Emanuel Gat

SILENT BALLET/SIXTY FOUR

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28 November, h. 20.30

AUDITORIUM CONCILIAZIONE national prèmiere

Emanuel Gat’s personality has emerged in barely a few years on the international scene thanks to his unequivocal trait made up of pure movement in space, inebriating sinuousness and outstanding musicality.
Recipient of the Bessie Award 2006 at the Lincoln Center of New York for his choreographies Winter Voyage (based on three of the 24 lieder that form Franz Schubert’s Winterreise cycle) and Le Sacre du printemps (from The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky) with which he had made his debut in Rome at last year’s  Romaeuropa, Emanuel Gat is back with two new pieces, which are a further development of the relationship between music and silence. The Israeli choreographer has in fact a very rigorous musical background having been trained to become an orchestral conductor, something that makes his rendition of the sound and movement relationship very sensual, intimate and definitely quite unusual.
While in his previous Winter Voyage the choreography developed in the long silences that separated Schubert’s Lieder, with Silent Ballet dance aims to achieve a greater autonomy. Thanks to a soundtrack of his own composition, Gat forces movement to concentrate on himself and on his creative energies and ability to develop concepts. The adventure is to create a self-sufficient dance at all levels: the theoretico-conceptual, the musical-sonorous and the theatrical-visual.
With Sixty Four, on the other hand, musical technique and its transposition in choreography emerge once again. The principal forms of counterpoint - often transferred in the past to dance and utilised with mastery by Gat himself - achieve an unprecedented synthesis in this choreography, where a female dancer interacts with four male dancers against the musical backdrop represented by one of the monuments of baroque counterpoint: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue).

Emanuel Gat studied music at the Tel Aviv Academy. His first encounter with dance was at a workshop for amateurs led by Israeli choreographer Nir Ben Gal. Six months later, Gat joined the Liat Dror Nir Ben Gal Company and toured with them in Israel and around the world. After two years with the company, Gat began working as an independent choreographer, creating his first solo piece in 1994. In January 2004 Gat established Emanuel Gat Dance, which received Israel’s Minister of Culture Award in 2005 for outstanding dance performance. In 2006 Gat was  named a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. The company has created since six pieces that have toured around the world. Since October 2007 - Emanuel Gat Dance is based in France at “La Maison de la Danse” in Istres. The company is hosted by Oust Provence for a three years residency.