by Ayelet Dekel, Midnight East Blog, 08/12
In Land Research, Arkadi Zaides presents a stark landscape: images projected on a large screen at the back of a wide stage empty of all props, except a mic stand at the front left. Land Research was performed in Israel on July 30, 2012 as part of the Summerdance Festival at Suzanne Dellal in Tel Aviv, continuing his process of developing an artistic dialogue with artists from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, into this landscape enter performers: dancer Yuli Kovbasnyan who immigrated alone to Israel from Russia in her teens, Ofir Yudilevitch, a dancer with an extensive background in acrobatics and Capoeira, Palestinian artist and actress Raida Adon, performer and video artist Sva Li-Levy, and dancer/acrobatics practitioner Asaf Aharonson.
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by Ruth Eshel, Haaretz, 08/12
For a few decades now, the body has turned into a place where dance is written. It's not a body telling a narrative with a libretto, not a body in the service of the whims of the soul, but a body of bones, flesh and blood that speaks in its own voice. It's a body that shakes itself loose of dance genres, of phrases of movement, of rhythms; it sheds everything familiar, in a desire to produce only what the body writes. The body in Zaides' work cries out in distress. His movement is not humane, in not attentive to natural abilities or the desire for what is pleasant and good for the body; rather, it is cruel and screaming. All the solos are finely performed and characterized by a restlessness – one that projects the sense of seeking, with repetitive motions strewn within as a refusal, as the body's unwillingness to express itself "properly".
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