PrimiTV? Diver Festival for Contemporary Dance

Primitivity is an unpopular concept in the politically-correct era of our multicultural society. At the same time, we have grown tired of technological advancements, and developed a longing for “what we used to be” – a longing for the principles of the noble savage (with an iphone in his hand).

Dance has always been accused of primitiveness. It was certainly not important, rational or spiritual enough for the great philosophers. It was identified with the primitiveness of women, the primitiveness of the body, of the nonverbal, of desire, repetition, and trance. Dance still requires the audience’s actual bodies, if only “just” to look at the movements of others’ bodies – a supposedly “primitive” demand in the age of screens.

But dance is not, nor was it ever, primitive.
It is certainly not primitive in the sense that it expresses an ancient order.
It is also not a noble savage.
Rather, Dance is PrimiTV – the first screen.
A privileged screen, as it evades the image’s curse of eternal life by sticking to the body.

Dance spans the unbridgeable gap between our body being forever an image and our own real-time sensation of our body as inseparable from ourselves. This gap that our body generates, the paradox between alienation and identity, establishes religions, cultures and arts in abundance. Dance enables us to compassionately view this paradox and even give it a special status – PrimiTV.

In an era of globalized modes of representation – that is to say in the era of Netflix – for the heartless and the lazy, dance appears to be an awkward instrument. And yet globalization, television and dubious representations all fall into the dancing body that stands before the audience’s body. And that body is not afraid of using color, gender, violence, sweat, nudity, gesture, movement or stillness in order to broadcast PrimiTV.

In today’s primitive times, where our world is led by a “reality star,” it is not surprising that we dive into the truth with a PrimiTV dance festival.

​                                           Photo by Alain Monot

PrimiTV is the theme of 2018 Diver Festival for contemporary dance is taking place over three intense weekends. During the festival, performances are presented all over Tel Aviv-Jaffa in different venues, theaters, museums and performance space. The content performed is introducing young and experienced leading choreographers from Israel and abroad. Next to the shows, the festival wishes for the conception of the present to transpire alongside the investigation of the past – thus, the history, philosophy and theory of dance are of importance to the festival. The political, aesthetic and social dimensions of dance are meant to appear together. Therefore, The festival invites and initiates collaborations with academics, journalists, other medias and artistic forms, educational organizations and many more, in order for dance to be celebrated in varied ways and appearances. Next to the shows, other dance related events are taking place, such as workshops, discussions, lectures, screenings, heated debates, parties and more.

1^st weekend: 29.8-1.9

Wednesday 29.8 20:00 Inbal Theater (Suzanne Dellal Centre); duration: 45 min

Epoch / Volmir Cordeiro & Marcela Santander Corvalán (CL/BR/FR)

                                                Photo by Alain Monot

Epoch is a study, an inventory of dances in which 20th century female artists explore the performance of contorted movements. It began by reading the descriptions of the dances written by the artists then transcribing these writings into simple partitions. Thus made fiction, these partitions transform words into movement and enables to create works that are independent of the sources that inspired them.

Once the words are used to produce movement, these dances that the performers had never seen, came to life, telling the story of the desynchronization of two dancers; like dancing the difference between two different eras, between words and sensations, between theatre and nostalgia.

The title, Epoch, evokes a certain quality more than a specific time. In this performance, different elements are explored and interpreted to reanimate an intimate and vibrant story, that has been forgotten or lost in the symbolic past of our journey as dancers. Here dance is used as a raw and direct means to revisit and revivify an archive whose insistent vitality resonates with our present.

Epoch is a search for magic. The magic of an enigma, of mystery, of the power of the moment and the way its constant renewal provides the basis for our movement.

Choreography and performance: Volmir Cordeiro et Marcela Santander Corvalán | Light: Maël Guiblin | Support and tour management : Margot Videcoq | Coproduction: Le Quartz, Scène Nationale de Brest | With the support of: Ménagerie de Verre (Paris) Casa do Povo (São Paulo – Brésil) LE CND - Un centre d’art pour la danse | Thanks to : Clarisse Chanel, Carolina Mendonça, Phelipe Janning and all the team from Le Quartz

The performance will be followed by a discussion between Shir Hacham, the creators, and the audience.

Thursday 30.8 20:30; Friday 31.8 12:30 Fresco Dance and Art Center; duration: 140 min

PrimiTV @ Fresco/Mor Shani: Love-ism / Tamar Lamm & David Kern: Dogwalkers / Merav Dagan: Bloody Mary / Sun Shy Boy (Emile Lagarde) (NL): That Space Between Us
 

Mor Shani / Love-ism: The Problem of Our Being Together

                                               Photo by Paul Sixta 

Love-ism is the outcome of a long term study with and within different communities, exploring the politics of intimacy and their physical manifestations. In this research, inspired by the book Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, Shani asks to challenge the perceptions of the agreed upon, the sublime and the condemned in an intimate relationship. When does supreme ideas such as care, compassion and mutuality become sinful?

The problem of our being together is the second of a series of works created in the frame of Love-ism. In this duet  a man and a woman attempt to walk on the thin line that separates brotherhood and erotic love, in a composition that quickly becomes a pathetic ode to radical romanticism.

Creator: Mor Shani | Incepted by: Alma Kidron and Gal Gorfung | Music: Jaap van Kulen

Tamar Lamm & David Kern / Dogwalkers

                                              Photo by Efrat Mazor

“The work is formed in the space between dance, performance and musical concert, while adhering to an organizing principle that leaves it both unraveled and structured at the same time. In the stage space, there are scattered objects, these, like the movement, have a two-way relationship with the doubting fantastic humorous narrative and the perplexity that spreads throughout the work. A score of partnership, love, longing and separation is formed on the seam between the perspective of emotional consciousness and the physical experience of the body.” (Idit Suslik , “the contemporary eye” )

Performance and Choreography: Tamar Lamm & David Kern | Costume and Stage Design: Tamar Lamm & David Kern | Lighting Design: Dani Fishof

Merav Dagan / Bloody Mary

This is an offer to take the biological mechanism of the menstruation cycle and use it as a choreographic score – an outline for a space of cyclical – temporary destruction.

This is a wish to establish the female body as a source of information and inspiration for new insights, turn it into a platform one could view the world and operate in, in the hope for a better future.

Creator and performer: Merav Dagan | Costume Design: Tamar Ben Cnaan | Light Design: Amir Castro | Artistic Advisers: Erez Maayan and Anat Katz

Sun Shy Boy / That Space Between Us

THAT SPACE BETWEEN US IS A SEARCHING BODY THAT KEEPS CLOSE PROXIMITY TO CHAOS AND ABANDONMENT

Sun Shy Boy explores the expressive qualities and architectural boundaries of music and its body. Craving for a wider dynamic and an embrace of all peripheries, bodies gain their meaning within the shadow realm, with faces blurred, and backs turned front.

Creator, Producer, Composer and Perofrmer: Sun Shy Boy (Emile Lagarde) | Special thanks to: Maya Tamir, Tamir Eting, JEROME (Label), Yves Tumor, Rodrigo Sobarzo, Internationalisering Fond Amsterdam, School for New Dance Development

Friday 31.8 21:00 Mandel Cultural Center; duration: 130 min

PrimiTV Therapy / Anat Danieli: The Treatment / Ariel Bronz: Me2much / Sigal Bergman: Revert To Manual

Anat Danieli / The Treatment

The work explores situations of human closeness and healing related to the term jouissance, which means: pleasure. In my new work, I will refer to the concept of pleasure through a dealing with erotic and political aspects of three intimate relationships between people: one in relationship of intimate touch, the second in physical therapy and the third in context of performance.

By: Anat Danieli in collaboration with Omer Uziel | Artistic Consultant: Yael Venezia

Ariel Bronz / Me2much

An experimental performance for the prevention of sexual harassment with the audience’s participation.

Me2much is an artistic reaction that challenges the wide consensus around the me2 phenomenon that dares to bring about our fears and doubts.

Me2much examines the distance between sexual harassment and you, between humor and incitement, between aggression and vulnerability.

Me2much touches the act of sexual harassment and sexual violence.

Me2much reveal through a series of games and activities the hidden and shameful aspects of sexual harassment.

The performance includes nudity and is restricted to 18+

Creator and performer: Ariel Bronz

Sigal Bergman / Revert to Manual

Revert to manual Performance as a lesson, learning as healing - how listening to the body can help free us from Physical and mental habits. For over 15 years I’ve been creating dances and at the same time teaching the Alexander Technique and improvisation. In Revert to Manual I dissolve the borders between those field letting the alchemy between them create new possibilities.

Thought changes movement, movement changes the tinker. The body changes thought and the thought changes the mover. Every door to the body/mind unity opens a unique perspective. I begin with the body.

Choreography and performance: Sigal Bergman | Outside eye: Sharon Zuckerman Weiser, Keren Ben Altabet | Rehearsal management: Kim Tietelbaum

Saturday 1.9 19:30 Mandel Cultural Center; Free Admission

Art in the Bureaucratic Space

Discursive event with Dana Yahalomi and Ido Feder

Saturday 1.9 21:00 Mandel Cultural Center; duration: 65 min

SonicBodyTV/ Gali Kaner: Beginning / Bosmat Nossan: Ba Ze

Gali Kaner / Beginning

A performance of sound and the dancing body.

Created and performed by: Gali Kaner | Costume Design: Rosalind Noctor

Bosmat Nossan / Ba Ze

When my daughter was two years old she kept asking “Ma Ze?” (what’s that?). I was ready for a being asked “why?” but not for constant soundtrack of “Ba Ze?” A question that made me define everything, all the time. The starting point of “Ba Ze?” is the question what are we looking at when we watch dance? I want to linger on the moment when the spectator defines what he sees until this question disappears.

By: Bosmat Nossan | Soundtrack: Noa Lamberski | Recording: Guy Shomroni | Costumes: Kim Tietelbaum

2^nd weekend: 5.9-8.9

Wednesday 5.9 20:00 Inbal Theater (Suzanne Dellal Centre); duration: 60 min

Ligia Lewis / Minor Matter (DE/DO)

                                                     Photo by Tate 

“Minor matter” is the second part of the trilogy (BLUE, RED, WHITE) performed by three dancers. Two discursive apparatuses are at play—blackness and the black box. In this work, Lewis turns to the color red to materialize thoughts between love and rage. The work unfolds multi-directionally creating a poetics of dissonance from which questions of re-presentation, presentation, abstraction, and the limits of signification emerge. Throughout the choreography the performers push their bodies against the boundaries of the stage while simultaneously illustrating a humble relationship between their bodies and the space that encapsulates it. The performers get exhausted as their bodies strip the stage of its formal mystique to approach its matter—black. In “minor matter”, sound travels across musical epochs to arrive at the poetics of the intimate present. Built on the logic of interdependence, the theater’s parts—light, sound, image, and architecture—become entangled with the three performers, giving life to a vibrant social and poetic space.

Concept & Choreography: Ligia Lewis | With performers: Corey-Scott-Gilbert, Ligia Lewis, Tiran Willemse (in creation with Jonathan Gonzalez, Hector Thami Manekehla) | Musical Dramaturgy: Michal Libera, Ligia Lewis | Styling: Alona Rodeh | Sound Design: Jassem Hindi | Sound Technician: Neda Sanai | Light Design: Andreas Harder Light technician: Joseph Wegmann | Dramaturgy: Ariel Efraim Ashbel Assistance: Martha Glenn | Touring & Distribution: HAU Hebbel am Ufer / Nicole Schuchardt

Thursday 6.9 18:00; Saturday 20:30 Mandel Cultural Center; duration: 150 min

Michal Samama / Retrospective: Hospitality

“Hospitality”, commissioned by ‘Diver’ festival, is a site specific project, created to fit the various spaces of Mandel Cultural Center in Jaffa. The piece is composed of a number of works all exploring the medium of performance as a social event of ingathering, with its implicit rules and regularities and their possible transgressions. At its heart there is a chance for contact, whether pulling in or pushing away.

The piece makes use of the ‘public establishment’ aesthetics of the center, objects taken from the Israeli public space, and the gesture of hospitality, for an examination of the manner in which the body is situated in a shared space – an everyday activity, that nonetheless harbors a certain danger and risk. Both parties: the host and the guest, the inviter and the invited - risk an element of their privacy, creating together a precarious and fleeting event at the very edge between the private and the public.    

Creator: Michal Samama | Performers: Karmit Burian, Omer Uziel, Michal Samama | Director, Design, and Sound Design: Amit Gilutz and Daniel Sapir

The performance on Saturday 8.9 will be followed by a talk led by Naama Arad

Thursday 6.9 21:30; Friday 7.9 13:00 Inbal Theater (Suzanne Dellal Centre); duration: 60 min

Samira Elagoz / Cock, Cock... Who’s There?

                                            Photo by JIRINA

Cock, Cock.. Who’s There? is a documentary performance about violence and intimacy Samira Elagoz takes us along on her personal research project across three continents. From online platforms to close encounters, she showcases gender relations in their brutal and wonderful ambivalence, and takes the audience on her journey of regaining power, reinventing autonomous expression of sexuality and attempts to relate to men after being raped. Confrontational, unrestrainedly funny, deeply touching and formally simply virtuoso. She explores desire, the power of femininity and the male gaze in a world in which the virtual and the real are inextricably intertwined.

Written, directed, edited, starring: Samira Elagoz

Friday 7.9 14:15 Inbal Theater (Suzanne Dellal Centre); Free Admission

Sex, Art and Danger in the Time of Me2

Discursive event with Samira Elagoz, Inés Moldavsky, and Shir Hacham. We will screen Inés Moldavsky’s film “The Men Behind the Wall”, the recent winner of the short film prize at the Berlinale, which will be followed by a discussion with Samira Elagoz, Inés Moldavsky, and Shir Hacham.

3^rd weekend: 12.9-15.9

Wednesday 12.9 19:00 Inbal Theater (Suzanne Dellal Centre); Free Admission

Post Acre in Tel Aviv: Thoughts on the Artist’s Political Action

Discursive Event moderated by Shir Hacham and with the participation of other artists

Wednesday 12.9 21:00 Inbal Theater (Suzanne Dellal Centre); duration: 60 min

Sharon Zuckerman Weiser / Adam & id

As in her previous works,Sharon Zuckerman Weiser exposes the human and personal mechanisms that are linked to the performers who bear them. In the present work Moshe and Sharon, two experienced dancers, wonder in the performative field of vision, looking for blind spots and trying to bring them back to light.

Creator: Sharon Zuckerman Weiser | Performers: Sharon Zuckerman Weiser and Moshe Scheter Avshalom | External Eye: Shani Granot

Thursday 13.9 20:30; Friday 14.9 20:30 Tmuna Theater; duration: 60 min

Lee Méir / Line Up

                                       Photo by André Lewski 

The solo Line Up explores the passage of time as a surface of intensity rather than a linear process of development. On a stage full of loud metal objects and through a practice of excessive speech, the performer works towards organising elements that she can never fully control. Navigating the chaos of putting things in order, movement and time appear in their bare state, with no beginning or end. Line Up invites the viewer to experience the urgency of a single moment of control and the continuous loss of it.

*Line Up was born through the research I have been developing within my solo series fourteen functional failures, which parts of it have been presented at Tmuna Theatre in Intimadance festival 2017.

Performance, Choreography & Concept: Lee Méir | Philosophic Dialogue: Marcus Steinweg | Musical Dialogue & Sound: Moritz Gagern | Dramaturgy: Julia Rodríguez | Voice Training & Dramaturgy: André Lewski | Light: Gretchen Blegen | Stage & Construction: Johannes Maas | Production: Annett Hardegen

A production by Lee Méir in collaboration with Vierte Welt and Ausufern. Co-produced by Uferstudios GmbH in the frame of the Project „Life Long Burning“ with the support of the Cultural Program of the European Union.  Funded by the Capital Cultural Fonds (Haupstadtkulturfonds). The performance at Diver festival is supported by the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ International Guest Performance Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Saturday 15.9 20:30 Noa Dar Dance Group Studio; duration: 55 min

Noa Dar / NoaNoa

                                   Photo by Tamar Lamm

A solo work that conducts a dialogue between an older dancer and the dancer she was 20 and 40 years ago. The discourse that is formed between them and their reflection in one another, floods a simple initial desire to move and with the movement to follow the memory embedded in the body. The act of observing the body as an archive that holds everything that has been experienced, gives rise to a search for what remains of what was, and what is presently active in it. In the intimate space created between body and memory, there is reverberation from the internal and private to the public space, between abilities and limitations, and between the basic and the impulsive to the processed and the experienced.

Created and performed by: Noa Dar

Saturday 15.9 21:30 Noa Dar Dance Group Studio; Free Admission

Conclusions on the term PrimiTV

A Closing Cocktail and Discursive Event with Dr Ruth Abeliovich, Ran Brown, and the audience.

                                                  29/8 – 15/9 2018

Artistic and General Director: Ido Feder | Founder: Moshe Shechter Avshalom | Producer: Chen Goldfarb | Graphic Design: Amethyst Deceiver  | Technical Management: Adi Shimrony | Production and Management Assistant: Rotem Meir | PR: Mira Ann Beinart | Instagram: Gilad Benjamin Shahar

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