Uri Shafir is a dance and performance maker.
Uri is a graduate of the Kibbutz Ga’aton Dance Workshop, Kelim Choreography Center (Israel), and the MA choreography studies in Montpellier France, in the MASTER EXERCE program, at ICI-CCN. Uri has been creating independent works since 2009, and presenting them in different platforms and festivals in Israel and abroad.
Uri’s solo “The Koloklum” won the 1st prize in the MASH Choreography competition (Israel) and in Contact.Energy festival (Erfurt, Germany).
As a dancer, worked in Ensemble Batsheva Dance Company, and in dance works by Yasmeen Godder, Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor, Dana Ruttenberg, and others.
Uri is a Gaga teacher (Ohad Naharin’s movement language), leading classes/workshops around the globe. Uri also leads classes and workshops investigating his working materials and choreographic methods, and is teaching in Seminar Hakibutzim Tel Aviv college of arts.
As a maker, I seek to celebrate the Liveness of the performance – The liveness of the body, of the dance, and of the event itself. For me, the Liveness of the body is its potential to exist in the present, which is constantly changing and becoming. This Becoming is its power, uniqueness and strength.
The Liveness of the event is the opportunity to escape from the expectation of something fixed and stable, and to flirt with the unknown.
In my works, I look for the delicate balance between the set and the unstable; between structure and chaos; between the known and the unknown. Liveness creates friction. It challenges the promise of a well- organized dance. It challenges a capitalist system that demands a stable, reusable object, one that could be traded on the arts market. I seek for a different kind of virtuosity, one that makes us feel unexpected things could happen – like when we are outside in nature.
In this period, when our personal time becomes an asset to trade with, where every action we make is being monitored by invisible algorithms, I believe that the dance performance is a place for refuge, where we can reclaim our bodily intelligence, where we can practice intimacy, freedom, passion, delicacy – and at the same time cast doubt, disappear, fall in-between and remember we are flesh and bone.