Dance Voices - קולות המחול

The flourishing of Israeli dance in the last decade, among Israeli creators and performers, is not self-evident. Decades have passed until a combination of creativity and technical ability came to fruition. In this article I will focus on one chapter in the history of dance in Israel. The period in question, beginning in 1964 (the year Batsheva Dance Company was founded), was characterized on one hand by lack of belief in the creative abilities of Israeli choreographers, and on the other hand by an immense improvement in the dancers’ abilities and in the professionalism of performances.

Today, after the giants in the Israeli dance world whom we worshipped in the 1960s and 1970s fell and others arose and also fell away, it seems that the artistic concept of the pageant is not obsolete, but is even ahead of its time. How are the holidays of ancient Israeli history celebrated in modern Israel? This question occupied the best of artistic and popular dance professionals in pre-State Israel of the 1930s and 1940s. Thus was born the pageant—a combination of Hebrew text declaimed and sung and of holiday dances performed under the open sky.

From the 1920s to the mid-50s, the main dance style in Israel was Ausdruckstanz. In the 50s, after approximately fifteen years of cultural isolation – World War II, Israel’s War of Independence and the economic depression of the 1950s in Israel – foreign dance companies from USA and Europe started performing in Israel.