Somewhere In The Now
2015
A work for two dancers and a video artist, which asks the question- what’s really alive in the art of live performance?
Three men move on stage, accompanied by 8 video screens. together they create a new space – a landscape that allows one to observe the inside and outside at once and to ask what is happening in this very moment, and can we be present in it.
Choreography
Uri Shafir
Performers
Nimrod Gershoni, Ofir Yudilevich, Uri Shafir
Video Environment
Nimrod Alexander Gershoni
Music
Ennio Morricone
Light Design
Ofer Laufer
Premiered in Curtain Up Project 2015
Artistic Director
Hillel Kogan
Photos
Vojtēc Brtnickÿ
Video
Nimrod Alexander Gershoni
“Somewhere in the now- a masterpiece by Uri Shafir that is an original observation of performance art, a type of contemporary Ars Choro in Horace’s iambic pentameter (from 2035 years ago), which gained influential status on poets even though it was created solely to please the private recipients to whom it was sent.
In Shafir’s case there are also his collaborators and the audience who he invites into his missive on the topic of dance, which he performs with the dancer Ofir Yudilevich in a wonderfully creative and performative show with video artist Nimrod Alexander Gershoni and eight video screens.
The human trio and the hi-tech eight are bonded in humor and seriousness, in a choreographic movement designed to the detail, between and thanks to cables, to the wonderful music of Ennio Morricone. They ask themselves and the audience if what we are experiencing in the show is what the show is experiencing within itself and what is truly alive in it. Even if Shafir doesn’t have a definite answer- and why would he, for example- it has an original response whose great value is that it is temporary, right for this moment.”
Zvi Goren, Habama website Full review
“…Shafir is experimenting with solidifying a contemporary approach to the concept “presence” and creates a game between the way in which the performers see their presence and testify about it to the viewers and the way in which they are viewed by the audience when they are presented as fragments on the stage. The play on the value of authenticity of the characters dismantles the filmed manipulation and challenges the theatrical one. The honesty and directness in the creation of these images foster a state in which the live and filmed bodies are of almost the same authentic value.”
Dana Shalev, Erev Rav Full review
“…Uri Shafir’s piece, challenges the borders of the audience’s sensory perception and shows how we are used to experiencing dimensions in dance- stage, body, presence- as an organic whole, and what happens when our viewer experience is brokered by a third party, inviting us to observe differently…
Idit Suslik, City Mouse Full review