Dance, Dance, Dance

March 25, 2007 - 7:30 AM by Stephanie

Last year I was assigned to write a story about Israel’s Dance Drama Company U.S. debut at Manhattan’s Harkness Dance Festival. As the perks of this job go – meeting cool, interesting and creative people – company director/choreographer Sally Anne Friedland and I subsequently struck up a friendship and we keep up with each other’s “stuff”.

In-between travels and “working it” as a celebrity judge on Israel’s “Dancing with the Stars”, Sally Anne had time to choreograph a new work – Concerto for 4 Dancers and Orchestra – this year. I went to see it last week at Tel Aviv’s Suzanne Dellal Centre.

Sally Anne’s pieces are not simple. They include complicated, angst-filled and difficult to watch moments. “Is life that bad?” a friend remarked while viewing Friedland’s modern day version of Tchaikovsky’s “dying swan“.

Sometimes, yes. But luckily, Friedland also imbibes her work with enough slapstick and humor to counterbalance the tension. That and a free-wheeling sense that the dancers have a hand in their own choreography. They do. She intentionally leaves open spaces in her work for interpretation.

A “strict classical concerto” structured dance with solo prologues, Concerto for 4 Dancers and Orchestra is a painful-whimsical-adventurous and eye pleasing collaboration with Raanana’s Symphony Orchestra (Conductor Omer Welber also wrote the music) that has dancers weaving between on-stage orchestra members and musicians interacting with the dancers.

Conclusion: It’s fun despite the pain.

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