Suzanne Dellal Center: "Strange at 26"

The work Muzar by Noa Dar, with writer Yosef El-Dror, premiered in 2000 as part of Haramat Masach at the Suzanne Dellal Centre. Now, after a quarter of a century, Dar is revisiting the work with Muzar in ’26. The work is presented as part of the Friday in Orah performance series, which returns to dance works created between 1990 and 2015 through intimate, exposed studio performances.

At the heart of the original performance was the question of what goes through a spectator’s mind while watching a dance performance. What are they thinking? What do they “understand”? The performance revealed the thoughts of a spectator who responded in real time and out loud to what was happening onstage. The dance and the spectator’s comments create two parallel lines of stage activity, asking the audience to divide its attention between a contemplative and sometimes amusing dialogue between the dancers and those watching them, between dance and speaking about dance, and between the dancers’ sophisticated, expressive physicality and the thoughts of the spectator, fixed to their chair and trying to decipher hidden codes, drawn in and pushed away, hoping to participate in the event.

The curiosity that led to the return to Muzar and the creation of Muzar in ’26 prompted a contemporary examination of the act of looking that took place in Muzar in 2000, considering what has changed since then in the relationship between dance and audience and in the nature of the dialogue taking place within the walls of the performance space. Alongside this, the improvised laboratory of Muzar in ’26 examines how the passage of time affects the qualities of the performance and the movement materials themselves. Together with dancer Michal Mualem, who returns after 25 years to the same materials she danced in the original Muzar, the work also reexamines the person at the heart of the dance—the performing dancer, who gives life to the movement material and thereby establishes the dance itself.

Noa Dar is a dancer and choreographer working in Tel Aviv במסגרת the Noa Dar Dance Group, which she founded in 1993. Over the years, she has developed a rich, original and groundbreaking body of work with artists from various fields who share in the development of new forms of creation and performance. Her works focus on the points of contact between the body and the fabric of its physical and sociopolitical surroundings. Since returning to performance in 2018, her body has become another arena through which she examines concepts such as memory, temporality and transformation. Dar has received several awards, including the Minister of Culture Award for Young Choreographers, the Ministry of Culture Performance Award for a Company, the Rosenblum Performing Arts Award from the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, the Minister of Culture Dance Creation Award, and the Landau Award for Arts and Sciences from the Mifal HaPais Council for Culture and Arts.

Her works include Eretz Yisrael BeChil Dumam, Bo’u Tishkevu, Druchot, Inventory, Noa-Noa, Skin, We, Arnica, Tetris, Muzar, Children’s Games and many others, presented at leading festivals in Israel and around the world.

Muzar in ’26 collaborators

By Noa Dar
Text: Yosef El-Dror
Performers: Michal Mualem, Moshe Shechter Avshalom
Soundtrack actor: Gal Zaid
Sound and video editing: Talia Ben Am
Costumes: Rosie Canaan
Stage management: Talia Barda
Media: Leticia Boulo
Projection: Akraninyu
Lighting: Hagi Shlomov
Still photography: Tamar Lam
Initiation and production of Friday in Orah: Suzanne Dellal Centre

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