Yael Schiller’s Gloria: On Triumph and the Finitude of Being

What is the scent of time? Do you have a friend on another planet? How do you say "Ima" in Russian? 

If I were asked to tailor a dream of the perfect ballet, this would be it—an experience that seemingly dropped from the heavens. I was invited out of the blue by the wonderful Yael Schiller, a performer-choreographer whom I hadn’t even met. It was a Friday evening, Herzliya held its particular aura, and somehow, everything just fell into place.

And then, the curtain rose—yes, there actually is a curtain here, a rare luxury in our neck of the woods. I saw what I saw and whispered to my companion: ‘I already love this.’ For the next hour and a half, I sat motionless, barely daring to breathe for fear of breaking the spell of a masterpiece.

What did I witness in that opening scene? The limp, headless body of a rag doll—Petrushka, who else? The allusion was unmistakable. Standing before him was a lady in a magnificent crimson dress, an apple in her mouth. Magritte, my beloved Magritte; ceci n'est pas une femme, this is not an apple—the treachery of images. Perhaps this world doesn't exist at all; perhaps there is only a ‘void-world,’ a Beckettian nothingness, like a ‘body without organs’ drifting through the formless, abstract landscapes of some impossible avant-garde.

The apple as the forbidden fruit of silence, and the Lady, a woman of most perfect propriety—well, that is Yael Schiller herself. There is no mistaking her, for the other six in her ballet are athletic youths straight off an ancient Greek amphora. And what torsos they have—defined "six-packs," as my gym trainer loves to say. They dance incredibly well—all of them, but especially one curly-haired dancer (Irad Avni, I later noted in the program). He was the one hanging like Petrushka before collapsing soundlessly to the ground.

Perhaps the lady in red with the apple is "Gloria" (Glory) herself, a figure who speaks volumes. She speaks through a mouthful of fruit—a kind of "vocal muteness." The apple physically blocks her speech, yet the text resonates, creating the sense of an internal monologue that cannot be silenced, even when external circumstances demand your tongue be tied.

                                            Photo by רוית זיו

"Gloria was born from a profound void and a direct collision with loss," says Yael Schiller. "I felt that the dance stolen from me had to return to the body. This work brought me back to life. It is a reality that demands the courage to rise from the depths." She asks so much—too much to remember all at once, though I long to hear it again. One question lingered: When our wings are cut, can we still fly?

Gloria. The "Glory" of this world is ineffable, or perhaps it is merely a hollow shell hidden behind a lavish facade. Neither Vivaldi, nor Poulenc, nor the liturgy can save us here. This is a deconstruction of the sacred; instead of canonical Latin, we hear living, contemporary speech. It suggests that any "Gloria"—whether divine light or a stage triumph—is forged from deeply private, human, and often painful reflections. This makes worldly glory feel tactile and devastatingly honest. Worldly glory? The phrase slips out: sic transit gloria mundi. Everything that follows is an absurd glitch in the celestial hierarchy. Schiller doesn't just choreograph a ballet; she issues a diagnosis: earthly triumph is a surrealist mask behind which lies nothing but fragility.

                                     Photo by קטי בורינדין

The sheer eclectic range of the score is staggering, opening with Chopin and traversing the Baroque masters, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and even vintage Israeli songs. It’s no wonder the six male dancers plus Yaël reminded me of the seven notes of a scale—not just because of the score, but because their bare white torsos and dark trousers looked like the semitone keys of a piano. I immediately imagined Gloria as a score written in flesh, where seven bodies arrange themselves into chords—sometimes diatonic, sometimes chromatic, even reaching the tension of a tritone. These are jagged lines, a physical resistance to harmony, where the body refuses to be "correct" or pretty, choosing instead the truth of an internal breaking point. Duets unfold like fugues; group dances like massive choral canvases where every gesture is a distinct vocal part. Schiller works with space through the laws of polyphony: while the duets are filigreed fugues of overlapping and chasing themes, the ensemble moments become a verticality—a monumental harmony where the individual dissolves into a collective surge. The dynamics are syncopated; a dancer’s sharp halt echoes in the movement of another, creating a visual rhythm you can feel against your skin. Seven bodies as the overtones of one grand idea: that glory is the complex, sometimes agonizing music of human presence.

                                        Photo by קטי בורינדין

Is this why the classical vocabulary—arabesque, attitude, développé, grand battement—appears not as stylization, but as fragments of the body’s cultural memory? Schiller’s language is built on the extreme tension between the classical and its decay. Academic portés suddenly lose their stability and collapse into falls; a pirouette never quite finishes—the body "slips" off its axis, choosing sincerity over equilibrium. At times, Gloria feels like an investigation into what remains of ballet once the illusion of control vanishes.

Yet it is not all in a minor key. There are plenty of playful moments—take the grotesque solo set to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The magnificent Irad Avni comically "sculpts" a single wing, loses it, then suddenly breaks into a breakdance set to a remix of the classic score. This isn't a parody or the destruction of a classic; it is its liberation, its return to a living, playing body. Or consider the group dance set to Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5. The rhythm is almost folk-like, the synchronicity almost that of a corps de ballet. But then comes the glitch: the dancers take turns "ejecting" one another from the structure, their bodies thumping against the floor as if gravity had suddenly taken over as the lead choreographer. In that moment, a paradox emerges: the more the form disintegrates, the more precisely the rhythm is felt. A community, it seems, only holds together until the moment it excludes someone.

At the center of this vortex is Yaël. She exists outside of gravity. She soars above the stage, held aloft by six titans—a nearly classical élévation, yet stripped of triumph. It is a displacement beyond the common field of weight, a contrast between earthly strength and celestial lightness.

The only set piece is a table on wheels. A transformative object that shifts functions: now an altar, now a stage-within-a-stage, now the cold surface of a dissecting table where a male-female duet becomes an anatomical inquiry. Upon it, sculptural compositions form—hands raised in prayer, a body in the position of the crucifixion. In the finale, there is a hauntingly beautiful closing of the circle: a dancer arches into a backbend—a "bridge"—but it isn't just a plastic element. The body becomes the structure, turning into that very table. Man – Structure – Man.

The finale is deceptive: after colossal, near-limitless physical exertion, the dancers emerge with ice cream to the music of Queen. And you know, it doesn't feel like a postmodern joke. Rather, it feels like the right to a simple joy: to eat, to laugh, to be. To my mind, Poulenc’s Gloria could have easily played here—a work for which "Glory" is not just divine majesty, but human wonder, sometimes bordering on childlike innocence. Just like Yael.

                                      Photo by קטי בורינדין

Yael Schiller’s Gloria is a refusal of "safe" choreography—a visual Baroque stripped of excess and left in its pure, graphic essence. Remember how Renaissance and Baroque artists depicted celestial radiance? Here, the "golden background" is the light falling across muscle, creating the sense of an internal glow of the human spirit. It is the living embodiment of sic transit gloria mundi: behind every moment of triumph and beauty lies the awareness of its fleeting nature. The beauty of a gesture exists only in the second of its performance and vanishes instantly, remaining only in our memory.

In the second half, the dancers are in white; but we haven't forgotten that crimson dress—the color of passion, power, blood, and earthly celebration. Schiller likely wanted to clash two glories: the divine (invisible, celestial) and the human (strident, material). She collided them from the very start: a hanging, headless, spiritless body—as if its subjectivity had already been extracted—and a Lady in red, rotating slowly on her axis in a distorted adagio stripped of its academic support. An incredible ballet that begins with the loss of control over the body.

Behind every masterpiece stands a real person with their own questions for the world. Go ahead—ask your own.