Pause: The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group

Performance
Friday, 25 August 23, 7.30 pm **SOLD OUT**
Sunday, 27 August 23, 2 pm **SOLD OUT**
Venue: KW Main hall

With Rachaeli Nul-Kahana, Mor Bashan, Noga Goral and Dror Shoval

The Chamber Dance Group—originally named ‘The Chamber Dance Quartet’—was founded by Noa Eshkol (b. 1924, PS, d. 2007, IL) in 1954 for performing her compositions, developed through Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN). Eshkol danced with the group until the late 1950s, when she became increasingly focused on developing EWMN, composing, and teaching her dances. After she died in 2007, the group was refounded as ‘The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group’, featuring veteran dancer, Rachaeli Nul-Kahana, as well as the new members, Mor Bashan, Noga Goral, and Dror Shoval, who have joined the group since.

Dance performances by The Chamber Dance Group are made up of the basic material of all dance styles, namely, the movement of the human body. For Eshkol, dance was a pure art form, in and for itself, to be practiced without scenery, costumes, or music. She treated the parts of the human body as separate instruments, not unlike the musical instruments of an orchestra, each with its own rules of movement. Her compositions rely on seriality as well as on the polyphonic forms of canon, fugue, and so on. She used these forms to create polyphony between various parts of each dancer’s body and between the dancers as a group. Her profound understanding of the body, commitment to the compositional method, and inexhaustible creativity resulted in unique, complex, and dazzling masterpieces.

As part of the Pause at KW, the performers of The Chamber Dance Group will host a workshop giving theoretical and practical insight into Eshkol’s notation of movement.

On the occasion of Eshkol’s 100th birthday, the 28th of February 2024, a reprint of Eshkol’s seminal book from 1958 “Movement Notation”, written in collaboration with Avraham Wachman, will be launched. The book is produced in collaboration with the Georg Kolbe Museum, which will open an exhibition in March 2024, focusing on the life and work of Eshkol and her legacy in contemporary art and dance discourses.

Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Curatorial Assistant: Nikolas Brummer

Part of project: Pause series

The Pause series of KW Institute for Contemporary Art allowed for an ephemeral yet deep engagement with a single artwork in order to draw and question relationships between the past, present, and future. A Pause acted as a punctuation of KW’s regular program by presenting an artwork for a short period of time in between exhibition cycles, working with this state of in-between. Pause projects were predominantly commissioned or reworked pieces that shifted between or even merged the disciplines of performance, installation, video, and sonic work.

Overview
2017–2024

Pause: Billy Bultheel & James Richards
Workers in Song
7–9 June 24

Pause: Alexis Blake
Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve
27–29 January 23

Pause: Lydia Ourahmane
sync
1–2 October 22

Pause: Tobias Spichtig
Die Matratzen
19–23 January 22

Pause: Michele Rizzo
REACHING
1–3 October 21

Pause: Archivio Conz Collection
Broken Sounds / Remote Music—Prepared Pianos
16–19 January 20

Pause: Every Ocean Hughes
Help the Dead
24–25 August 19

Pause: Emma Hedditch
+49 30 243459-53
18–19 May 19

Pause: Jimmy Robert (After Ian White)
Joie noire
19–20 January 19

Pause: Evelyn Taocheng Wang
What is he afraid of?
27–30 September 18

Pause: AA Bronson
Garten der Lüste
26–29 April 18

Pause: Ericka Beckman
Super-8 Trilogy
18–21 January 18

Pause: Margaret Honda
Spectrum Reverse Spectrum
18–20 August 17

Pause: Anthony McCall
Line Describing a Cone
27–30 April 17