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Fourth Year: Rachel Tess on Zvi Gotheiner By RACHEL TESS
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| Zvi Gotheiner (seated) looks on as Rachel Tess (foreground) and Sebastian Gehrke and Mark Burrell (in mirror) rehearse. (Photo by Rosalie O’Connor) |
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Benjamin Harkarvy, who directed Juilliard's Dance Division from 1992 until his death in March 2002, once said of the class of 2004 that, if you put us in a room together for too long, we would make each other bounce. Our unusual group dynamic often resulted in a bit of chaos during our freshman year in class and rehearsals. In a nod toward our uneasy beginnings, we considered the name "Looney Tunes" for our upcoming senior production T-shirt logo. So, what happens when you put 18 separate identities with zany personalities in one room with a choreographer and ask him to make a group piece?
By their senior year, Juilliard dancers are equipped with the knowledge to assimilate many different types of movement. Along the way, our personal tastes, movement qualities, and processes that might not jibe so easily have evolved. One person is inspired by choreographer Ohad Naharin, another by William Forsythe, Lar Lubovitch, Robert Battle, or José Limón—choreographers with extremely different approaches. Israeli-born, New York-based choreographer and teacher Zvi Gotheiner embraces this. He acknowledges what he calls a "less than cohesive group of people" and is using this characteristic to his advantage in creating a commissioned piece for the upcoming December concert series. In fact, he doesn't mind if we bounce off of each other, maintaining that some of the most beautiful choreography can result from mistakes, collisions, and how the dancers enter and exit them.
Zvi Gotheiner began his artistic career as a violinist with the young Kibbutzim Orchestra, where he became soloist and concertmaster at the age of 15. This early talent for music is clear in his detailed use of Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2. In his Juilliard commission (tentatively titled Easy for You to Say), Zvi is attempting to create what Shostakovitch might have envisioned choreographically. He pairs rhythmically complex and technical movement phrases with an unusual recording, subject in this instance to the will of the conductor, swelling and quickening in unpredictable ways. We are required to literally sing, speak, and dance the music, challenging nearly every skill we have learned in our four years at Juilliard.
Gotheiner once said, in his Saturday-morning ballet class at City Center, that a dance studio is comparable to a chemistry lab, a place of experimentation with room for "trial and error." In rehearsal, he pushes us as dancers to "investigate the material, to find our own unique way of moving within it." He challenges himself to find the magical moments we create through this process, searching for the sense of humanity integral to his works.
About a month away from the performance, we still collide in rehearsal. We are not always sure of the music, the correct arm, the initiation of a body part, or the dramatic motive. Nevertheless, the experience is an exciting one. Zvi likens the piece to a "tapestry that becomes livelier and livelier," as new elements reveal themselves. When asked if he is worried, his reply is no. He expresses his excitement at being in a room with so many extraordinary dancers, and enjoys the challenge of bringing us together in one of our final group offerings at Juilliard.
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