It couldn’t have happened before is a very revealing dance piece as our personal lives made their way into it, compelling us to share our own experiences and individual worlds, says artiste Ady Elzam. By Ankita Jain
You stop and the silence is all around. And you start to realise that this person is not just hanging on to you. This person is hugging you. She is hugging you as no one has hugged you over the years. She just wants you to hug her too. When the years pass by she will no longer hug you this way... You will be hugging her. You will beg her for a hug. It couldn’t have happened before, a dance piece came out with this message at a three-day dance festival of contemporary dance titled Expressions at Shri Ram Centre.
It couldn’t have happened before is a love story performed by Dafi Dance Company from Israel. Choreographed by Dafi Altabeb, the piece is performed and co-created by Ady Elzam and Noga Golan. An intricate, layered duet, it was a refined presentation performed with exceptional skill and sensitivity. The couple experienced countless small moments, some more extreme in nature than others, as they traversed a wide range of emotion, action and reaction.
“It took Dafi four to five months to choreograph this piece and it was first performed about a couple of years back. Since then we have staged it more than 20 times,” said artiste Ady. He quickly added, “I am not sure of the numbers though.”
About the creative process, he said, “It was a very revealing one, as our personal lives made their way into the piece, compelling us to share our own experiences and individual worlds. At the end it developed into an authentic and exciting piece that you go home with.” From the first moment, the performers, each with a distinct personality and varied artistic background, clicked as an ensemble. Perhaps it was the easy going way in which they maintained eye contact and didn’t hold back smiles.
Dressed in pedestrian clothing, using their bodies functionally, efficiently, with no frills, focussing their attention on the intense and intricate emotional interplay, alliances among the dancers formed and disintegrated in a split second, only to pop up again in a different form, with a different energy and in a different context. Most of the time the dancers maintained physical contact as they wove their way through fluid and complex compositions. “We talk about daily life experience through movement, with a focus on relationships, which include heightened moments of joy, but also many routine moments and small struggles. Each wants to breathe on their own but needs the other to survive,” he said.
Choreographer Dafi Altabeb has been successfully staging dance performances and touring all over the world (International Exposure Festival (Israel), Napoli Theater Festival (Italy), Guang-Gue Modern Dance Festival (China) and Viva Dance Festival (Brazil). One of them is Never The less. “This one deals with life’s choices. What do we really choose in our lives and what are mere products of a familiar routineIJ How many times have you asked yourself whether the person you live with is somebody you have chosen or somebody you have grown accustomed toIJ Usually, we take our relationships for granted without asking ourselves these questions. Questions of this nature are closely examined in Never The less,” explained Ady.
The dance piece is the result of collaboration between choreographer Dafi Eltabeb and artiste Nini Moshe. The work’s original soundtrack was created by Belgian musician Niko Hafkenscheid. “Soundtrack for every dance piece is created by Niko. The one which we performed here incorporates his original soundtracks,” he added.
Ady received a mixed bag of feedback from the audience in India. “There were many who didn’t want us to leave the auditorium while there were few who compared us with other performers and said ‘your performance had depth but there were better performances than yours’. I am glad people felt free to come and tell us what they felt.” The performance highlighted the modern day relationships. The one which looks for instant gratification but is actually a long journey from maturity to emotional connect to sense of belonging.