Habitat
Duet, 2017
What makes a dance alive? How can choreography be born and written each time anew, in the same moment as it is performed? Is it possible to look at Nothingness as material? And if so, What does it look like? What happens in the moments between the planned and the improvised? How does the dance change and respond to the space in which it exists, and how does the space affect it?
On an empty stage, with the audience seated in the round, we will dance for you a dance, and at the same time we will live for you a life. We will grow one hour older. And although we know the dance, and although we know ourselves- we will imagine that we do not. We will stop, we will suspend the next known moment, and will let Nothingness be discovered. We will let it tell us something we didn’t know- about the nature of dance, about the nature of the body, about their ability to exist in constant clash between biology and culture, between knowing and not-knowing, between the everyday and the sublime.
Dancer creators
Zuki Ringart, Uri Shafir
Music
Goldberg Variations, Johann Sebastian Bach
Rehearsal Direction
Anat Va’adia
Premiered in Dance Arena Festival (Zirat Machol),
Hazira, 2017
Artistic Director
Sahar Azimi
Photos
Efrat Mazor, Vojtech Brtnucky
“… Also “Habitat”, a creation by Uri Shafir, is as its name – “domain”- at the center of which is situated the physical body that changes movement and emotional states in a composed action of development set to the notes of “Goldberg Variations”. It begins with slow and focused movement on the floor of two inseparable bodies and it grows and intensifies to rolls and jumps, together and apart, throughout the entire show space. At the climax the body is revealed as a container for personal and cultural biographies, with moments of self-awareness of the performance happening in real time in front of the audience alongside historical references to known movements from outdoor dances, folk dance and ballet and to conventional gestures- a glance, a bow and head movements- of the environment from which these styles emerged.
In many ways, it seems that Shafir’s work continues the conceptual and structural act established in iconic creations by choreographers like Steve Paxton and Paul Taylor who worked with Bach’s music or Mark Morris who created to Handel and Mozart’s notes, in the sense of the connection of the body to the everyday, free of traces of formatted musical compositions, which creates a blend of the ordinary and the extraordinary.
-Idit Suslik, The Contemporary Eye, full review
“Habitat”, by Uri Shafir, created with Zuki Ringart, presents a domain for the physical body. To the sound of “Goldberg Variations” by Bach the two bodies moved between different states, released, in love, apathetic, producing from within childish energies, enthused or mischievous: making a laughingstock of masculinity, of the bloated seriousness of the ego. They attempt to find simple pathways for the two masses that move constantly in mutual motion. The work is imbued with a minimum dose of tongue-in-cheek humor mixed with awareness and intelligence. Shafir and Ringart elevate carelessness and apathy to an artistic level. They echo the contact improvisation of Steve Paxton however in contrast to his form of a duet, whose roots grow from movements and positions taken from various sports and martial arts, here the roots of the duet seem to sprout forth from outdoor dances. They move upright from slow dances to fast, hopping low, bowing and adding a head movement. The combined rhetoric combines charming moments and slapstick jokes…
-Anat Zecharia, Hamevakeret The Visitor, full review
Trailer 01
Trailer 02
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