Beautiful Madness
Review by Ruth Eshel, DANCE NOW- ISRAEL, 20.03.2019
Kamea Dance Company, under the artistic direction of Tamir Ginz, has produced a terrific and varied program. The name “Beautiful Madness” suits it well. Galili’s piece “Peeld” to the music by Percossa brings to mind a gathering of people for playful wrestling with rules. It has a few short, dancing paragraphs by soloists who dance in the center of the stage, like a “game” move, which receive the group’s fast and relatively long response. Male and female dancers alike are dressed in royal blue tights and simple, loose dark shirts designed by Amalia Yakir and Galili. At the beginning of the piece, a single female dancer enters the stage as if checking that the space is empty, while at the end of the dance, a single dancer remains as if making sure that there are no traces of what we saw. Us the audience, we got a glimpse of what may not be allowed to others, and Shai Yehudai’s beautiful lighting is frugal, chooses minimalism to emphasize and darken. The shiny tights absorb the light and glitter colorfully, while the color of the shirts remains dark, letting them be swallowed up by darkness. At the same time, it was sometimes difficult for the dancers to map the stage through the dimness.
This is a composition of a master choreographer. I found the group’s polyphony interesting, as if layers are moving one below the other, changing the relationship between each other, moving constantly to respond to the rules of the game. There is nothing new in group harmony. Nevertheless, this time it caught my eye and this may be thanks to the division of the movement sentences, to the broad and clear movements with little use of space, the way the group is disbanded, all within the limit of leaving all the dancers on stage. I could not crack the code, but the voices in the group radiated originality.
Galili’s Duet “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” to Colombian music is the pure pleasure of a humorous dance that is a celebration of playful imagination. Lorris Eichinger is thin and tall, wears black pants with suspenders, a white shirt decorated with a bow and glasses to complete the appearance of a “geek”, while Einav Kringel is tiny, energetic, impudent and sexy. Their encounter is rich with surprising choreographic solutions. There are unconventionallifts, jumps and double work suchas the use of the long leg of the dancer as a slide, everything like pulling out solutions from a magician’s hat.
The work of the German choreographer Marco Goecke to the music of Keith Jarrett and Jimi Hendrix is fascinating in its movement language. Men and women are in raised dark trousers that serve as a foundation which bears the upper part of the torso. The movement’s range of the piece focuses on trembling palms, abundant handwork, head and shoulders. At the beginning of the dance, the dancers stand scattered on the stage facing the audience, making repetitive movements of the forearm towards the face with the elbow fixed. The position and movement radiate ritual and mystery. Who are they? What do they want to trigger? Petals of autumn-colored flowers fall from the palms like autumn leaves. The work is rich in surprising duets of joining hands, small movements sitting on the base of a wide and generousPlie. When in this vibration, like a bee farm, suddenly a dancer performs an attitude that glows in its uniqueness. The performance is accurate and radiates lightning. And it seems that what we see is a rite in honor of a huge golden flower that towards the end of the work emerges from a dream,partly visible, partly hidden behind the stage, its petals trembling.
The dance benefits of the best performance of all the dancers in the band: Ayelet Alfo, Sagi Baleli, Jonatan Bukschtein, Tom David, Lorris Eichinger, Noam Ephron, Eddy Hersaut Calazel, Einav Kringel, Lou Landre, Alma Lauer, Rona Lerner,Vladislav Panasyuk, Peter Starr, Elliott Thompson.