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ITZIK GALILI, choreographer

The work:

Galili’s work is striking in its ability to explore dance in a wide range of viewpoints, bypass our consciousness and stir our inner feelings. Weaving dreams and reality, past and present, Galili invites the audience to reflect about what remains hidden behind reality. He combines expressive movements with powerful or poetic images, often created by his own lighting designs, and transforms his experience and perception of the world into a performance that is universal and human. His constant and intensive research into the interaction of movements with texts, projected or spoken - as in the solo piece Little Tiny Bite - makes him a very unique choreographer on the international scene. Galili’s movement vocabulary is very energetic, sometimes even acrobatic. But he is not only interested in the physical possibilities of the dancers. With very subtle, meaningful gestures, he is able to communicate an expression or a change in relationship between people. He combines fear and power, loneliness and comfort, cruelty and tenderness, seriousness and humor, struggle and happiness, emotions and abstraction – not as contradictions, but as possibilities. He challenges the dancers to go beyond their borders by acting, using their voices, using their bodies as percussion instruments, playing instruments they have never played before, and by questioning them on what they think about their own possibilities as dancers and as human beings, pushing them to be creative individuals and independent thinkers. Furthermore, Galili is keen to nurture upcoming choreographic talent.

The Choreographer:

“When the body will open its mouth and will say the words he comes from, I will embrace him and I will let him rest at my side.”

“Every art form is religious in a way, a ritual. To erase religion is only an intellectual statement. But on stage, it becomes a necessary and automatic commitment to live the moment. My work is an intimate ritual, a mirror that offers just what we already carry within us. For 25 years, I engrave myself into the world. Conscious and terrified, I realize my life. I study. The study is: to turn away from the study. The years follow unanswered. It is crucial to find nothing. I experience being invaded by a stream, a vein of underground rivers that appear and disappear. I wear my pieces inside of me. A movement made of air and body. A dance. The dancers are a gold mine, the colors, a reflection of my limits, of what and I cannot see. Each of them brings a different element in the creative process, made of body and soul, far beyond what is expected of a traditional knowledge of a dancer. The work becomes themselves, and with it, the requirement of a rich range of movements, obvious, the differences in interpretation, essential. To develop with them the scales of thought is to look beyond the mental limit. They push me to become the best of me, and prevent me from becoming a shadow of someone else. The body becomes a politic body, a time bomb because driven by the need to move forward, ignoring the time limitation. Aging…”

Itzik Galili

Biographical details:

Born in Israel, Itzik Galili danced in Bat-Dor Dance Company, Batsheva II, and in Batsheva Dance Company, where he started choreographing. Robert Cohan, artistic advisor for the Batsheva Dance Company and artistic director of The London Contemporary Dance Company, encouraged him to attend the Gulbenkian International Course for Professional Composers and Choreographers in the UK. In 1990, Old Cartoon won the originality prize at the Gvanim Choreographic Competition. In 1991, Galili moved to The Netherlands, and formed his own project-based company in Amsterdam. His controversial piece The Butterfly Effect won the Public Prize at the International Competition for Choreographers in Groningen and became his breakthrough piece that earned him international recognition. In 1997, the ministry of culture appointed him as Artistic Director of a newly founded dance company in Groningen: NND/Galili Dance which, under Galili’s direction for more than 11 years, made a name for itself, putting not only the city but also the region of Groningen, Drenthe and Friesland on the dance map. In 1998 and 2001, Galili directed the Groningen International Competition for Choreographers. In 2009, Galili returned to Amsterdam as the co-founder and artistic director of a contemporary dance company, representative for the city of Amsterdam, Dansgroep Amsterdam. Since 2011, Galili is a guest choreographer on the international dance scene.

Collaborations:

•Dance films for television including A Sense of Gravity (2002 commission for BBC2 – UK) and Come Across (1996 commission for NPS – Nederland).

•Opera production of Prince Igor directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, with The Polovtsian Dances at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

•Grand Show with Berlin it is for the production THE WYLD at the Friedrichstadt-Palast (2014).

Awards:

In 1994, Galili won the Final Selection Culture Award (Phillip Morris), for exceptional talent and contribution to Dutch culture. He is a recipient of the Choreography Prize of the Dutch Association of Theatre and Music Hall Directors for his contribution to the Dutch dance field.

On April 2006, Itzik Galili was made a Knight in the Royal Order of The House of Oranje Nassau by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for his contribution to Dutch dance.

In 2009, his work A Linha Curva (created for Balé da Cidade de São Paulo) premiered by Rambert Dance Company at Sadler’s Wells, was nominated for 3 awards in the UK: Knights of Illumination (for Lighting Design), Critics’ Circle (for Best Modern Choreography), Laurence Olivier (for Best New Production).

Works by Itzik Galili:

As well as creating for his own dancers, Galili has created for and worked with many other companies, establishing himself as an important choreographic voice:

Stuttgart Ballet, Ballets de Monte Carlo, Bayerisches Staatsoper Munich, Gulbenkian Ballet, Scapino Ballet, NDT II, Batsheva Dance Company, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Finnish National Ballet, Bale da Cidade de Sao Paulo, Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Norrdans, Rambert Dance Company, National Dance Company Wales, Koresh Dance Company, Cisne Negro, Ballett Kiel, Ballet British Columbia, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Het Nationale Ballet, Holland Dance Festival, Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, Staasballet Berlin, English National Ballet, Danish Dance Theatre, Ballet de l’ Opéra National de Bordeaux, West Australian Ballet, Metropolitan Opera…

During the Season 2015-16, a Galili full-length evening production, Man of the Hour, will be premiered in Israel, and will be touring in Russia, The Netherlands and other European countries.

Galili’s work will also be performed by the following companies: Compañia Nacional de Danza, Dantzaz Konpainia, SPAIN • Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, Stuttgart Ballet, Ballett Dortmund, Gauthier Dance, GERMANY  • Phoenix Dance Theatre, Rambert Dance Company, UK • Ballets Jazz Montreal, CANADA •  Ballett Basel, ZWITZERLAND •  Balé da Cidade, BRAZIL • Kamea Dance Company, ISRAEL • Balletto Teatro di Torino, ITALY

To date, Galili has built an oeuvre of more than 80 works showing a pioneering diversity, among them:

Old Cartoon (1990) • The Butterfly Effect (1991) • Earth Apples (1992) • When You See God... Tell Him (1993) • Ma’s Bandage (1994) • Through Nana’s Eyes (1995)  • Chronocratie (1996)  • Fragile (1997)  • Until.With/Out. Enough (1997) • Chameleon (1998)  • The Drunken Garden (1999)  • Things I Told Nobody (2000)  • For Heaven’s Sake (2001) • See Under X - new production (2003)  • Mono Lisa (2003) • Peeled (2004) • Hikarizatto (2004)  • A Linha Curva (2005)  • six (2007)  • SUB (2009)  • Or (2010) • Little Tiny Bite (2010) • Bullet Proof Mama (2010) • The Grammar of Silence (2012)  • The Open Square (2012) • Somb-risa (2012) • And The Earth Shall Bear Again (2012) • Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (2013) • O Balcão de Amor • The Chambers of a Heart (2014) •