Exotica, longing, Ending
Performance in other body, light and sand
Between Heaven and Earth Festival (Jerusalem) 2022
Choreographer: Savyon. Dancer-creator: Nufar Yanklevitz. Music: Yuval Shenhar. Curator: Kim Teitelbaum.
On the jewish agricultural sabbatical year, when the land is resting and restoring itself, performance artist, dancer and choreographer Savyon gives her body a sabbatical year. Therefore, she convey the performance execution to the creator-dancer Nufar Yanklevitz. Together they continue to explore mystical, existential, spiritual questions regarding infinity that Savyon investigated in her previous works. They re-encounter questions about perception and experiencing infinity in the prism of time, childhood and adolescence, family, memory, femininity, identity by working with light, sand and body.
The show begins with a prologue - a spot of light moves from object to object, lights it and breathes life into it. It points at the object but also on its own actions, the action of light, returning the gaze to the very act of looking. "Let there be light". After illuminating the objects, the light reaches the center of the space, towards the figure of the dancer. She is enlightened and awakened, not as a sleeping beauty but as an elaborate and bewitched body-soul that becomes aware of itself.
Sand is a metaphor of infinity - “I will greatly multiply your seed (…) as the sand that is on the seashore” (Genesis 22); metaphor for time (hourglass sand clock); metaphor for routine or materiality or impurity (in Hebrew we say “Holy and Sand” meaning “Holy and Profane”).
On the slowing down dance, the body passes time extremely slowly. Through the finitude of the body - the infinity of movement and mind unfolds. The body crawls close to the ground between a sequence of images that merge with each other, as if asking about its own essence, about the dimension of time and the dimensions of space.
Nufar Yanklevitz, the dancer-creator, talks about physical pain and pleasure, about limits and about everyone she could (or couldn't) have been. The desire to be all as a passion for life and movement.