WHAT NOW

What Now is a performance of disorientation, both for us, dancers, and for the audience. It is a dance being lost in the crossroads of real life and of the realm of art, imagination, where everything "can" happen. Lost and doubtful, we want "it" to happen! We search for the "right" movement, for the "dance of nowness", for being "cool".  Where are we? on stage or in the studio? 

Is there really a difference, in resolution or in the experience, between representation and reality?  Our dance steps do not resume to a specific aesthetic or style, not sure if we are dancing the "now" or quoting some steps of an "old fashion" past. The body devotes itself to music. We love to dance. But we give up fast. It is not what we are looking for. 

What is really bothering now? Not the Israeli-Arab conflict, nor covid-19, nor the political wars, but rather the collapsing of reality. Reality is depressing. the dancers determine. The audience is invited to become a partner in the debate, in doubting. We fail to conclude into a final meaning, into logic, into order, into coherence which is so often expected from an art piece. 

I am not interested in dance that convey to the viewer a spiritual or aesthetic experience in which the viewer could be sucked into disappearing. I demand the audience to be active in the debate, to put some question marks. 'What Now' disassembles and assembles the language of dance, the body, music and audience, and presents a contemporary struggle of art- a heroic search for grace, for beauty, for the spiritual, for sense, meaning and coherency, for orientation. But dance is also a failure as it is flesh and blood, weaknesses, self-critique, it is chaos.

What about some answers?  'What now' is a question. A metaphysical or practical existential question. It is what an artist asks himself as soon as he enters his studio, or in front of his canvas, most alone, before he begins to create. Or maybe it's not only artists who ask that. “

Hillel Kogan