Contemporary Dance and Movement Workshop for professional dancers with the Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group at Sentralen

The workshop is free to attend, but tickets must be reserved. 

The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group will introduce the participants to the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN) system.

The open contemporary dance and movement workshop offer the opportunity to experience the various layers involved when working with the notation system, from striving to embody the movements of EWMN to expressing the poetic dimensions of Noa Eshkol’s compositions.

For Noa Eshkol (1924-2007), dance was a pure art form, in and for itself, to be practiced without scenery, costumes, or music. She treated the parts of the body as separate instruments, not unlike the musical instruments of an orchestra, each with its own rules of movement. Her compositions rely on seriality, as well as on the polyphonic forms of canon, fugue, and so on. She used these forms to create polyphony between various parts of each dancer’s body and between the dancers as a group. Her profound understanding of the body, commitment to compositional method, and inexhaustible creativity resulted in unique, complex, and extremely beautiful masterpieces.

Eshkol formed the Chamber Dance Group in 1954. Today, Racheli Nul-Kahana guide the Group. The workshop will be led by veteran dancers from the Group who worked with Eshkol for many years, as well as new members: Racheli Nul-Kahana, Mor Bashan, Noga Goral og Dror Shoval.

Racheli Nul-Kahana, a 1963 graduate of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, has been a senior dancer in the Group since the 1960s; she presently teaches movement and movement notation in the Movement and Dance Department of Seminar HaKibbutzim College of Education. Mor Bashan, a graduate of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, joined the Group in 2008. Noga Goral, a graduate of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, also joined the Group in 2008. Dror Shoval a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, joined the Group in 2015. 

The workshop is arranged in connection with the exhibition Noa Eshkol: Rules, Theory & Passion. The exhibition was first shown at Oslo Kunstforening 28.08 - 07.11.2021 and is shown in an extended version at Norrköpings Konstmuseum 26.03 - 02.10.2022. The exhibition is the first major retrospective of Noa Eshkol (1924-2007) in the Nordic countries. The exhibition covers Noa Eshkol’s entire life and oeuvre; her wealth of research, theory development, studies into language comprehension, textile art and movement notation. The exhibition also includes works by contemporary artists inspired by Eshkol’s practice; Sharon Lockhart, Yael Bartana and Omer Krieger. 

Noa Eshkol: Rules, Theory & Passion is produced by Oslo Kunstforening, Norrköping Art Museum and Jewish Culture in Sweden, with additional support from Artis. The exhibition is curated by Marianne Hultman and Helena Scragg. Program curator is Lizzie Oved Scheja. The Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation, Holon and Galerie neugerriemschneider Berlin are partners and lenders.

The workshop is arranged in collaboration between Oslo Kunstforening, Norrköping Art Museum, Dans i Öst, Region Östergötland and the Ultima Festival 2022.