Last November, in the large plaza that has become known as Hostage Square, a group of dancers from the Israel Ballet gave a series of short performances set to the last thunderous bars of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The dancers, clad not in tutus but in T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Bring Them Home”, stunned the gathering crowds – which included some of the families of hostages – with their moving homage to the events of October 7. At the end of each performance, a dancer was lifted high by her colleagues as she unfurled a banner bearing the same Bring Them Home message.
This has been the only work danced by Israel’s classical company with a direct link to the ongoing war. The past year’s terrible conflict has resulted in severe limitations on not only where and what they can perform, but to whom.
Claire Bayliss Nagar
Israel Ballet’s artistic director Claire Bayliss Nagar says that in the 27 years she has lived in the country, she has never experienced anything as dreadful as the past 12 months. “It is almost better to be living under the threat of bombs and running to the safe room every night than to be going through this. This is just a nightmare, this is torture,” she says, referring to the hostage situation. “We are surviving, we keep working, but it is very difficult because we can’t perform, neither in the south of the country or in the north. We used to go into Christian Arab towns and do school performances – we can’t do that now.”
Although company members still receive their regular salaries, finances are stretched. “It is a bit of a struggle because we’ve got fewer performances, and less support from the government as the government has had to cut funding because of the war. Everyone has got eight per cent less this year, so for us it is a big chunk – it is almost half a million shekels (£101,000). It is very challenging.”
The company has managed to put on a series of shows for displaced families around the country and Bayliss Nagar made a conscious decision to cheer up audiences by performing lighter works. Nothing has been created yet around the theme of the war. “I think it will happen but not just yet because we are not out of it. We’ve still got hostages, we’ve still got people dying, whether they are soldiers or hostages and I don’t think that is what anyone needs right now. In the future, people will be inspired and will make pieces about this, but almost all the companies having been much more affected by what they’ve been programming, what they have been performing and how to deal with the situation.
“Because the situation is still so present in our lives, I don’t think anyone really needs to see a piece of dance that has anything to do with October 7. It has affected us very much in our choice of repertoire. I know other companies, like Batsheva, couldn’t go on tour and they had to think very carefully about what pieces they would be performing.
“It was so frightening for children so we felt it was very important to get our children’s performances out there. As soon as we could, we started performing Cinderella because it [the war] is so scary for the kids.”
The Israel Ballet performing Snow White Photo: Oren Cohen
So, the fairy tale Cinderella, with its glorious happy ending, has been performed regularly for Israeli children, as has a child-friendly production of Snow White. “We are also doing our children’s version of Swan Lake – we worked on it while the war was on and we premiered it in March.”
The choreography for this most famous of ballets needed some re-thinking. Gone was the usual (in the West) tragic ending with Odette and Prince Siegfried leaping to their deaths and instead there was a happier conclusion. The prologue also warranted a make-over. Bayliss Nagar had turned to the American Ballet Theatre’s version for inspiration, but quickly realised that having Odette struggling desperately while being carried off by the evil Rothbart was not going to work.
“He is really scary in ABT’s production and he picks her up and carries her off. Well, we were just on the back of hostages being taken into Gaza, so I couldn’t do that, because the children would be traumatised.” Instead, she opted for a less violent version, with more of a pantomime feel. She has also been catering for adults with some feel-good productions such as Balanchine’s luminous Serenade and Don Quixote – “a fun ballet which really cheers the audience up and there is so much beautiful music”. With many of its foreign dancers returning home during the past year, the company has now had to employ more home-grown talent. Bayliss Nagar describes these dancers as “resilient and amazing. They come to work and do their job with passion. We go out there and perform whatever and wherever we can. A lot of them are only 18 or 19 – some of them are still doing their army service.”
The rules for national service in Israel are slightly different if you are a talented sportsman, musician or dancer, and a reduced service time is permitted. “They do something that should allow them to combine it with their dancing career,” says Bayliss Nagar. “They will be with us and dance all day, then go to the base and be in the army from six till nine in the evening.
“Currently we have five or six soldiers doing their service. It is very physically challenging because they dance all day and then they go and do another three or four hours [at the base]. And then the mental stress – when they leave work they need to be in their big boots and their uniform. The dancers are resilient and loyal – loyal to us and loyal to their country and I think they are amazing people.”
Naomi Perlov Photo: Asya Skorik
For Naomi Perlov, artistic director of the Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theatre in Tel Aviv, the past year has brought enormous challenges, following other setbacks which would have defeated many other people. She stepped into the role in 2020, a week before Covid struck. With performances cancelled, she took the opportunity to work with CEO Anat Fischer Leventon on various projects such as developing programmes for emerging choreographers.
Zoom enabled audiences to remain engaged with dance for a while, but Zoom had its limitations. “How much can we watch – we are fed up!” says Perlov, who emphasises the importance of live performances at Tel Aviv’s premier contemporary dance space.
“But who wants to come when there are missiles? Until there is a ceasefire nobody will come here. We know what Iran can do, we know what Yemen can do, we know what Hezbollah can do, we know what Hamas can do… we live it.”
Her initial ideas for this summer’s annual modern dance festival needed to be reassessed. Perlov decided against plans to invite international choreographers to the celebration and switch the focus to purely Israeli talent. “I didn’t know whether there would be missiles or not. We had the threat from Iran and I couldn’t sleep.”
It turned out that she underestimated audiences’ need for escapism. The festival was an enormous success. “All the performances not only sold out, but there were waiting lists.”
All the dancers performed, says Perlov, from “the kishkes”. The festival opened with a work by Orly Portal, called Al-Atlal and set to a poem by the Egyptian Ibrahim Nagi. It was sung, not in the original Arabic, but in Hebrew and was described as “a lament of lost lives and lost faith”. Portal’s shows sold out quickly.
Perlov says that choreographers now work with “a different kind of creativity which deals with something of trauma, of deep pain, and the body cannot be indifferent to it. I think they found something that they had never found before – this strength. It has brought out a new reality in the choreographers.”
She says that inevitably, the events of the past year have marked the dancers: “The body cannot be what it used to be. You enter the same studio as before October 7, the same light, the same music, the same choreography, but not the dancers. We cannot be the same, we have been changed a lot and we are still changing.”
Perlov remains hopeful for the future, even though she believes it will take a long time to get back to some sort of normality. The way forward for both dancers and choreographers will be through work: “Creativity is very special – it is like medicine for the soul.”
