Tights: dance & thought

1^st Annual Conference​ at the Mandel Culture Center

Tights is a platform promoting and celebrating the alliance between dance and thought. A community of practitioners, scholars, students and audience coming together to think, lecture, share, present and perform.

In the near future, dancing will become an experience to be traded in, consulted with, prostituted, presented as an object in a museum's white cube. Indeed, then dancing will resemble the body that is no longer heard aloud. A voice, that’s no longer civilian, but of a machine. This is what Tights’ artistic & general director Ido Feder believes, and he's not the only one who feels that way. With any others as like believers, Yuli Kovbasnian and Bosmat Nossan, he will present his new choreographic work It Itches.

                        It Itches by Ido Feder. Photo: Ben Palhov

Tights: Dance & Thought is a unique, first of its kind, platform that seeks to give the dance-thirsty audiences of Tel-Aviv Jaffa a place to create a discursive-community of dance. The goal before us is creating a profound discussion revolving around local dance, its philosophy, its history, its politics, and more.

Tights’ primary belief is that art cannot develop without thinking of and about itself. We see that dance, often perceived as a bodily form of art, has been somewhat neglected from this perspective. Tights answers the local dance community’s wish not only to dance but to think and talk about dance. Tights’ importance is threefold: artistic, communal, and intellectual.

Tights gives a place for young and experienced performers to research their work while conducting a thorough discussion of it. In addition, we discuss theoretical and philosophical aspects of dance in order to enrich the field. Finally, the local dance community finds in Tights a multi-dimensional place to deal with dance as a varied and complex field. We wish to give the local community of those dealing with dance in all its forms an intimate opportunity to think of the future of this discipline, on new modes of artistic work, and ways of organising the community.

                        It Itches by Ido Feder. Photo: Ben Palhov

Yuli Kovbasnian's project Pieces (temporary title) is based on “5 Pieces for Orchestra, Op.10” by composer Anton Webern. The dance reflects it by selectively including deconstructed layers from each one of them, while the choreography becomes an instrument of organization of all ingredients in time and space.

A new work by Lilach livne Young Girls Wanna Dance Their Spirit with Shay Kukui, Amit Tine, Yael Weiss, Gal Levinson, Nunzia Picciallo, Nitzan Shafran, Tamar Even Chen, Oran Barak, May Manovich, Yuval Finkelshtein – participants in La Collactiz! Program – the author describes as "new project for a new world: the potential of the meetings of the Spirits". Based in Israel, Lilach Livne is an artist who focuses on the relationship between choreography, philosophy, religion, healing & community. She suggests new self-perception techniques, called "The Non-Image" and "The Darkened Body", which she believes can fulfill dance's potential to create manifested philosophy and a transformative mix between art & reality.

  Young Girls Wanna Dance Their Spirit by Lilach livne. Photo: Lilach Livne​ 

Sharon Zuckerman Weiser will present The Sub Way – a duo for two mature performers: for herself and for Moshe Schechter Avshalom. Dealing with the black boxes; the things behind things; the blind spots of the human consciousness – performative, dancy, physical consciousness; removing the personal layer and touching a sub-layer – self-operating mechanism. Like Zuckerman’s other works, physical representation of the human and the performative communication between the performer and public feed the search and the finding.

Iris Erez is aiming to search the option of dancing the space, making the actual body vibrate its surrounding, becoming an environmental body. In doing so to question our ability to resist our environment, surrender to it and change it. What is between utopia and dystopia in the actual dancing body? In the gap between the will to move "out of here" and the will to move "from here" maybe lies the possibility to create a change (in Hebrew: "to dance a change") in a deep sense.

Tami Leibovits will be working with Fog as a physical entity that you can get lost in. Inside this landscape she is interested in the range between being alive and still. In the human capacity to inflict itself and its surroundings, inside a sphere which is vast and uncontrolled.

Retrospective: Hospitality by Michal Samama 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.

        Retrospective: Hospitality by Michal Samama. Photo: Michal Samama

Work of Flesh – Soundtrack for Five Slammed Bodies by Annabelle Dvir focuses on the physical and behavioral shape of the voice, as an outcome for the slamming action, the “moment of fragmentation.” The soundtrack is processed by transformation of audial archetypes, chanting, humming, and "the sound of the flesh," and is asked to alter the meaning of the physical acts, by procuring new connotations for it.

One of the most interesting and informative events during this conference promises to be a The Boycottables: Russia-Israel Network – workshop and discussion lead by Dina Khuseyn, choreographer and curator based in Moscow and Bordeaux.

Dina Khuseyn is a choreographer, performer and independent curator of festivals, educational programs and collective dance expositions. She was born and grew up in Moscow where she received her first dance education and diploma of a ballet dancer. In 2009 she completed the ex.e.r.ce program, under direction of Mathilde Monnier, at the Contemporary Dance Center in Montpellier, France. In 2015, in Moscow, she created SOTA – an open, mobile program, which cooperates with various cultural institutions in Russia and abroad, in order to create a platform for the development and promotion of contemporary dance as an important part of contemporary art and culture. In 2016, in Moscow she created Performative Practice Place – an independent art space focused on the development of arts associated with performativity, and in November 2017, together with Emilie Houdent, she initiated and curated international festival "Déprogrammation" at the Theater Manufacture Atlantique, Bordeaux. At the moment Dina Khuseyn lives and works between France and Russia, where she creates her choreographic and curatorial projects. The development of her own artistic pass brought her to the point where her artistic practice is very much linked and related to her curatorial practice. Creation of “alternative/ different spaces” and investing in community – are two main lines present in her choregraphic and curatorial works.

Mandel Culture Center, Jaffa ​

12-15.12.18

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