A group of men in their seventies stand in a war scene and hold each other up. A woman without a home throws her body against the floor, again and again, because the floor is the only home she has. Two heads of the empire lean into each other with something close to pleasure. Above all of it moves a figure the creators call an angel of death, and through all six scenes, a pianist plays music he wrote for exactly this.
This is All Spirits – in Hebrew, Kol HaRuchot (the title quietly plays on lechol haruchot, the Hebrew expression meaning “to hell with it,” and takes it literally) – premiering at the Jerusalem Theatre on August 4 and 5 as part of the Israel Festival’s 65th edition.
Built by artistic directors Shani Tamari Matan and Moshe Shechter Avshalom, with choreography by Mor Shani, Ariel Cohen, Gilad Jerusalmy, Annabelle Dvir, and Michal Samama, the work is a single piece assembled from six independently choreographed tableaux. Each one is built around a different archetype or myth of war – from the battlefield to motherhood, from leaders intoxicated by power to refugees and the displaced.
Pianist Nitai Hershkovits performs the score live throughout, on stage, as part of the work rather than underneath it. The entire piece is structured as a palindrome: it moves forward through its six scenes, then moves backward, returning close to where it began, “like the infinite militaristic cycle in which we are trapped,” as the program note puts it.
“We chose the clean, classical space of the theater to respond to a dirty, disturbed reality that sanctifies an aesthetic of violence we’ve been training in since birth.”
Agreeing with a dead man
In 1932, German choreographer Kurt Jooss created The Green Table: 10 men in tailcoats bow to each other around a table and, through gesture alone, agree to send a generation to die. He called it a “political ballet” – a phrase that, at the time, sounded almost like a contradiction.
“This piece is a masterpiece that every dancer, everyone who follows dance closely, knows well,” the creators of All Spirits say. What pulled them toward it was not only the choreography, but the nerve of Jooss’s own declaration.
“Jooss’s declaration – he was a pacifist – that this is a political ballet is pretty stunning,” the program says. “It’s incredibly loaded, but also almost naive. Who today can say they’re making political work? And what does that even mean?”
There is something they admit to envying in Jooss’s certainty.
“His dancers knew exactly what they were doing – what message they had to carry, how to carry it. That anachronistic clarity is very appealing right now, in our chaotic times. We wanted to say ‘yes’ to it. To agree with it.”
But agreeing with Jooss did not mean illustrating him.
Ask the artistic directors where the politics of All Spirits actually sits – not in a program note, but in the choreography itself – and they choose their words carefully.
“These days, even stating the obvious – writing that we’re making an anti-war piece – is an act that might get read as political,” they say. “But what really interests us is the choice of how and what to move.”
TALIA PAZ PLAYS several mothers inside a single sequence, a role that nods, the creators say, to a Batsheva Dance Company piece created two years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as well as to the contemporary image of mothers fighting publicly for their families. “Their movements and words happen inside her body.”
The men in the war scene were chosen for their age, not despite it.
“Their bodies are soft, gentle, and they agree to touch and be held up by one another,” the creators note. The image, they argue, creates “a different way of looking at the militaristic experience” simply because of whose bodies are doing the looking.
Turning a war that is still painfully close to the present into an archetype was a risk the creators say they did not take lightly.
“We asked ourselves this, over and over, through the whole process,” they say. “What is this tableau doing in relation to its archetype? Where is the war present in the image? Where does the current reality stand in relation to it?
“Life in Israel is a school for war,” they say. “The myth becomes redundant when we’re running to the shelter during a siren, thinking about how to wake the kid.”
A palindrome, not a repeat
The mirrored back-and-forth format is partly a bow to Jooss, whose own work carries a similar bleak circularity.
“We chose the palindromic structure partly as a nod to the work that inspired us, where the circularity delivers an almost unambiguous, very bleak message about a reality that repeats itself,” they say. “But also out of a wider thought about the way the audience arrives at the theater and leaves it. The palindrome exists before and after the show – the piece isn’t cut off from the reality outside the stage.
“It’s not an ordinary repetition,” they add. “It’s the same sequence in reverse. You experience the ‘reverse’ after the first half has already settled.”
Seven equal creators building one piece is, by their own account, a messy arrangement.
“We’re in the middle of the process, still learning this structure,” they admit – a structure that grew, they say, “out of a desire to slice the myth into pieces and dig our hands into this painful subject together.”
“We didn’t really know what we were heading toward. We tried to understand whether the model resembled a joint exhibition or a collection of poems – but pretty quickly we understood we wanted to create one whole piece, without seams, so that one thing would flow from the next.”
The idea underlying it: no single person decides on a war, so no single author should decide on the peace.
“The meaning of the collective structure is, first of all, that it lets the audience shift angle each time – movement expression, atmosphere – through the different creators, so as to feel a bigger sum total.”
Hershkovits, one of the most in-demand Israeli pianists working internationally today, is the only figure on stage who arrives from neither dance nor theater. His music does not emanate from below the stage – the creators are firm on that point. It exists as a live presence within the work.
“Nitai understood us from the first moment, even though he doesn’t come from the performance world,” they say. “Working with him is proof that all the arts share a common heart. He has a demanding role; he’s largely the one who connects the tableaux, not only through his playing but through his presence.
“We’ve been blessed to work with him,” they say.
The performance will premiere at the Jerusalem Theatre on August 4 and 5, at 9 p.m., as part of the Israel Festival’s 65th edition. It is now running at venues throughout the country until August 20. For tickets and details: www.israel-festival.org