uncontrollable forces drive us to actions beyond our comprehension. The artistic director and founding choreographer of Sol Dance Company is Eyal Dadon.

The Kaiser Antonino Dance Ensemble will premiere a new work – “Shhh...” (August 7 at 7 p.m.). The onomatopoeia shhh... is the sound instructing silence. It is often said that secrets, lies, especially the “white” ones, are the foundation of the social structure. The choreography of Avi Kaiser and Sergio Antonino takes inspiration from this theme to build a framework for a quartet: two women and two men from different generations, experiencing the complexity of being together.

After October 7, the sound “shhh,” insisting on silence, gained a dramatic echo in our daily lives. Simultaneously, the family institution suffered states of disconnection, fracture, and helplessness – but also immense strength of unity and preservation, a force uniting our society.

Bringing images of Jackie Kennedy to the stage, Ori Lenkinski will premiere her work “Jackie Pink and Black” (August 7 at 9 p.m.).

Lenkinski is a dancer, creator, and journalist combining the language of movement with written language. Since 2000, Ori has performed in works by independent creators such as Naomi LaFrance, Rachel Erdos, and others. 

Lenkinski regularly writes for The Jerusalem Post and Ma’ariv and pens the column “Parenting Choreography” in Haaretz’s family section. In her work “Jackie Pink and Black,” Lenkinski embodies a version of Jackie Kennedy and fills in the gaps between photos published in the world’s most renowned magazines. From the televised White House tour watched by millions to a quiet night in a penthouse on Park Avenue, “Jackie Pink and Black” is a journey into the memories, tragedies, and fantasies of one woman – the former First Lady.

Bring out your glitter and join Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor in “Disco, Baby!,” a show combined with a party as well as a group dance session in the style of Bal Moderne, to the tunes of the biggest disco hits of the ’70s – ABBA, Boney M, The Jacksons, Donna Summer, KC and the Sunshine Band, Chic, Thelma Houston, Baccara, and more.

Bal Moderne is a form of group dancing meant for people with no professional dance background who simply love to move. The principle is simple: professional dancers and choreographers teach the audience short movement phrases, the cumulative length of which does not exceed three minutes, and then everyone dances together.

Sheinfeld and Laor are dance creators who have been working together since 2004. Their works combine contemporary dance with physical theater and performance.

More fun is to be had at the Kazuyo Shionuri and Dror Lieberman (TakeDown productions) “Blue Balls” production for the whole family, which will be held outdoors on August 8 at 7:30 p.m., at the Main Square of the Suzanne Dellal Center.

The creation is a cross between circus, dance, and visual art. Its language consists of craftsmanship, physical effort, quiet moments, and teamwork, which together attempt to produce poetic images through the movement of the body and objects.

This is the second chapter in a trilogy of “labor performances” dealing with the interaction between material objects and the human body. The trilogy serves as a kind of requiem for the human body as we know it today. Admission is free so bring the kids and join the fun.

Last, but certainly not least, is a premiere by the Lior Tavori Dance Company – “Crust” (August 10 at 7:30 p.m.), a dance creation about Israel and the world, 2024. Thick red smoke obscures vision. Forbidden pleasure appears. An invasion into territory whose boundaries are unclear. Lior Tavori’s works are characterized by passion, sexuality, and animalistic qualities, exploring the boundaries of the dance medium with a combination of innovation, emotion, and technical precision.

The festival is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sports, and the Tel Aviv Municipality. Tickets can be purchased at the box office or on the festival website: telavivdance.suzannedellal.org.il.