The Israeli choreographer Shahar Binyamini, whose talents were honed in Batsheva and developed by science, now brings his House of Dance Company to BIAF with a double bill ('New Earth' and 'Bolero X') about how bodies change and come together.
Maurice Ravel called Boléro an experiment. It has one melody, one rhythm and one long crescendo lasting around 15 minutes, with almost nothing changing except the volume. Choreographers have been drawn to it for almost a century, and most have tried to decorate it.
Binyamini did the opposite
In Bolero X, which he conceived for up to 50 dancers, the piece begins with single bodies in darkness. As Ravel's snare drum keeps its unchanging pattern, the bodies find each other, match each other, and finally move as one rhythmic mass. When the double bill was played at the DanceFirst festival in Germany in July, the critic Teresa Lindner wrote that repetition in his hands became "a motor for change" rather than monotony. It precisely describes what Binyamini is after.
Binyamini's movement vocabulary is easy to trace. Born in Lod in 1988, he joined the Batsheva Ensemble in 2006 and moved up to the main Batsheva Dance Company from 2008 to 2013. He then became a Gaga teacher, Naharin's movement language, which asks dancers to listen to sensation rather than copy shapes. He led intensives in Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, New York and Japan, and worked as Naharin's choreographic assistant with Paris Opera Ballet, Ballet BC and Nederlands Dans Theatre.
That training is there for all to see. Yet Binyamini is not a copy of his teacher
The difference is his curiosity about how the body works, not just how it looks. In 2013, he co-founded TNUDA with Professor Atan Gross of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a research group that puts dancers and scientists in the same room. The influence runs through his choreography. His pieces tend to behave like systems: Individual units, simple rules and patterns that only become visible at scale.
Since his first work, FLAT, for Singapore's Frontier DanceLand in 2016, those ideas have found a wide market. Commissions have followed from Paris Opera Ballet, Gothenburg Dance Company, Opera Ballet Flanders, Ballet du Rhin, Gauthier Dance and São Paulo Dance Company. In 2021, he received the Israeli Minister of Culture Award for a Promising Choreographer.
So how do the two Baku pieces fit together?
New Earth starts at ground level, quite literally. The stage is covered in dark soil, and dancers in flesh-coloured costumes emerge from it as primordial creatures before gradually becoming human. The score moves the same way, from Middle Eastern percussion and flute, with music drawn from Ahuva Ozeri, Piris Eliyahu and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, into the electronics of the British producer Vessel (Sebastian Gainsborough). Ofer Laufer's lighting keeps the stage close and dark. The piece ends in what its creators call floral abundance and controlled chaos.
It is a work about evolution. Bolero X is a work about community
One asks where a body comes from. The other asks what bodies become when they come together. Seen on the same evening, they form an argument in two parts: Individuals are defined by where they come from, and made stronger by moving with one another. Binyamini has put the second idea in plain terms: "This is how we should coexist, by respecting each other, making room for one another."
The company carrying that argument is young. House of Dance opened in Beersheba's Old City in 2022, in a restored Ottoman railway station from 1915, as a home for a resident company, a festival platform and an incubator for new choreography. Its dancers are strikingly varied in build and background, and Lindner noted how naturally that variety was folded into both pieces. For a choreographer whose subject is the group, that is not a minor detail.
Bolero X has already been seen in Germany, Canada, France, China and at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto and now it’s Baku’s turn to include it in a festival programme that also includes English National Ballet and Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo. This double bill from a company not yet five years old is already rubbing shoulders with the elite.
Gesher Theatre
Yet there is more Israeli representation with Gesher Theatre performing Dmitry Krymov's Bloody Mary. Gesher returns to Baku after making a considerable impression at the inaugural BIAF in 2025 with its stunning version of Anna Karenina.
Bloody Mary
Gesher was founded in Jaffa in 1991 by a group of actors who had immigrated from the former Soviet Union, under the artistic leadership of Yevgeny Arye, the theatre’s founder and longtime artistic director. Today, Gesher Theatre is led by its Director General, Lena Kreindlin, who has played a pivotal role in its development, strengthening its international reputation and establishing lasting connections with theatres and festivals around the world. The Russian school transplanted to the Mediterranean, Gesher has been bilingual ever since.
Krymov, the son of the director Anatoly Efros and the critic Natalia Krymova, is a designer by training who builds performances out of objects, images and the visible mechanics of pretending, and who has spent recent years working outside Russia. The tradition that stayed and the tradition that left are both showcased in Baku.
New Earth and Bolero X are at the Azerbaijan State Academic National Drama Theatre on 5 and 6 November.
Bloody Mary will take place at the Azerbaijan State Musical Theatre on 1 and 2 November.
Tickets are available at biaf.az
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This article was written in collaboration with James Evans