Pause: The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group
25/27 August 23
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
Geula Dagan, Summer Evening, 1985–1986 © The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group, dancers from left to right: Shmuel Zeidel, Ruti Sella, Rachaeli Nul-Kahana.
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
7–9 June 24
Pause: Alexis Blake
27–29 January 23
Pause: Lydia Ourahmane
sync
1–2 October 22
Pause: Tobias Spichtig
Die Matratzen
19–23 January 22
Pause: Michele Rizzo
1–3 October 21
Pause: Archivio Conz Collection
Broken Sounds / Remote Music—Prepared Pianos
16–19 January 20
Pause: Every Ocean Hughes
24–25 August 19
Pause: Emma Hedditch
18–19 May 19
Pause: Jimmy Robert (After Ian White)
19–20 January 19
Pause: Evelyn Taocheng Wang
27–30 September 18
Pause: AA Bronson
26–29 April 18
Pause: Ericka Beckman
18–21 January 18
Pause: Margaret Honda
18–20 August 17
Pause: Anthony McCall
27–30 April 17
With generous support by Artis.
Further support by neugerriemschneider.