For Israeli stage artists Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor, there’s no longer a separation between life and art. They have been partners in life for 13 years and the works they have created together since 2004 are, according to a recent interview with Life, “their babies”.
A scene from Two Room Apartment.
One of those is a re-enactment of Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal’s 1987 original duet performance Two Room Apartment, which will be performed today and tomorrow at Chulalongkorn University’s Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts.
This award-winning performance — Best Performance of the Year 2013 by the Israeli Dance Critics’ Circle — premiered in Tel Aviv in 2011 and Sheinfeld and Laor have so far performed around 80 shows all over the world. Presented by the Israel embassy, it is part of this year’s International Dance Festival.
“We wanted to do a duet for a long time because we have been partners in life for 13 years,” said Laor. “I saw Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal doing only the first seven minutes of the original work for a festival and I was so overwhelmed even though they were then a lot of older [20 years after the premier]. We talked to Nir and said they should do the whole thing again because it’s so refreshing and still contemporary. But they said they would never do it again.”
Initially, Laor wanted to do a different duet, also by Dror and Ben Gal, but Sheinfeld suggested that Two Room Apartment was “more minimalistic and cubistic” and had what it took to “contain” them.
“It was a milestone for Israeli contemporary dance back in 1987,” said Sheinfeld. “And it still feels like a fresh work now. It has important issues for us, like the question of borders and of partnership, of two people, two nations and so we felt that this duet is more open for us to take it and work on it.”
Two Room Apartment touches on the issue of borders, of gender and of a relationship between two people. Laor said, that much like every piece they have worked on in the past, besides the subject matter of the show, there’s always a commentary on contemporary arts as well.
“The two things are always together,” said Laor. “If you are talking about a theatre play, you can devise a show that is dealing with, for instance, the subject of holocaust. But it’s also about how you stage a work onstage, questioning the way people perceive stage art. [In Two Room Apartment], we question the idea of borders, we put them on the floor and we also take them away and we decide when to cross them and when not to cross them. It’s about borders and about the personal relationship between us and that’s the main reason why we chose this duet.”
Laor added that it is also about how the audience react in the theatre, that you are not “in the darkness watching something over there. You are also being watched by other audience members around you”.
“It’s really close, you can feel and smell the sweat, you can feel the energy going through your body. It’s also challenging for the public.”
For years, they had worked hard on researching and reconstructing all the movements and choreography of the original work, but gradually added a few changes to make the work more of their own. One major difference is, of course, how the original duet was performed by a man and woman.
“First of all we studied everything they did from the videos,” said Sheinfeld. “And we started with the choreography, we did it but we felt it was not us. For example, in the original, the woman undressed in front of the man in an erotic fashion and somehow, for us, it didn’t feel right.”
“It’s a process of rediscovering actually and making material that is not yours, yours,” added Oren. “Today it’s not really Two Room Apartment, it’s like Two Room Apartment with a mixture of our own.
“When Nir Ben Gal himself saw the show, he said it’s no longer theirs, he said that it’s totally different and was ours now.”
- Two Room Apartment will be staged at Chulalongkorn University’s Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts today and tomorrow at 7.30pm.
- Tickets cost 600 baht (300 baht for students).
- For reservations, call 02-218-4802 or 081-559-7252.
