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Translucent - One Too Many Body

Dance show about identity in the technological age, virtual body, Truth and fake, Childhood and adulthood, otherness

Pre-premiered on Bodies of Evidence Conference (Stuttgart, 2018). Premiered on Acco Festival (Israel, 2019). Performed again at Spring Festival at HaSimta Theater (Israel, 2020). 

The work was developed with the grant of the Foundation for Independent Artists of the Ministry of Culture (IL); Grant and residency at Akadmie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany); Residency at the Stage Center (Tel-Aviv).

Translucent

In "Translucent – One Too Many Body" Savyon attempts to stretch and expand the boundaries of physics in order to stretch and expand the appearance of the Self. In circular time she celebrates and problematizes her body. Every movement is a small confession, vulnerable and powerful, revealing otherness within this self. Savyon dismantles, documents and duplicates herself through endless circular loops, yet continuously moving forward, to experience a simultaneous presence in different times and different places. This is how she meets herself in the layered reality.

Much has been said and written about the allusive nature of the movement, the one that constantly disappears. But the particular set of conditions embodied in the work - between the real and the virtual, between the choreographic and the cinematic, between past-present-future, between the flat image and the moving body in space - allows the movement to be more present, sustainable and tangible. The new body, the one that appears in the Looper, has its own paranormal physics. It is invulnerable, constant, eternal, and yet imprisoned in two dimensions, imprisoned in repetitious time. It confronts us with questions about the essence of time and in particular the performance time.

 

The work consists of different layers of research. The work raises broad questions on various topics, both at the level of the medium and at the level of the content. For example, the scene where Savyon is meeting herself as a child is an autobiographical scene that talks about the fantasy of meeting the inner child and finding early signs, looking for future hints in the childhood and even recalling the child's fantasy about the future - what we dreamed of and what we are today, what we knew and where is it now...

Death is present in the work both as an image and as a theme. The attempt to perpetuate, to be eternal, reminds us that we are finite, temporary and perishable. The simultaneous presence in different places refers to out-of-body experiences. The collapse of time into a continuous present, refers to Near Death Experiences phenomena.

The show holds a hectic, unease, disturbing world. A world in which things are happening again and again… a world that moves in a strange logic within the memory of the show, the artist's personal memory and the collective memory. This is a world of loneliness, highways, abandoned malls, transparent objects, ghosts and one body that wants to become many bodies…

Savyon derived the movement materials of the performance from her mental-physical practice “Travel & Trouble”. Same as the looper, so does the practice: It’s an attempt to problematize and celebrate the body, to experience self multiplicity, not only quantitative -wise, but mainly qualitative-wise in order to reveal otherness within one self.

 

Choreography, text, performance, production: Savyon. Technology development: Dr. Eyal Gruss, Savyon. Original music and technological operation: Yuval Shenhar. Lighting design: Shay Skiba. Artistic consultant: Eyal Bromberg. Artistic accompany in the frame of Acco Festival: Shalom Shmuelov.

 

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