The entrance of the four female dancers onto the stage is plain, they are wet and pedestrian in their costumes. They arrive and then disrobe from shoes and some of their wet clothes, and as they untie their hair, Arnold Schoenberg's short opera piece 'Erwartung' plays, and the tempo of their motions slows down.
My choreographic practice in the process of working on 'The Gloaming' was deciding on mutual "invisible" elements that acted as focal points for the organization of the different scenes in the dance. These decided upon imaginary elements were objects taken from the Renaissance cannon (endless flowing fabrics, marble urns, golden arrows, exotic animals etc.) that could be then touched by, used or passed around by the four female dancers in elaborate choreographed structures. These structures and tasks resulted in agreed narratives that became occasionally clear to observer and occasionally opaque and undecipherable. The feminine as it is portrayed through the male gaze of antiquity is an ambivalent object. It evokes the witch and priestess, the heretic and the unknown. Could it be re- represented through a critical contemporary view point and reflected on as a point of origin for a new figure? Which in essence is an assemblage of all the periods prior to now?
PERFORMed by:
Gili Inglis, Layil Goren, Shaked Mochiach & Annabelle Dvir.
AT kELIM, BAT YAM 2019