CIRCLES OF LUST
That sense of one form refreshing and invigorating another is what made Circles of Lust, performed by the Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal Company, so effective. This group of eight dancers and two musicians–the first troupe to appear in a two-week “Festival of Israeli Dance”–brought theater, music, and dance together in the most natural way. Natural, but not easy or pleasant: this dance is at once exhilarating, horrible, and true. Though it’s not overtly political, it embraces conflict–without endorsing it–in a way that could perhaps come only from a country that lives with violent dissension every day.
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Dror and Ben Gal, who are married, jointly choreographed Circles of Lust, which addresses the relations between men and women. The dancers are divided into four couples, two of whom are feuding and interrupt the dancing with their verbal and physical quarrels. The stage almost seems set up for a party, with a semicircle of ten folding stools covered in red velvet, a grand piano behind them, and a cart filled with glasses and bottles center stage rear. These glasses regularly get broken–first by “accident,” then on purpose; and finally the dancers systematically smash a whole tray of them to the floor.
Later sections erase such distinctions. Four men, tossing a glass from one to another, play keep away from a woman. Two women perform a blatantly “sexy” dance while two men, mesmerized, eye them greedily (then the men and women reverse roles). Three couples slow dance in a deeply sexual embrace, partnering each other in a droopy slow motion: the men, their backs to us, pick up the women, who wrap their legs around the men’s thighs (later the women hold the men). A man tries to make up with a woman: both are seated and he leans toward her avidly while she pulls her head away, exposing her neck to him in a gesture at once inviting and cold.
