The Gravity of Closeness. On Sharon Fridman’s Go Figure

Absolute shock. Awe. A state of suspension. A hypnotic haze.
An extended moment of presence, arising from fragility, care, and attention to the other. A stretch of stage time in which a body marked by suffering ceases to register its own vulnerability and simply lives within art.

Go Figure is a work by choreographer Sharon Fridman (Spain–Israel). A duet performed by Shmuel Dvir Cohen, who lives with dystonia—a neurological condition affecting movement—and Tomer Navot.
Medical sources like to describe dystonia as a condition that forces the body into unnatural postures. Nothing of the sort happens here. What appears instead is movement of extraordinary precision: refined, measured, strikingly aesthetic. One cannot help but wonder how this is achieved.

                                      Photo by Nimrod Peled

I was not certain I would be able to write about it at all. For a second day now, I remain in the same state of shock and suspension. Words feel intrusive here—fussy, impatient, trying to pin something down—while inside there is silence, dense and opaque, like the smoke on stage.

At first, the work seems like a carefully constructed illusion. When Shmuel Dvir Cohen enters the stage in a wheelchair, an awkward thought flashes through the mind: a device, a gesture, a mask. The illusion dissolves quickly. The body reclaims its right to truth—without explanation, without appeal to empathy—simply by moving.

His dancing is mesmerizing in its exactness. There is no haste, no randomness. Every shift of weight, every turn, every pause is lived through with a level of attentiveness rarely encountered even in impeccably trained bodies. This attention—to one’s own body and to the partner—creates a sense of inner order, forming visibly in real time.

                                   Photo by Nimrod Peled

The duet between Shmuel Dvir Cohen and Tomer Navot unfolds as a continuous dialogue of bodies. Its precision borders on the unsettling. The dancers read one another, respond, adjust, listen. Each movement seems to affirm its own singularity, its asymmetry, its exposure to risk.
Shmuel stands on Tomer’s chest.
Tomer stands on Shmuel’s bent knees.
Shmuel casts aside his crutches and continues to move.
Weight here is not a metaphor. It is a physical fact, impossible to ignore. The dance emerges and persists as a process of recognition—of the body, of oneself, of the other, of the distance between them.

All the while, an empty wheelchair circles the stage. It feels like a record of another coordinate system, one in which the body was once described differently. It becomes a kind of third presence—silent, insistent, stripped of dramatic emphasis. Simply an object continuing its motion, even though the body has long since moved beyond it.

                                     Photo by Nimrod Peled

Yaron Abulafia’s lighting functions like breath: it fades, thickens, returns. The smoke does not conceal; it erases borders and outlines, leaving movement in a state of near-pure presence. Miki Avni’s costumes initially resemble tattooed skin, then reveal themselves as a second skin through which the body’s inner topography becomes visible.
Noam Helfer’s music begins with rough, broken breathing—as if sound itself is searching for form before becoming suggestion, persuasion, trance.

This work does not frame itself around triumph or conquest. Instead, a body shaped by its own conditions speaks in its own language—sometimes sharp, sometimes fragile, sometimes stubbornly unpredictable. In this fidelity to itself, in this unevenness, a sense of freedom arises: the freedom to be oneself, to diverge, to exist without striving for alignment.

Go Figure leaves the viewer in a state of unusual balance—perhaps even one of internal displacement.
Encounters like this are rare in Israel. This is a performance that stands apart from conventional dance experience: a spiritual event that invites reflection on the limits of the human body and the boundlessness of its possibilities. On connection and separation. On the extraordinary strength of the human spirit. A rare reminder that dance begins precisely where we stop demanding explanations from the body.

                                   Photo by Nimrod Peled

The production returned to Israel after more than thirty performances across Europe. Sharon Fridman remarked after the recent showing that this was the thirty-fifth.