The
Koloklum
Solo, 2015
The Koloklum (in Hebrew: the “all-or-nothing”) is an intense, dense solo performance, both humorous and melancholic. The solo describes an absurd existential state, in which the passion to choose everything and be everything meets stagnation and the inability to choose anything. The body faces an impossible task- to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It must express all of the expressions and give expression to ‘Nothingness’.
The choreography is set and known, while simultaneously revealed and changing in real time through the meeting with the audience, the space and the body- which is in constant flux.
The solo served as an opening point for a dance-performance research of ‘nothingness’ as potential in choreography, and the ways in which it activates and obstructs the mechanisms of the theater .
The solo participated in various festivals in Israel and abroad (Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Turkey and America). It won the first prize in the Machol Shalem International Choreography Competition in Jerusalem, Israel, in 2015, and in the Contact.Energy choreography competition in Erfurt, Germany, in 2022.
Choreographed and Performed by
Uri Shafir
Music
Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber
Costume (shirt)
Muslin Brothers
Light Design
Dani Fishof
Premiered in Dance Arena 2015 (Zirat Machol), Hazira
Artistic Director
Sahar Azimi
Photos
Efrat Mazor, Arale the Sizzling Shutter, Omer Messinger
Video
Danzad Danzad Malditos Festival
From among the three programs, I was bewitched by the solo “The Koloklum” created and performed by Uri Shafir, which depicts a man who lives in the franticness of the current century. He moves quickly in every direction, trying to touch everything, as if he is trying to contain all the stimuli of his life. He is confused, dizzied by passion for more and more. Sometimes he looks like a contemporary clown, funny and sad, or like Charlie Chaplin in the film “Modern Times”, or a robot whose program has gone awry. Shafir washes the space, touches everything, breaks through to the hallway perhaps dreaming that he is climbing the walls. The movement is light, hopping, almost floating tangled with many small, precise and polished movements. Sometimes it seems that the body “remembers”, perhaps from another time, movements of bowing, nodding, like a clown in a circus. Cuts slice through the solo, returning us to the now, reality, to distance ourselves from the dizziness, to organize, to recalibrate but the dizziness overcomes him, and he can’t help but give in and runs into the lobby of the theater, where he disappears, like Nijinsky jumping out of the window and disappearing in the creation “Le Spectre de la Rose”.
“Among the most intriguing pieces in the festival was “The Koloklum” by Uri Shafir, who moves frantically all around, as if in a conscious space, as if there was no more time in this world to be romantic rather only to be completely hysterical. And there are moments when he stops, gets stuck and knows but most of the time he is trying to vomit the body through an exorcism, leaving behind footprints that cannot be denied.”
Anat Zecharia, “Hamevakeret (The Visitor/Critic)” Full review
“The creation The Koloklum by Uri Shafir lasts ten minutes during which Shafir marches himself and slams his body all over in the rhythm of a jackhammer and burns the stage, in an action that moves between bodily contortions creating a spastic hyper-hysterical body and the rat race of life in which each goal is clear for one second and the body is aimed at the target for a moment of sanity. Hop, he’s here. Hop, he’s there. The choice of music by Samuel Barber, which accompanies this jet-engine odyssey is so far from the spirit of the piece but in a surprising way doesn’t creak against the spirit of the work and rather exists in its own plain, in a parallel universe to the Uri-Shafir-on-speed planet. I was certainly intrigued as to where The Koloklum would lead him next.”
Ora Brafman, DanceTalk Full review