Haaretz \ 15th November 2022. 

Almost everyone now talks in dance, but no one does it like Hillel Kogan 

By by Ran Brown, Dance critic

In most premieres this year in Curtain Up Festival, there is an incessant surge of speech. What causes this right now in Israel? One piece, THISISPAIN by Hillel Kogan, answered this question.

It seems that this year, the Curtain Up events under the artistic direction of Oded Graf and Dana Rotenberg, brought with them an incessant surge of talk on stage. The project featured works by Hillel Kogan, Avidan Ben Giat, Tami Yitzhakhi, Ofir Yodilevitz, Annabel Dvir, Rotem Weissman, Shaked Mokishin, Talia Beck, Anat Oz, Michal Herman and Anat Grigorio. In most of the premieres I watched, the dancers did not stop talking. They spoke about themselves, to the audience, with their image photographed and projected on the screen next to them; They confessed their heart wishes, their dreams, presented their sources of inspiration, the teachers they learned from. They talked seriously, jokingly, together and separately, and they sang. How beautifully they sang.

In the last century, the rebellion against modernism in the dance of creators in Europe and North America was also reflected in speech while dancing, which over time became the hallmark of choreographic experimentation. In the performances of collectives such as the Judson Dance Theater in New York and the Pina Bausch Dance Theater in Wuppertal, the dancers' voices took center stage. The blurring of the boundaries of the medium and the emergence of a new subjectivity, which until then was hidden from the eyes of the public, went hand in hand with a new democratic ethos, with cultural and political revolutions that changed the face of society in the second half of the 20th century.

Although today it is not unusual to hear dancers talking in a contemporary dance piece, the cumulative effect of listening to the dancers' voices at the Curtain Up events raises a question: why this inflation in Israel? Is this an empty gesture, a fashionable form of artistic experimentation or an expression of a deeper drive, the order of the hour, a resistance to the rising winds that threaten to erase the legacy of the 60s?

One piece answered this question in a complex way but also one that is not ambiguous: THISISPAIN by Hillel Kogan, a sharp and humorous piece, in which Kogan dances with the choreographer and flamenco dancer Michal Natan. In a brilliant move, Kogan weaves clichés about Spain, flamenco, Nationalism and identity wherever it is. Along with flamenco style dance parts that both of them perform in an astonishing manner, Kogan juggles his words with a speed that does not fall short of the rhythm of his feet, makes jokes and rushes forward without waiting for the audience to laugh. Sometimes he praises the Spaniards and sometimes he mocks them (and actually us), and all with the same degree of logic, supported by historical facts and subtle cultural diagnoses, which are intricately woven into his and Natan's stage conversation.

Kogan continues to portray himself in this work, as he has consistently done for the past decade in a series of duets in which he collaborates and converses on stage with other dancers and creators; In "We Love Arabs" (2013) he had a choreographic conversation with Adi Boutrous, in "The Swan and the Pimp" (2017) with Carmel Ben Asher, and in "What Now" (2019) with Sharon Zuckerman-Weiser. In all of them there is an attempt to find out closeness and distance, connection and disconnection, identity and foreignness.

In THISISPAIN too, the discourse is at the heart of the creation. In fact, flamenco itself can be described as a double and multiplied discourse. It is an ongoing cultural conversation between Gypsy and Andalusian heritage, and it is also an artistic form that emerges in real time from the dialogue between its three basic elements - singing, music and dance. When Natan dances, Kogan accompanies her in singing. When Kogan bursts into a monologue, Nathan gives him a strict musical framework (compass) through rhythmic hand claps. She counts in Spanish, he in Hebrew, he makes sure to deliver the text in a 12-beat rhythm, even when he sings Hebrew children' songs and Jewish nursery rhymes, obviously different from the original.

Kogan and Natan are experienced, charismatic and confident performers. Both of them are portrayed as not sharing with the spectators everything that is in their hands, as if their impressive control of movement, rhythm and voice is a trivial matter, as if it happens naturally, but as the performance continues, more and more of their virtuoso ability is revealed. Natan stomps her feet powerfully while her hands swing, sail, beat her hips, slows down for one moment and sweeps the audience with her in the next, eliciting cheers from him ("Ole!"). Kogan does good not only to dance and entertain the audience with his imaginative and witty texts, but also with thunderous and confident singing that for a moment resembles an ancient Jewish litugrical ode.

In THISISPAIN, the choreography is a fluid conversation between styles, between times and between cultures. The ways in which Kogan shapes it also have another, political meaning: choreography as a conversation allows viewers to also understand identity as a constant discourse, as an action in the making rather than as a finished, stable and fixed product. Thus, although Kogan praises the Spaniards for being "a culture of exclamation marks!", a culture where "macho is simply a definition of a male, neither liquid nor volatile" (and by the way alludes to the elusive identity of dance itself), In his solo, a hand movement becomes the typical flamenco hand movement, and from there it slides into a movement reminiscent of Pavlova's hands in "The Dying Swan" by Fokine, which then become a quote of Nijinsky's hands in "Afternoon of the Faun", and ends with the hands Jesus on the cross, leaning against the back wall. Kogan brings the obsessive compulsiveness of the culture on the issue of identity politics to the point of absurdity when he accompanies Natan's dance by singing the Jewish surnames that may entitle their bearers to a Spanish passport. (The Spanish Law from 2015 makes the acquisition of Spanish citizenship possible for the Sephardic Jews that are descendents of those Jewish families expelled from Spain in the 15th Century, without requiring residency in Spain). 

Along with the humor, the piece also contains gloom, as indicated by the inscription PAIN that is projected throughout the piece on the right side of the back wall of the stage. Death is also present-absent, appearing again in Kogan's words and in the imagined death of the bull that Kogan and Natan construct from flamenco dresses. At the end of the piece, Kogan stops talking and embodies gestures of intense human suffering, with his mouth wide open in terror. For a moment, in the dramatic lighting designed by Nadav Barnea, Kogan's naked upper body became particularly bright, in stark contrast to his black dress. The entire stage image becomes monochromatic and remarkably similar to Picasso's "Guernica", a stark reminder of the destruction wrought by a culture sickly preoccupied with identity. THISISPAIN illustrates how even in these murky days, "Even in the mud and scum of things", as the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "something always, always sings".

*Translated from the Hebrew source