Guy Dolev
I am a practitioner and creator of dance, currently studying for a master's degree at the program for Cultural Studies in the Hebrew University. My theoretical interest as a scholar of culture and my current practice as a choreographer are both informed by a speculative conception of anaesthesia as a potential of choreography. Thus, through a glance at dance history, classical and modernist, as well as through somatic research in the studio, I follow a certain ideal of dance that is primarily a being-danced of a nonconscious being, a being-moved in a state of oblivion and muscle relaxation while absolutely controlled by another. Thus, the anaesthetized body joins a genealogy of figures, mainly puppets and automata, whose virtue is their absolute obedience to the choreographic commands given by their operator, be it a puppeteer, a technician, or an anaesthetist/surgeon.
The following photographs documented performances of “Anaesthesia,” which premiered at the 2021 Intimate Dance Festival at the Tmuna Theater (Dancer: Eden Kramer, artistic direction: Anat Katz and Erez Maayan-Shalev, photos: David Kaplan), and a solo work-in-progress, “Grotesque reconstruction experiments.”
