In recent years, the Inbal troupe has been going through the process of finding its contemporary identity in the Israeli dance field.
The troupe, founded in 1949 by Sarah Levy-Tanai to present the Yemeni dance through its connection to the principles of artistic theatrical dance and a modern performance approach, struggled for many years to get out of the accepted labeling of "ethnic dance" and "folklore".
Since 2016, contemporary designers create the troupe's present, and its current repertoire reflects current choreographic trends alongside a discourse on tradition and heritage.
Emanuel Gat - one of the prominent Israeli choreographers in world dance - began the joint path with "Inbal" when he created "Susan" in 2021, and these days the premiere of his second work for the company - "Kiryat Gat" is taking place.
The names of the works indicate themselves as landmarks related to Gath himself, a kind of reflection that sheds light on the movement he began to create here.
"I didn't decide to call 'Susan' that way. Somehow I got to Nina Simone's concert (at the Philharmonic Hall in New York in 1969, which Gat turned into the soundtrack of the work - AS), and one of the songs she sang at that concert was 'Susan' by Leonard Cohen Then it made a connection for me, because 'Susan' in my story is the place, the institution, the first time I entered the studio and started dancing. 'Kiryat Gat' was a continuation of this way of thinking. In the last years before I left, I worked in Kiryat Gat on a project to establish a choreographic center, Which for all kinds of reasons didn't work out and was also one of the things that pushed me out."
Designing a new identity.
The Inbal band in the 1980s, photo: Moshe Shay
"Kiryat Gat" opens with a movement section of the band that breaks up into a sequence of solos, and gradually builds to a regrouping of the dancers at the end.
This move is rich in transitions between movement and pause, light and shadows, and above all attention - a lot of attention;
of the dancers to the music and to themselves as a group, and of each dancer inward to his body.
The way Emmanuel Gat worked on "Kiryat Gat" echoes the contemporary thinking about choreography and creative processes that is prevalent in Europe, and is also identified with the work of some of the independent creators in Israel.
At its core is an agreement to give up preliminary decisions: "I don't have any element in my work that is placed as a starting point. All the things that emerge emerge and appear from the process," he says.
As a result of this, Gat also avoided defining in a binding title the connection between "Kiryat Gat" and "Susan", even though both works are defined as part of a trilogy, which will be completed next year.
"Many times I am faced with the question of what the work is about, and I am not willing to reduce it. For it to be about something, it must be about everything and nothing. I think the connection is a product of the simple fact that I am doing them for the Inbal band, in this Israeli context and in relation to the story Mine, and that I do them in sequence. That's enough to connect them. I trust the process that creates the contexts from within itself."
Emmanuel Gat.
"I perfect the potential, not the result",
In fact, the choice not to close the works in a binding choreographic or conceptual framework turns them to a large extent into a living organism that is in constant formation - even after the work is finished.
According to Gat, "My work with the dancers is to open up the range of possibilities for them and make them understand the responsibility they have in making a decision, and they have to be precise every time and pay attention to what is happening today. They are connected to each other, and there is always a tension between the constant and the variable. The work is not supposed to find its form. I am careful that it will not. What I perfect is the potential, not the result."
It seems, however, that precisely from the release of the planned and structured, the inner threads in Emmanuel Gat's works manage to be organically oriented, from the inner inertia of each work, but also in the light of the relationships that emerge between them over the course of time.
The decision to open Kiryat Gat where "Susan" ends, for example, came from Gat's completely random experience in finding the beginning that was missing for the work, just as it was only through the process of Kiryat Gat that the decision to create a trilogy was made.
Such intuitive insights added additional charges in the meeting with the specific context of the Inbal band: about a week before the premiere, Gat decided that the soundtrack of "Kiryat Gat" would consist of two sonatas by Beethoven and two songs by Avner Gedasi.
He played "We broke up like this" by chance during one of the rehearsals ("everyone knows it from the radio"), and following it he became familiar with "Ahavat Hadassah", the search for the words of which revealed to him that the song was included in the music written by Mordechai Seter for Sara Levy-Tanai's work for the Inbal band, "Tikon midnight".
From Kiryat Gat.
A kind of choreographic Rorschach blot, photo: Eli Katz
The surprise of the discovery is what made it accurate for him: "If, say, I had known this before, in my life it would never have entered the work, because I believe that it reduces the range of possibilities so much, but it happened. I learned that if you are attentive to the process, what happens is always interesting And he will always create references and contexts that are relevant in some way."
The evening before the first show, however, the work decided otherwise, and Gat realized that it wanted to end with "We Parted So", with which it also opened.
"Hadassa Love" remains written in the program, like a souvenir of the materials that are part of the work, even if they do not exist in its final form which is, apparently, final only for the time being.
To a large extent, one can read "Kiryat Gat" as a sort of "choreographed Rorschach stain" of "Inbal" today, and this despite Gat's conscious choice to put aside the complex history of the band and not engage with it.
"It has to do with the question of where you look - forward or backward", Gat explains, and to a large extent also succeeds in placing folklore and heritage in contemporary "eyes".
"Many times, the gaze in dance is backwards - we had a perfect version, we announce it as official, and all the time when we work, we will want to go back there. But if you look now at what is happening, the gaze takes you to a completely different place."
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