
Jerusalem International Dance Week 2020
Q & A
Q&A with Israeli Festival Managers Directors - Get to know the directors of the following festivals: Between Heaven and Earth, Diver Festival, March of the Hare Dance Festival, From Jaffa to Agripas, and Intimadance Festival.
Festival directors answer questions and reveal the unique voice of each platform.

Jerusalem International Dance Week 2020 /A taste of Israeli Contemporary Dance Festivals
Between Heaven and Earth Festival
The "Between Heaven and Earth" festival is a Jerusalem symbol that connects the contemporary dance world with the world of Jewish renewal.
The festival creates connections between the new and the old, between the traditional and the contemporary, between the Jewish origins and the local culture as well as the universal one, and different cultures from all over the world – connections that create fresh new worlds of content, connects different sectors of society, shine a new light on art and tradition, and produce a new artistic language.

Photo by: natasha shaknes
Diver Festival
Diver Festival: Contemporary Dance in Tel Aviv-Jaffa is an annual international festival and a leading agent in the current new wave of dance in Israel. It calls for post-disciplinary context, artistic courage, collaborative projects and radical engagement in the field. The festival is known for its independence as it’s not exclusively officially associated with any major institution in the Israeli dance scene, but at the same time it collaborates with most of them and with major visual art partners and prominent cultural venues.
Diver is taking place all over Tel Aviv-Jaffa in different venues, theaters, museums and performance spaces. The content performed is introducing young and experienced leading choreographers and artists from Israel and abroad. Next to the shows, Diver wishes to develop an embodied discursive sphere that is conceptualizing the present, while investigating the past and performing a futuristic prophetic gesture. Thus, it invites and initiates diverse collaborations, formats and platforms.
www.diverfestival.com

Photo by: Noa Simhayof Shahaf
Choreography: Bosmat Nossan.
Dancer: Shay Kukui
Intimadance Festival 2020 - Overthrow
Intimadance Festival is a contemporary dance festival that has been going on for 19 years as a flagship project of Tmuna Theater. It serves as a platform for a high-quality variety of creative artists from Israel and from around the world.The Festival and the Theater strive to broaden the realm of artistic, political and social discourse, as well as dealing with intra-medial questions geared towards creating new performative languages.
This year, due to the Covid-19 crisis and the general instability around, we decided to change the festival format to an On-line version which flirts with the medium of Theater- the home base of the Festival and its creators. In the spirit of this year festival them - overthrow, and in the spirit of our times, the works at the Festival deal with the politicization of the body, with our ability to act, as individuals and as groups, and with practices of protest that blend and mix between the public and private arenas. The Festival included 10 premiere works, which have undergone adaptation to video. They were presented through the festival website, as well as at screening and discussion events which took place on-line, on Tmu-na Theater’s Facebook page.

Photo by: Shiraz Grinbaum
‘From Jaffa to Agripas’ Festival
‘From Jaffa to Agripas’ Festival is an annual contemporary dance festival which has been taking place in Machne Yehuda Market in Jerusalem, since 2014. The festival exhibits original dance performances in locations around the market, raising public discourse on human body culture in Jerusalem.
The festival produced more than 60 original dance pieces which have been created by diverse artists. It creates a one-of-a-kind, local and unique experience in Jerusalem through events in alternative spaces (hotel rooms, galleries, bars and restaurants), video-dance events, Dinner & A Show, performances in the open air and many more…

Photo by: Tom Azaria
March Hare Festival
March Hare Festival 2020 -
The festival strives to create an environment in which choreographers, audience and varied communities place the body, with its personal, human and political manifestations, on stage.
One of the main questions we chose to raise in the festival this year is how dance, movement and working with our body allow us to open new, mostly non-verbal, spaces in order to observe our daily motion and create new choreographies out of reality. Can we use an the dance or more specifically choreography as a practical tool?
The festival wishes to expand the notion of the “work of art” through the connection of professional bodies, challenged bodies and the presence of the spectator’s body, thus inviting us all to take an active role in creation.
Can artistic work offer us a new perception with which we can design practical choreographies to create a new environment?

Photo by: Avihai Mizrahi