“Almost surreal but very humbling” - Israel Aloni on 10 years of ilDance | Part 2

At the end of ilDance’s 10-year anniversary, Co-Founder & Artistic Director Israel Aloni gives an insightful interview about how they and ilDance have evolved over the years, the people who have impacted the organisation and the works which have been so important in hindsight.

This is part 2 of the interview, part 1 can be read here.

That personal side of things, the connection with the audience, connection with the dancers, is so evident in your work now. Given that the first section of your career was in these large dance companies in Israel and Sweden, if you were to talk to your 16-year-old self and said this is what your philosophy is going to be and this is what you will be doing – what would that younger version of you say?

Israel: I would go even further back; this is why I started dancing when I was three or four years old. I had a very western European formal training and career but my dance doesn’t come from school, my dance comes from the desert in the Middle East, thousands of years ago when people were dancing in celebration, in mourning, their suffering, in birth and death – it’s an ecstatic ritual.

When I speak about the connection between the body and the work, the work and the space, all of this is related to ancient rituals and practices of dance. I think when I was four years old and I started dancing, I literally started performing. Friends and family would come over, we would push the furniture around, turn some music on and I would dance for them.

It wasn’t in my bedroom for myself, it was with and for the people and there is something significant about that attention. In the book ‘The Kite Runner’ if I recall correctly, there is a child held hostage and he dances to please his captor and reading this, many years ago, reminded me of the manipulative flirt that one has with the audience as a dancer, which is very interesting to reflect upon because there is something fascinating about the intricacies of who is the witness of whom in this context.

The audience keeps thinking that they are the ones watching but they are also being watched, by each other and by the performers. That dimension is very interesting to me and I knew that the vivid dynamic between the movement and the audience is intriguing at a very young age.  It took a long time to realise what was missing, I was super privileged to have a career from the age of 16, to be dancing in opera houses and big theatres for many years and it gave me the critical position that I am really happy I utilised, to go deep into what I actually found interesting.

I didn’t take things for granted, I questioned, I challenged and I critiqued the comfort I found myself in. I never thought about aspiring for more of these privileges in my work, I didn’t understand why I needed these privileges if I wasn’t connecting with people.

Dance originally had a purpose in society and I am interested in that purpose. Dance has a heritage in purpose, it is an embodiment of current affairs – when a new baby was born, when people got married, when people died, when there was a drought or a flood, there would be a dance. That dimension of dance is interesting to me, not the prestige of being a world-renowned, famous artist who wants everybody’s attention but gets nothing.

Lærke Apelon and Israel Aloni in Schism | Photo by AdeY

It is no surprise then, hearing you speak about this, that ilDance has become a company that collaborates and facilitates. Looking at these 10 years, there are these red threads of people who you and Lee continue to work with. Can you tell us about some of these people, who they are to you and what characteristics they have that make them so important to ilDance?

Israel: I think some of the people would be very similar to us and some very different to us, giving us fortification of our approach of collaboration and at the same time it is good for us to work with people who come from very different backgrounds and practices who stimulate what we do.

This year, I made Schism and in that cast was Lærke Apelon from Denmark, who I met 10 years ago at Balettakademien Stockholm. Lee and I choreographed a piece for that year’s graduation project and it was a kind of instantaneous love.

I knew there was something special, deep and interesting in that connection between me and Lærke and I invited her to be in the process for Forbidden Fruit, which I created the following year, so she was in residence with us in Norway. The same year, I created a duet for Lærke and Joszef Forro called Catharses and that was a very important piece for me as I delved into the female, because I really wanted to explore notions of femalehood with the attempt to unpack or potentially even deconstruct the female and somehow separate it from only being a femme or a woman, and try to see how we can think about it in alternative ways.

Lærke was basically a fresh graduate but I had auditioned many people and looked around through my connections and Lærke felt like the right person to work with. Lærke has an outstanding stage presence, she is just mesmerising, but at the same time doesn’t take herself so seriously, which gives her such a range of exploration and performativity that is just so rare, because it is so authentic and genuine. She is super powerful and strong yet fragile, attentive and sensitive.

We went from Catharses, which is my piece that toured the most so far, around Sweden and the world for four years. Lærke and I also made a work for the Göteborg Baroque Festival and she was in the cast of Here, There, Yet Nowhere which was part of Godlike, an international coproduction ilDance did with Odelya Kuperberg Dance Company from Israel, so we have done a lot together over 10 years.

Lærke Apelon in Godlike

I think what connects us is her immense depth and a lot of fun at the same time, because we really need to accept our childlike qualities as well. We are new in the world, the world keeps changing and we keep changing, so there is always freshness, which is important to lighten things up.

From recent years, we had Jennifer Wallen, who was with us in ilYoung for two years in a row, then did a creation with Lee and has been very involved in Compass. Jennifer is another person who is exceptional in her artistic work, her stage presence and sincerity as a performer but at the same time has such a scope of qualities, traits and personalities. She is not a one-trick pony, she is so diverse and fluid, I think that is so important.

I think about Gwyn Emberton, who is from Wales but is now also based in Sweden, and we have been working together for 10 years on international collaborations together. Gwyn has been teaching workshops and seminars for ilDance, working in ilYoung and Compass and it is the same thing with Gwyn. On one hand, extremely diligent, professional and experienced but at the same time a fun maker and doesn’t take himself too seriously.

There is a lot of pressure in the dance world, and the arts world in general, to be successful and success is measured by some linear trajectory of one milestone after the other and each milestone needs to be bigger, greater and more valuable. A lot of artists are so occupied by it that they do not deviate, which also means not deviating the qualities you’re experimenting with inside yourself and the fun making and flexibility I speak of don’t exist in artists who are too occupied trying to maintain a fixed image of themselves.

We have had collaborations with artists who are so afraid to do something not predetermined as the legitimate next step in their career and they only collaborate as a means to get to that end and that can be very problematic. If you really meet with someone, you need to be able to change, you cannot stay the same, we are always complete, we are always full.

Perfection is a vacuum, you cannot move from it and anything you’d do is a destruction of that image, so why strive for it? It is such a stagnant thing and we are movement artists.

There are more people, like Linnea Bågander, who is a costume designer we’ve been working with for maybe eight years and she has done a lot of different things with us, perhaps 10 projects. She is so incredibly diligent and creative but also incredibly collaborative – she is brilliant with what she brings in but there is always room for negotiation. So movement is maybe the characteristic that is seen in all of these people.

Jennifer Wallen in Self Contained | Photo by AdeY

You mentioned Catharses as a work that was very important for specific reasons. Are there any other pieces in these 10 years that were particularly important to you, not because of something that was achieved but rather something that it sparked or something you could delve into for the first time?

Israel: I don’t want to be over-dramatic and say “every piece I ever made” but I can think of different things. I think the different elements that I experimented with in my works are very important for where I am today, not as a milestone I could foresee but in hindsight with the challenges and hurdles I had to deal with in the process.

I made #Ghetto in 2017, which was my first lovemaking with slow-motion and boy, oh boy, did we satisfy each other. That was a very important thing because it was also in complete silence, a whole hour with 10 people in complete silence, 40 minutes of which were in slow-motion. This is incredible because that experience gave me a peephole into the dynamic I spoke about earlier, the mediation between the experience of the performer and the experience of the audience and how the work is really being made in the liminal space between the two – it is not the performers making the work and audience watching, the work is being created in the in-between.

Because of that work with the slow-motion, 10 performers and the audience seated in close proximity to them, the audience was very agitated. Not agitated because they were uncomfortable but because they did not want to miss anything as everything was happening so slowly but still every time you turned your head, you saw a completely different image.

When I made Forbidden Fruit in 2014, the whole concept of what it means to make a work was completely challenged. The relationship with the dancers, methodologies of making, improvisation practices, dramaturgy and performance fields were all challenged. During the tour, I kept on changing the order of the different parts of the work and at some point, took the work away and I encouraged the performers to perform spontaneity, to trust that the process has already made the work, we don’t need to articulate the work. It was a real research process for us, very challenging but very important.

I think the solo I made, My Body My Nation, was also a serious eye-opening experience for me because of the collaboration with Keren Rosenberg, who is an incredible artist but very different to me, which was the purpose of inviting Keren to be my outside eye or dramaturg for the work.

This was a two-year process where I really went very deep, to ask myself what is dance to me, where it comes from, what is this thing I called body, how do I treat this body – is it my body, who’s body is it, do I own it? All these questions. It was a very interesting process which exercised my empathy to performers. As a choreographer, putting myself in that position again after not performing for three years or so and going through that deep quest, really exercised my empathy and every work I’ve done since has been very different in how I interact with the performers.

Israel Aloni in My Body My Nation | Photo by Megan van de

Also, the work I made in Australia, I Say Yes, was very interesting for me. I wanted to make a work about how augmented the self-image is of female-identifying individuals when they come to their wedding day because I saw a photo on social media of a friend of mine who is otherwise a real feminist and quite connected to all her sides. In this photo from her wedding day I saw her with a white dress, super dolled up and I thought she doesn’t even look like herself. Why would someone like her, do it to themselves?

I wanted to think about what is this thing we say yes to, it was very interesting to me. Little did I know, the premiere of the work was coincidently scheduled on the day of the referendum for marriage equality in Australia. The whole creation process was a very different way for me to work with references, there was quite a lot of text, it was very techy and employed many visual symbols with props and costume changes, it was almost like a Romeo Castellucci piece with the visuals and aesthetics. That was important to me in the context of how the piece meets with local affairs but also in terms of the practice and how to use symbols and imagery.

Finally, I am not going to ask you about hopes and dreams for the next 10 years for the company, but on a personal level, if there was no limit to resources and time, what kind of work or idea would you like to delve into?

Israel: I don’t have a dream work in the sense of having something that I’d like to do but cannot because I don’t have the resources. I think the work and practice evolved in the way they did because that is the way they needed to evolve. But what I can say is that I would really like to delve more into what I call corporeal indigeneity, which is the idea I was going to research in an academic context, but I think it is very much part of my artistic practice.

I would like to continue developing the I.Aloni experience, where I feel there is a nice convergence of my three main passions in life: movement, psychology and philosophy.

My dream is to continue to do what we do with less stress. I feel that we are honest, genuine, we are changing and evolving as ilDance and I hope to continue doing that. There is too much unnecessary stress because of the limitation of resources, which changes how things happen.

Another hope of mine is that I’d really love to support other artists, so we could have a collective of artists that we can keep close, progress together and support each other’s practices.

It is almost surreal that the past 10 years have happened, that it’s happening and in one way or another it will keep happening. It is almost surreal but also very humbling.