What We Are Not; Dawn of the Desiring-Machines
Trio, 2020
A queer sci-fi spectacle
In days of pandemic, warfare, and fragile reality that changes in the blink of an eye, three dancers/desiring-machines seek to exercise the dance performance as a remedy, or a curse, and turn the theater into a space that celebrates instability and absurdity, clinging onto pleasure, escaping common sense, common ground, and the common body.
“We do not wish to tell you a story, but to practice our very existence in the world — a world in catastrophe, a world in repression, that dares to demand from us narratives of stability, unity, linearity. We try to practice what our dancing body has always known – that we have never been whole, and our survival plan has never been stable. We navigate the map of changes that are taking place in us, in the multiplicity of our identities – what we are, and what we are not, real and fictitious, organic and synthetic, and seek nothing but to relish a little more in the fantasy we may win”
Choreography
Uri Shafir
Creative Dancers
Anat Va’adia, Michael Yalon, Uri Shafir
Music
Tomer Baruch, Uri Shafir, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Franz Schubert
Music Editing & Live Sound
Tomer Baruch
Costumes & Scenography
Reut Shaibe
Light Design
Nadav Barnea
Technnical Director
Baruchi Shpigelman
External Eye
May Zarhy
Rehearsal Director
Melanie Berson
premiered in Curtain Up Project 2020
Artistic Directors
Dana Ruttenberg, Oded Graf
Photos
Efrat Mazor and Vojtěch Brtnický
Video
filmed by Kino Kitchen, edited by Yoav Brill
“… With the lighting, which changes throughout the piece, and the fabric, which is made of holes and ornaments the dancers, Shafir presents an elusive, shifting, porous object that cannot be grasped. The object is dance itself. It is not just the movement gibberish woven by Shafir with a curling tongue, a pelvis thrust forward or mechanical hand gestures but out of a subtly robotic movement emerges a cabaret of strangeness, rich with eccentric facial expressions and rhythmic movement that is full of passion- it is the dance of the consciousness and it cannot be categorized, tied down or set.
Shafir goes back to the roots of creation- to what has motivated modern dance since its inception- the plight for freedom from every type of limitation;
Shafir returns to the roots of creation in another way, in what defines it- desire- and reminds the viewers that the body is the unperishable source of this type of desire, a machine set in constant motion that has no purpose other than its own existence. The three dancers in the piece completely give over to the choreography, charging it with their presence while delighting in one of the essential foundations of dance: being present in the moment.
Ran Brown, Haaretz, full review
“…It seems that what Shafir is trying to do, together with his dancers Anat Vaadia and Michael Yalon, is to challenge each time anew what we know about dance and the choreographic process…”
Anat Zecharia, Hamevakeret (The Visitor/Critic), full review
Trailer
