A N N A B E L L E D V I R
Ran Brown on CRESCENDO GOLD | August 6, 2023 | Haaretz
Dvir continues to perfect in "Golden Crescendo" the performance art she has formulated in recent years - vocal work, choreography and live music merge into a spectacular art, a mind craft of elements that have no hierarchy between them"...
In CRESCENDO GOLD Dvir offers not only an alternative female mythology, in which the women are the protagonists - she offers a new way of telling it, and creates a form of performance that cannot be classified. She adopts the bodily rhetoric of the showcases of the hysterical women, the possessed witches.
This was their way, according to feminist theorist Catherine Clement, to take the floor and express their desires, their sexuality, their anger and the silenced experiences of women in the patriarchal culture. "We cook, wash, vacuum, anesthetize," the performers sing in one moment. At another moment, knife in hand, one of the dancers calls out: "we may all look like sinners, I'm myself a D-E-M-O-N", while another dancer convulses at the other end of the stage. And despite what has been said, this is not "mobilized art" for the liberation of women. This is already the next step, and it's wonderful!"
FICTIONS – Annabelle Dvir (Israel)
An article by Luis Alberto Sosa Berlanga | June 13, 2022 | Achtung
These three professionals set up a true coven, in which their "spells" took the form of songs and movements interspersed with such a sense of rhythm, a sense of aesthetics, rigor, and above all, a strong defense of what they were representing on the stage. What I'm talking about is the most eccentric and bizarre piece selected for this edition of the International Public Beta Exhibition.
These three professionals put together a very difficult job to achieve the result they arrived at, given that, perfectly, they could have saved complications by having done half of what they staged, with a series of more or less conventional links, and they would not have had trouble getting approval from your audience. But they did not settle, they wanted to go as far as their imagination and willpower took them. Not to achieve something virtuous that sought technical excellence, but actually, to expose absolute delirium in the best of its versions. Which places them at the focus of all the comments: both the cruelest and unnecessary ones, as well as those that could raise them to a level, in which it is a matter of time, before a fan club of them is founded in Madrid. In this interval they moved, as if they were from the first research session for the production of Fictions , assuming their peculiar destiny.
The structure of Fictions is not narrative. At best, it had an internal logic that would take years to decipher the pattern that organizes it. So there was no way to predict what would follow the next scene, keeping us, the viewers, in a permanent state of alert. Behold, those of us who "entered into their games" abandoned any position that leads us to intellectually analyze what they were doing. At least in my case, I was inclined to "collect" in my memory the images that referred us to an imaginary in which people assigned the female gender had been mandated to materialize a series of behaviors. and ways of understanding the world, it does not surprise me that many have "lost their axis" (if I may use the expression) along the way.
In such a way, that Fictions is postulated as a piece that is called to value the beings that have been badly injured in the attempt to comply with the norms with which all of us human beings have found ourselves at birth without first being we have committed in one way or another, to its militant compliance. There has only been a kind of coercion that has stalked us to determine if isolation, or being dehumanized, were the "sanctions" that best corresponded to our initiatives against a supposed natural order. That is why there is room to collect readings of feminist and Queer inspiration, through identifying the performative acts that constitute Fictions, under the "shelter" that it was "just a piece of performing arts."
Therefore, it could be said that this piece sought to shake each of us viewers, including people who follow feminist and Queer traditions. It is not going to be, that they have been adapting to lands where they have had the enormous fortune, to insert safe spaces where they can be themselves with others where, let's say, they must maintain their composure and a certain decorum. I guess that's why Fictions can be so offbeat, even though its background isn't really avant-garde at all.
In short, I think Fictions is a brilliant work that establishes Annabelle Dvir as a creator and interpreter, with the potential to be talked about beyond the borders of the country in which she develops her profession as an artist. Having said that, I invite you to continue delving into her imagery and stage language, so that exhaustiveness continues to be one of the pillars that will make her be the extraordinary creator she aims to be with this short piece.
Daniel Reshef on CRESCENDO GOLD | October 1, 2024 | Yekum Tarbut Culture Universe
A GATEWAY TO A WORLD UNRESTRICTED CREATION / Daniel Reshef
In an era of sophisticated, hyper-medieval art, and charged with cynicism and rage, which forces independent creators to take their place through a unique predation of the existing into a personal and distinctive language, the dance field is washed by postmodernist trends, which include a number of fascinating phenomena, such as the mixing of voice and lyrics, live music and vocal performance, An ethnic-identity discourse, and perhaps the most important of them (even if marginal at the moment) - the intensification of the physical shock as a provocative reaction to the viewer's unimaginable rise in stimulation threshold, as well as to the monotonous softening that dance has sunk into in recent decades. All these trends, absolutely, constitute essential characteristics and even identity markers of the unrestrained body of work of the choreographer Annabelle Dvir.
The piece CRESCENDO GOLD by Dvir is perhaps a clear example of the unique style and penetrating statement in the artistic world of the choreographer, and the set of characteristics of the piece may be a gateway to this disturbed world. Dvir's dancers, all women, share the stage with a progressive metal band, also made up of women, and successfully participate in a thick and twisted melodic ritual. The movement, sometimes uniform and sometimes distributed, is sharp and forceful, and always involves some expression, more or less crude, of the body's violence towards itself, towards an absent recipient, or towards another body. The clothing is simple but revealing, hinting at the violence that has taken place or is about to take place. And the words - strange and jagged, full of venom and magic, devoid of any meaning and acute in their meaning to the point of chills.
The product of this mixture is a great work of art, which modestly corresponds with the bed of contexts in which it emerges, while its greatness full of horrors crushes behind it the comparison between it and any creature of lesser power. Dvir's language, which relies on compressed and niche techniques that she developed herself, stands on the seam between esotericism and provocation, and is superior to both. The full picture is not self-evident, but it also does not create a disconnection from the viewer. While power and emotion are the permanent property of this language, it consists of a unique variety of ways of expression and modes of behavior, all of which stem from the rich world of the choreographer, which, as mentioned for the moment, is not devoid of context.
The use of live and innovative music, along with the special contents in their bluntness on stage, are reminiscent to a great extent of Ohad Naharin's monumental work "Kir" from the beginning of his career with the Batsheva band. There, as here, questions are posed about the limits of contemporary dance, and its fair and structured nature, compared to its potential to dismantle conventions and flood repressed impulses. However, unlike Naharin, who at the time brought meteoric success to a local field that celebrated around a limited and flightless mainstream, Dvir flourishes from the existing wealth and utilizes its cultural resources very wisely. Her work requires a lot of stage and textual thought, which does not at all contradict the simplicity of the experience, which is completely liberating.
The piece is defeated from within by Dvir herself, who stands out as the possessor of the dream that controls the nightmare she created, and lived it fully during the performance. It is difficult to call the feverish physical-mental state in which the choreographer and her dancers are in the simplistic term "figure", but the normal human being is indeed left behind during the work, in favor of a brutal and precise occurrence, demonic in essence. This, while the women on stage weave an innovative concept (and not yet an orphan from the context) of femininity, which stands in a variety of relationships with pain and power that are terribly human in essence. The gender discourse intertwined in Dvir's work is placed alongside her preoccupation with her roots, where distinct elements of Georgian folk dances, as well as characteristics of traditional music, stand out from among the metal and shouts in English and Hebrew, leaving the impression of an abstract legend taken from the forgotten history of a nation that is one woman.
This impression stems from a huge struggle, which takes place endlessly between the simple physical event and the overall aesthetics of the work, which, although they maintain full harmony together, but for a moment never cease to challenge the viewer's attention to hold all the abundance at once. Even the name of the work embodies within it the tension between an intensifying and stormy power and a magnificent and external wealth - the crescendo of the body requires the eyes to join the aching muscle, while the gold in the behavior of the varied musical instruments, and in the design of the setting, awakens a kind of gentle forgiveness, almost naive in the face of the rage, but loud not less. Certainly, there is the storm in the sound as well, and the refinement also finds its way to the body from time to time, but the tragedy of all of these is indeed a burning dissonance that only a look at can reconcile it into the harmony it constitutes.
But we must not let that harmony, spread throughout the work almost without subjection to the dimension of time, make us forget the genius of the move itself. Dvir is undoubtedly a brilliant composer, both in stage design and in her narrative development. The space in the piece is often conducted in a well-thought-out chaos, when the dancers enter and exit personal rituals of slaps or cries, as if they were a wolf in front of the moon. Then we will discover a complex spatial thought that produces a wide organic image. However, sometimes the inhabitants of the same bizarre world gather, recognize one another, and like a dream emerging from sleep, adopt a real status within a hierarchy that has just been born, and will be disintegrated in a few moments. This order, teasing the chaos with its immediate appearance, gives unprecedented validity to the apparently baseless associativity, by proving the role of its components to the last of them, then devouring these roles without hesitation or shame.
If so, it certainly seems that the choreographer Annabelle Dvir is not only responsible for some of the most relevant material in contemporary dance now, but there is something in her work to move the field forward, to a much deeper tonal richness, to an unrestrained boldness, which stems from completely personal but almost political abysses in essence. At this stage it may be difficult to guess what comes next, but the doubts have already been removed from the understanding that Annabel Dvir's dance deserves a place in the hall of fame of contemporary dance in Israel.
Takao Norikoshi | June 2023 | cont·act Contemporary Dance Festival 2023
FICTIONS was the most astonishing piece I have watched in these couple of years and has received the most impact in recent years...pure and psychotic. Their bodies made me sense all the discords, conflicts, and frustrations, which a body can experience.
She displayed her unique and outstanding characteristics among many pieces of Israeli young artists that have been Europeanized in recent years.
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ANNABELLE DVIR'S MARTIAL DANCE CLOSES THE 19TH EDITION OF OPERA PRIMA 2023
The poetic, political and social repertoire of these metropolitan rappers capable of poetic poetry, also shocks and annihilates the audience of Generation Z, shaken in a performance without resolution of hits.
And in this regard, what about the show “Fictions” by Annabelle Dvir , on stage with Women of Sounds Ensemble at the Teatro Studio? At the end of this scenic bacchanal, we are struck by two miracles: the first is that the parquet of the Lemming headquarters is still intact and without dents; the second is that the bones of the three maenads on stage remain intact: with Dvir herself (Israeli-Georgian choreographer, playwright, vocal composer and designer of the soundtrack) also the performers Layil Goren and Dana Naim – Hafouta.
But what is “Fictions”? Anyone who claims to give an answer would be even crazier than the actresses on stage. Because this is “Fictions”: the rhythm of the body that produces a mixture of sounds and colors, the ritual of the theater that creates eddies of light and performance. These hysterical, haunted, possessed bodies produce a disruptive telluric energy. “Fictions” is blood and sweat. It's epilepsy and neurosis. It is eros, pain and paradox. It is the ritual of theater between hallucination and magic.
The possessed actresses start from a veneer of chastened women (in demure almost nineteenth-century dresses, white shirt and long black skirt) and peel it away until revealing the latent androgynous kaleidoscopicity.
Moreover, the name of the choreographer contemplates precisely the duplicity: Dvir, i.e. D as Domina and Vir asMale in Latin. The wild soul of these Bacchae explodes in a pervasive mix of reality and fiction. The furious dance, combined with tribal song, uses the body in a self-destructive way. We will have counted perhaps a hundred thunderous tumbles in this blunt and blunt, violent and liberating work, with a high coefficient of difficulty.
Creative animality. Combat Theater. Strong risk for bones and joints. A heart sinking for sensitive souls. Not recommended for orthopedic audiences.
7 INCH OF SLAM THE FULL BODY SOUNDSCAPE
WORDS of CRITICS
And here, from the depths of a sleepy swamp of mediocrity peeks out a work that is a true pearl. The song of human meat, pounded into the floor and from the pain and the impact emerges a beautiful, delightful poem. Astoundingly precise. An inspiring language devoid of mannerisms and excess decoration. A personal story that becomes, in a split second, a chapter in local dance history. Annabelle - you set the stage (literally)"
II Lee Nahat Shalom - CW - Ori J. Lenkinski.
An innovation…intriguing and primal…I would very much recommend to everyone who loves the searching, exploring and experimental fields, to watch this work”
II Yoval Meskin - An interview on the show - Art Period.
"From the material shards of the slammed body, emerges a feminine community that replaces communication through words and expression, for a deeper connection of voice and senses”
II Idit Soslik Phd - The Current Eye.
"Carved into my soul…an awesome lamentation…chilling slamming recital”
II Lilach Dekel Avneri - This moment 26 | a testimony of fracture.