Creating Life
by Anat Zecharia
Rami Be’er teaches us a powerful parable about life, and dedicates his beautiful new work to his recently deceased parents
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Mother’s Milk, the new work by Rami Be’er, is dedicated to his parents who died during the past year. But instead of evoking their memory or straying into fond sentimentality, what Be’er does here with great cleverness is to entrap us with movement into a beautiful, simple and effective parable about life as a whole.
And we see here all the familiar signs of Be’er’s work – frequent and rapid transitions between passages in unison to duets and trios, and the contrast between outbursts of movement and slow motion, within a carefully planned form. There is a beautiful duet with a couple held captive in a square of light, and sorties in a row or a column, and a series of solos presenting the company’s dancers. In one of the beautiful and moving moments, a circle of dancers lies on the floor like a clock, while three dancers move around the center like the hour-, minute- and second-hands. One dancer with a large stage light moves past them, illuminating them from up close, as if ingesting them.
And more than an esthetic experience pleasing to the eyes, on a stage crowded with excellent dancers and beautiful lighting that envelops them, Be’er weaves into the sub-chapters of the work a web of glances, a web of listening, webs of dancers looking at and listening to each other and to those who pass among them. Human figures who are almost destroyed from within by an unstoppable internal movement. Ultimately what we have is a cohesive, polished work, with the best ensemble of dancers I have seen in the last six months. And this time it is worth ignoring what will some see as the weakness of the work – those weak points in the connections between the various segments. Because in its form, this work manages to describe a cycle of life dwindling towards its end and towards a new beginning, wild and surprising, an infinite number of times. And more than anything else, the constant joining and separating that Be’er does here creates the feeling of a dead-end road that grabs you by the throat.
11 July 2017 | Yedioth Ahronoth | 24 Hours
