The choreographer Rami Be'er has worked with the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company (KCDC) since 1980, creating more than 40 pieces for the troupe, and he took over artistic direction of the company from Yehudi Arnon in 1996. He kept audiences at the Palace of Arts spellbound with a hybrid of dance and performance in a piece entitled Upon Reaching the Sun.
Upon Reaching the Sun is a narrated tale of an orphan who makes his way toward the sky to look for his parents. But he finds the moon is just a piece of rotting wood and the sun a dried-out sunflower. When he returns to Earth, it is an upturned crockpot.
The tale, borrowed from Büchner's Woyzeck, is repeated again and again in the performance, but each time it is the poetry and rhythm of the story, not its hopelessness, that dominates.
The framework of the fairytale reinforces the presence of several symbolic characters in the piece, among them a masked woman in a torn dress who makes her entrance with a flamingo puppet; a black, masked figure of death; and a "black widow", who arrives in a swimming suit and sunglasses.
Set designer Maor Tzabar has created a surprisingly harmonious style for the production, putting most of the dancers in simple, black, unisex dress, while creating marvelous, and sometimes humorous, fantasy costumes for the main players.
The piece plays out like a series of music videos, but the repeated narration and the symbolic figures hold it together as a unit.
Author: Ágnes Veronika Tóth / Photo: Gadi Dagon
