Dance Review: Paved life

The full-evening work completely changes the way we experience daily physical conduct in public.

By ORA BRAFMAN
Paved Life 370 (photo credit: Ran Shabi)
Paved Life 370
(photo credit: Ran Shabi)
As a recent newcomer who gets more attention than most, 36- year-old Rotem Tashach finally offers a full-evening work, titled Paved Life, lamenting the loss of body actions free from social codes since prehistoric man discovered the paved floor.
And what a revelation! It completely changed the way we experience daily physical conduct in public. No crawling in restaurants, tree climbing in the paved cities is replaced by paying to climb artificial, designated synthetic walls. On the other hand, Tashach (Hebrew acronym for 1948) enjoys free time for his experimental art with public funds, which should be counted among other advantages he enjoys, such as not having to run for miles barefoot on rocky hills after a rabbit for his daily meal.
The bottom line is that the hour-long piece, in spite of its inherent basic weaknesses, is highly entreating, at times witty and often humorous, physically inventive and presents a group of delightfully talented dancers.
Tashach juggles text and movement, trying to force the text as an independent entity on a parallel universe celebrating cerebral dominance. On the dance floor it soon looses to richer, more viable language of body-soul motivated by passion and instincts. At that point, halfway through, the dancers gave up breathlessly reciting endless chatty, sporadic wisdom tidbits, and switch to text based on what their bodies do best, rather than their intellectual aspiration.
From that point on, delightful treatment of body and verbal texts managed to portray the uniqueness of Tashach’s dance approach. There was so much bold wit in the Kama Sutra strictly technique class, or the oneon- one lecture demonstration in courting technique, Macho style, given by a petite female dancer, to name but a few funny, delectable pieces, obviously based on the dancers’ own experiences, but treated with exceptionally creative intricate choreography of refined instincts.