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Dance Reviews : Little Depth in Israel’s Eilat Company Program

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Eilat is a seaport in Israel where Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia meet. It is, according to the mayor’s published description, “a resort town, a tourist town.”

So it was not surprising--though it was depressing--to see the Eilat Dance Company offering only glitzy choreography suitable for nightclubbing tourists when the company made its first appearance Thursday in Eilat’s sister city of Los Angeles.

The 24-member company is made up of amateurs, including students, military men and hotel workers. Amos Kav has created strings of simple folk-like steps and patterns for them that individually seemed easy but changed so frequently (every two or four measures) that the dancers never looked particularly at ease.

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So for all the energy and pasted-on smiles, the dancers rarely seemed secure enough to be enjoying themselves at Royce Hall, UCLA.

Kav’s choreography included lots of little hops, side-swivels, leg lifts and shoulder shakes executed in lines, circles and, particularly, boxy unison phalanxes. Assembled in interchangeable pieces, the theatricalized dances only sketchily depicted, among other subjects, a Moroccan Jewish fertility ritual, a drama of fishermen leaving and returning to their wives, a wine festival dance, and, worst of all, a Hasidic Dance that trashed its rich religious source--exalting dance as ecstatic worship of God--with empty reaching gestures.

With their recycled choreographic ideas, the dances primarily differed from one another in the bright but not-always-attractive costumes and in the over-amplified music played by a pop band.

None of this seemed to matter much to the small, sympathetic audience, which needed little prodding from vocalist Romi Halachmi before clapping or singing along with several of her songs. Indeed, at the end of the program, a group of high-school-age students stood and swayed as Halachmi sang reprise after reprise of “Haleluya.”

Admittedly, Kav and company founder Ofira Navon (a former first lady of Israel) have set themselves the difficult and lofty task of virtually creating a new national folklore for a country that is celebrating only its 40th anniversary this year. But their apparent prohibition against anything that isn’t relentlessly upbeat doesn’t seem to promise much depth in the venture.

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