The "Intimdance" dance festival, which will open today at the Tamune Theater, continues to expand and challenge the boundaries of the medium, to be alert to changes and respond to the reality in Israel.
Each year a central image is chosen that frames the content of the festival - and the creators respond to it.
This year, the artistic directors, Merav Dagan and Stav Marin, chose the term "limbo" and wrote in the program: "Between one wave and another, between a global crisis and a perpetual local conflict, between yesterday and tomorrow... we are in limbo."
Temune Theater, the festival's home, is an old institution, and according to Marin, it is "one of the only cultural institutions that claim to be fringe and really stand behind it."
Both emphasized that the theater allows them to make art "without gagging, without censorship, without fear".
Marin shares that about three years ago and just before the epidemic, she was driving from her childhood home in the north of the country towards Jaffa in the pouring rain, and in a moment of enlightenment she realized what the theme of the festival should be, which she and Dagan first believed in - "Coup".
As dance artists with a socio-political consciousness, they were looking for a word that would be both a reading of direction and a physical action appropriate to the genre they are engaged in.
While we were talking this week ahead of the start of a new festival, they had trouble remembering what it was then that agitated them so much - another election?
Feeling stuck?
Everything happens so fast and the sense of emergency is a regular guest in our districts.
Dagan and Marin.
"Between yesterday and tomorrow - we are in limbo", photo: Ofir Ben Shimon
Around that time, in the week they started the festival, the public space was closed and the first lockdown began.
Instead of artistically managing one festival - "we did four festivals", they say.
The instability led to an online version, a live version with capsules, and so on.
Dagan shares: "There was a feeling that we were unnecessary, that the field was unnecessary," and Marin adds: "Our job was to make the artists feel that they were doing something good."
After a long wait and not a few moments of despair, the day came when the restrictions were partially lifted.
They jumped at the chance and invited the creators and the audience.
They described the shows as "like a miracle. There was enormous excitement to meet people face to face. The feeling was that it was subversive."
Two years passed and the traces of the epidemic became blurred.
Dagan and Marin, childhood friends with a symbiotic relationship, became new mothers at the same time.
The in-between area, limbo, also involves the corona effect and its effects on the balance between the individual and the collective and between the inside and the outside.
Each creator staged the concept in a different way: the issue of the relationship between mother and daughter will be the material in choreographer Dega Feder's work, in which she will explore, among other things, "Where does the mother end and the child begin?".
Creator Galia Eini will use home sound recordings, in which she and her partner fear that they will wake up their baby in a documentary performance that will present as an act of discovery what is usually covered up.
Micah Kupfer will perform a solo that "revels in the never-ending possibility of assembly and re-arrangement" within the ever-changing limbo body.
The festival raises essential issues whose triviality is the focus of interest.
The art of dance and the act of choreography have a wonderful ability to present a spectacle - but also to dance routine physical nuances and deal with memory, traumas, relationships or time.
Two guests of honor will accompany the festival and establish it as a festive event in the dance field - Iris Lena and Dr. Yili Nativ, researchers and initiators of the "Dance Animals" podcast, who in an extraordinary performative action will broadcast from a transparent studio, interview and respond to what is happening in the theater. From the studio they will see what is not obvious - A large crowd comes to watch the dance in a low-budget venue, face to face, body to body.
The Intimdance festival will open today (Wednesday) and will continue until Saturday.
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