In 1974 Graham created Dream, inspired by the biblical story of Jacob's Ladder, the only dance she created especially for the company, and in which Ohad Naharin performed the role of Esau. He had only recently started dancing, and his encounter with Graham was the turning point that made him quit the company and move to New York, embarking on 15 years of study and independent work. In 1990 he was invited to act as artistic director to Batsheva, on a trial basis, טיפה אירוני and Kyr was his first work in this role.

Dina Aldor, Batsheva's Executive Director since 2009.

Dina: In the official chronicles of Batsheva, Kyr, Ohad's first work as artistic director and main choreographer, was truly an earthquake. It really felt this way.

It was so thrilling, because he did things in real time, like the things that were being made elsewhere in the world. If we think about the 80s for a moment, even just from one perspective, the breakthrough of Flemish dance, of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and those working around her, and everything that was done in Europe at the time. Ohad was at the forefront; and he achieved here, with local dancers, all those disruptions that were being made and the novelty that characterized that time in Europe and in the United States. It was very thrilling, very exciting. Ohad, despite him saying that he doesn’t refer to the place he is coming from, or to all sorts of national stuff, his works are very local, and even Kyr examines us from a different angle.
In the end, that is what is so moving about art, isn't it? That it shows us the possibility of looking at things from a different angle.

Yali: I want to reflect on what makes this work, Kyr, so significant. What makes people talk about it in terms of a revolution, or a new era? If we examine the prior decade in Batsheva, the 80s,  we can see it had the greatest number of works created for the company.  If we compare it to what happened the years before. After Batsheva de Rothschild left and withdrew her patronage, the company was left with very little public funding. During this time there was frequent replacement of artistic directors, who invited young (and you might say less expensive ) choreographers to work. The Batsheva archive tells us that 116 works were performed in the 80s, with Moshe Romano and David Dvir as artistic directors, both of whom also danced with the company at the time. Among the Israeli choreographers who were invited, you can find Siki Kol, Alice Dor-Cohen, Igal Perry, Yair Vardi – and other Batsheva dancers.
We also see some well-known American choreographers such as Robert North, Gene Hill Sagan, Robert Cohen and Pearl Lang working with the company, as well as new local and international young artists, such as Nir Ben Gal,  Ohad Naharin himself, and New York-based choreographers Daniel Ezralow, Mark Morris and David Parsons  - all of them on their path to becoming well-known dance makers.

It’s also worth remembering that the company's morning classes in the 80s were based on classical Ballet. This is after two decades of very specific Graham technique. The aesthetics of most of the works of this era were formalist and abstract as well, an incarnation of modernism. However, we can detect some of the first signs of a search for novelty in dance language, naturally introduced by the younger generation.

Then, at the onset of the 90s, Kyr brings something else completely. I think It is perhaps the most narrative piece of Ohad Naharin’s. It is danced angrily, spitefully, chaotically. It has a rock 'n roll unrest, and a stubborn streak, but also moments of softness and melancholy. It's noisy, ritualistic, and filled with Israeli symbols and representations. That’s what makes it revolutionary. No more beautiful, aesthetic movements, no more universal, abstract ideas, but reality, hardcore. The bodies are real, the bodies move, they work and suffer, they are in pain, and they fall apart. In this sense, Kyr is a postmodern work in essence, because it breaks apart the traditional, aesthetic ideals of modern dance. Having said that, what are the markers of Israeliness in this work, and what do they represent outside of the fictitious world of dance?

Iris: back to Avi Belelli.

Avi: In our meetings, Ohad said the work was about nationality, society, community, and Israeli myths. I remember a lot of talk about the Palmach in those conversations (the Palmach was an elite force of the underground Jewish army during the British Mandate). Now it's an entirely different Israel. We talked about the Palmach, to us it was a symbol, there is a reason that Echad Mi Yodea is performed in Khaki Palmach uniform; all of Kyr, actually, is in this Palmach uniform.

Yali: The year 1990 in Israel began a decade of turbulent events: the IDF retreat from Lebanon, the Gulf War, the Temple Mount riots, the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO, a peace agreement with Jordan, suicide attacks on buses and in cities, and the assassination of prime minister Itzhak Rabin. I think Kyr recognized the crisis of Israeli society. The dance gave a disillusioned view of reality, history, and tradition, and it outlined the future while expressing the great disappointment, fear, and despair of the time. Echad Mi Yodea or “who knows one”, had become unprecedently famous and popular in Israel, taking its place in the cultural canon. It seems it had a life of its own, and has since traveled far from its mothership, Kyr. How did that come about? And why is that part of the canon? What makes a certain work canonical?

Iris: Let us define what a canon is. I am looking at the Encyclopedia of Ideas on the net: the word comes from ancient Greek, and its original sense was a straight rod or a bar; a rule; a standard of excellence. A secular meaning, the one we use today, was added in the 18th century: a selection of masterpieces considered authoritative, eternal and fundamental in arts and culture. Canonization is the culmination of processes of selection, appraisal, and measurement; in other words, it marks certain texts as better than others. In relation to questions of identity and values, the limits of the canon define the borders of social groups, therefore,  the canon is a political issue,  a territory of struggles. In this sense, this podcast is also an attempt to delineate the canon of contemporary dance in Israel, and our awareness of this significance is both challenging and intimidating.

Yali: With this in mind, I think we can define Echad Mi Yodea as canonical. First of all, we can see that it is performed endlessly. It is danced repeatedly, in different contexts and situations. It’s included in other popular works by Naharin, like Anaphasa and Deca Dance; and it reached its peak in 2014 at the event for Batsheva's 50th anniversary, at the Opera House in Tel Aviv, when it was performed by 100 dancers. It was a truly spectacular sight.

Avi: The Passover Seder was a key topic in this conversation. Ohad had an idea of working on one of the Passover songs, and the truth is we started with Ha Lachma Anya (another traditional Passover song). That was the first thing we tried, Ha Lachma Anya. We tried it, and I remember Ohad was sitting in the chair and we were playing, improvising, in a small room in Giv'atayim. These were the first meetings we had with Ohad about the music. We saw him making strange movements in his chair, and we were playing Ha Lachma Anya, and after a few meetings, we suddenly said: "Let's try Echad Mi Yodea”. Green, the keyboardist, and I – it was before computers and all - we would be working with samplers and going to Tel Aviv Central Bus Station to collect cassette tapes of world music. We would sample them. Basically, the Echad Mi Yodea samples are from Afghan music; and there was a loop we really liked, a few percussion loops, and one of them is what everybody knows from Echad Mi Yodea; and we said "Let's give it a shot". We played that loop, it sounded like Tom-Ta-Ta-Ta-Tom-Ta-Ta=Ta and I started singing, and we just felt that that was it, we nailed it. Immediately came the additional barrage of drums that everybody recognizes, those big boom-booms, and as it happens with good songs that it takes minutes to write music to, we figured out how to make it into Echad Mi Yodea.

Iris: it is especially interesting to examine the distribution processes outside of the professional and artistic dance scene. It can be said, quite confidently, that Echad Mi Yodea is the most popular dance that is performed in dance programs in schools in Israel, as well as in the graduation ceremonies of private dance studios. But that is not all. Searching Youtube for the dance we found dozens of videos from elementary schools to high schools.

Yali: There is one video uploaded in 2012 by the Eli Cohen Elementary School in Kiryat Malachi in southern Israel. It has about 10,000 views, and it shows the pupils in Dance for Passover Echad Mi Yodea (this is the title of the video). We see about 30 to 40 children, 7 or 8-year-olds, many of them of Ethiopian descent, dressed in their everyday clothes. They’re sitting on small, gray school chairs that have been taken out of the classroom and arranged in rows. The dance instructor, whose name is Siman-Tov Sfar-Adi, is listed as the choreographer of the piece!
She sits in the front demonstrating the movements. The dance moves they perform together seem quite similar to Naharin’s original choreography: they sit with their legs spread and move their back from side to side to the drumbeat, they do the wave, the famous back movement of Echad Mi Yodea, they get up together, sit down together, wave their hands above the chairs and walk around them, sit down and get up again.

Iris: Here is another video, uploaded in 2015. Its title is Flash Mob Echad Mi Yodea, Lea Goldberg School Netanya. We see a community event: parents and families, children, babies, grandparents, all of them holding cameras of course, and in the center of the school's yard, boys and girls in junior high, dressed in black suits and white shirts (inspired by the 1993 version of KYR). They dance and sing Echad Mi Yodea using black plastic chairs. 

And I ask myself, do any of them know the original dance? And does it even matter?

Edna: How does dance get in? Dance gets in, you could say, through the expansion of new practices of memory in Israeli schools. We usually do not see dance in the canonical ceremony.

Yali: Prof. Edna Lomsky-Feder is a sociologist in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We spoke with her about ethnographic research she conducted in the late 90s on school ceremonies.

Edna: The physical practices in traditional Israeli school ceremonies were extremely disciplined, militaristic and masculine, so to speak. Practices that are more readily associated with the masculine voice. What we see is that from the 1990s onwards, practices of dance are widely integrated. I worked on about 110 ethnographies of school memorial ceremonies; they were composed of around 40% of dance practices. Now, for me, dance practice is incorporating a more feminine component into the ceremony, and that goes hand in hand: as military practices are cut down, dance gets more and more incorporated into the ceremony.

Yali: And what do you think makes Echad Mi Yodea so popular in school ceremonies?

Edna: Popular? That’s arguable. I think most dances performed before were usually very different from Echad Mi Yodea. They are expressive, dramatic dances, performed by women, and girls. On that background, we see, at the end of the 90s, the entrance of Echad Mi Yodea into this ceremonial scene, and although I cannot say it floods the ceremonies, this performance is highly interesting for various reasons. But to answer your question, where does it enter? I think Echad Mi Yodea is superficially perceived as easy to dance as if it does not require virtuosity. Now, the incorporation of Echad Mi Yodea is highly meaningful to me, for several reasons. First, it introduces men to the dance scene. Until then, there were almost always just girls dancing, only female students. With Echad Mi Yodea boys enter too, they enter the ceremony as dancers. Secondly, it has a critical aspect, in the sense that it takes apart that very military element, right? There is something very disciplined and organized about it, but it also takes it apart. So inside the dance, we have a direct dialogue, even a subversive dialogue, you could say, with the military practices. While previous dances were expressive and more about mourning women, Echad Mi Yodea incorporates a component of critique into the dance practice. It takes apart from within the elements of a disciplined, military, masculine body. And the last point is that there is an incorporation, you could say, of canon into the dance.

Yali: In what sense?

Edna: I think this dance is closely associated with Ohad Naharin, it is associated with Batsheva. And here, by the way, the different variations on Echad Mi Yodea are very interesting to see, but the framework of the movements still exists, and it is very different if we compare it to other dances made usually for the ceremonies, which provide creative liberty to the school choreographer; and to put it gently, it operates on a continuum of dance that is not necessarily of superior quality. This is all the more pronounced in comparison to the written texts used in the traditional ceremonies because there are many canonical works with high standards of artistic quality, texts like poetry for example that are more sophisticated and considered high culture. Echad Mi Yodea starts creating a certain balance inside the ceremony between the dance and the songs or poems. Another point is that there is an element of continuity here. While the dance is usually, as I had said, a local improvisation and expression of each school, with no year-to-year continuity; (and without this sort of internal dialogue that exists between the texts – that is, there is a very distinctive repertoire in the ceremonies, that creates continuity through the songs and the poems that are being recited; in the sense that there is some sort of a ceremonial language).  Echad Mi Yodea begins to create some sort of a canon of dance, which establishes a certain continuity in the ceremonial language of the Memorial Day ceremony.

Iris: Echad Mi Yodea has a choreographic structure: a semicircle of chairs along the whole piece, beginning to end. The circle is a fundamental component in Choreography, it is a theme, a central motif, and also opens up a view of a historical timeline. In 2013  there was a comprehensive exhibition in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, titled Out of the Circle: The Art of Dance in Israel. 

Curator Talia Amar defined the circle as a fundamental structure in Israeli dance. It is rooted in the adoption of East-European folk dances as a social practice among the Jewish pioneers of the second Aliyah, in the first decade of the twentieth century. These young socialist Zionists, most of them men, exchanged the Hasidic dance of the diaspora for the Hora, a folk dance originating in Romania. According to historical descriptions, they spent entire nights absorbed in the Hora circles, holding hands and dancing, barefoot, burning with fever.

How did the Hora become a collective marker of Israeliness? It was probably the combination of various elements: the simple steps, which are easy to pick up, so that even if you don't know them, you can let the circle drag you along; the physical proximity, created by the holding of hands, shoulders or waists; having an eye contact with all dancers, you can see everybody at the same time; the fact that everybody is equally close to the center, the sense of togetherness, and the rejection of anything outside the circle. All these turn the Hora into the paradigmatic dance of the Zionist-socialist Israeliness

In the third Aliyah, when East European folk dance was gradually being replaced by original local folk dance, the circle became a defining structure. These new Israeli folk dances created for example by Rivka Shturman, Leah Bergstein and many other women choreographers, were intensively distributed in the folk-dance festivals at Kibbutz Dalia in northern Israel since 1944. Later on, the distribution was operated by the Dance Department of the Histadrut (Labor Union), through organized educational programs, events of public dancing; and in future years, by official state institutions, which integrated Israeli folk dance into a structured organized activity in schools all over the country as well as in the army. Anyone who grew up in Israel in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and even the 1970s took part in folk dancing. In a circle.

After marking the historic timeline of the circle, we can return to Echad Mi Yodea. In Echad Mi Yodea, the defining circle becomes a semicircle. The closed traditional structure of the circle opens up for a performative act, which is meant to be viewed on stage, with a distinction between performers and audience. If we want to approach choreography as text, the effect of the semicircle is that its front faces us, the audience, and in this way, we are the complementary part of that circle, therefore, we participate in the dance.

Radio host: And now, the choreographic DNA of Echad Mi Yodea: a semi-circle, repetition, accumulation, a movement language diverging from the dance code of the time, a live music rock band on stage.

Radio host (from the Israeli radio archives): “The Deputy Minister of Housing, Meir Porush, demands that the participation of the Batsheva Dance Company in the Jubilee Bells show for Israel’s 50th anniversary be canceled, or that the piece Echad Mi Yodea, in which the dancers are to go onstage in underwear, be modified”.

Radio host: This is what journalist Lital Levin wrote in Haaretz in May 1998, in her column "13 Years Ago Today".

Yali: We spoke to Naomi Bloch Fortis, who is currently the Executive Director of the Mekudeshet festival in the Jerusalem Season of Culture. Naomi was the co-artistic director and general director of Batsheva Dance Company until the end of 2009. She spoke with us about how the dramatic events of the Jubilee Bells affected the company.

Noami: So, I think that one, the company's ethos stood up in all its might and glory and became significantly stronger. The core values of creative freedom freedom of expression and artistic freedom, have probably accompanied Batsheva since its foundation. The rebellion of the first dancers against an artistic director several decades before the events, emerged in all its power, from the dancers and the entire team, and, led to the dramatic culmination of this crisis. I think it was such a defining experience for an organization, that it was even passed on to the next generations, who never experienced Jubilee Bells or were a part of it. It breathes inside the DNA, it breathes inside the organization's veins to this very day. I think you can see it in other tests the company faced over the years, it was a huge and meaningful test back then. There was an extremely dramatic moment, a few hours before the show with Ohad. They kidnapped him to the Israeli president's house in Jerusalem, literally kidnapped him! There were no cell phones back then, and so I didn’t know. At the president's house, he was alone under unprecedented pressure and with an explicit threat on the company's existence. There, at the president's house, Ohad said: “Okay, we will do what you ask us to do, and I will do the show as you ask, and I will resign”.  At this time, the dancers were already on the bus, on their way to Jerusalem to perform. There were already all kinds of rumors on the radio. When we arrived, Ohad entered the bus, so very pale, there’s even a video where you can see him, how pale he was at that moment, and he told the dancers exactly what it was about. He said: "They put a lot of pressure on me, I decided that we would do it as they asked, but I'm resigning." And then all the dancers jumped up and said: "We resign too". And I jumped up and said: "I resign too". We are not going to perform; we don't care what happens.

Iris: Avner Hofstein is an investigative reporter at the online newspaper The Times of Israel and a lecturer in Media and Communication studies, tells the story of Jubilee Bells from his point of view:

Avner: A lot of questions were involved. There was the question of modesty in the public arena, there was the question of whether they were entitled to this place; the space, between artistic freedom and public funding. There were a lot of questions regarding the political culture of the Netanyahu era, who, in his first government – we forget this man is prime minister since our youth, more or less – brought many polarized struggles to extremes, whether intentionally or involuntarily. The polarization between law enforcement and politics, and the social polarization, including the one between ultra-orthodox and secular. 

In that context, it was interesting to see how the non-institutionalized ultra-orthodox media, I am not even sure there was an institutional ultra-orthodox media at the time, saw this act, of a supposed attempt to force Batsheva on the Jubilee event, as an opportunity to examine secular society, which they perceived as degenerated, escapist, hedonistic and corrupt in the sense of the last days of Pompeii. Most of the radio hosts I was listening to were attacking the seculars quite harshly. Again, I don't even know if it was because of Jubilee Bells, or perhaps Jubilee Bells was just a platform, and an opportunity to go to the barricades. In this context, you could, of course, see, for example, how Israel’s Independence Day, as celebrated by secular society, or as the secular and religious society perceives it, as a vacation day with no religious significance, but rather a civilian one, how much the ultra-orthodox communities are estranged from these feelings. This is a difficult question. We understand that important artistic institutions such as the Batsheva Dance Company, Habima National Theater, or the film foundations cannot exist without the support of the state. It's not like in the United States, where you have a potential audience of more than 300 million people. We are a relatively small society, and if we want quality in the arts, just like in science, we need some kind of state funding. And so, the question that automatically arises, is whether the state can and should fund things that are supposed, according to some people, undermining its very existence. And of course whoever believes the state has the right to censor the arts because of its support, expands the question by saying: "Okay, so Jubilee Bells is not a regular artistic performance that people purchase tickets to with their own money, it's a show for the general public, and so it is subject to certain standards of modesty." Now of course, in the context of Batsheva, I will say this is complete nonsense, because Batsheva chose to perform a segment from a work with a well-justified artistic statement, and so the demand to censor them by wearing long tights (Gatkes) or whatnot, is insane. 

Yali: What are the connections between Kyr from 1990 and Ohad Naharin's latest work, 2019?
2019 sums up three decades of work, some more political than others;
But 2019, like Kyr, expresses a well-defined, coherent political stance. Both of these works cast a painful, disillusioned look at their reality. And 2019, like Kyr, has clear markers and representations of Israeliness and of Israeli identity. We will hear more on 2019 in our next episode Look at yourselves. 

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Iris: We would like to thank the Batsheva Dance Company, Executive Director Dina Aldor, Deputy of Content and Communications Noa Ron, Director of Sound Department Dudy Bell, and the Batsheva Dance Company Archive. To our guests, Avi Belleli, Tomer Heymann, Naomi Bloch Fortis, Prof. Edna Lomsky-Feder, Avner Hofstein, Talia Paz, and Yair Vardi.

We want to thank Ido Kenan and Omer Senesh from Podcastico for the production; and Sarah Holcman, Adi Drori, Nataly Fainstien, and Ido Kenan for the narration. 

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