International Exposure at Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theater Tel Aviv

Review by Talia Baruch

For a youngling, taking refuge between the walls of the Suzanne Dellal studios, my console-for-the-sole feeding center, it feels good, more than good, to now pace across the stone square, 20 years later. Early December rain has soaked the cement; whiffs of lamb-stuffed figs and nutmeg-pumpkin soup flutter out of Suzanna, the little corner comfort restaurant, and linger in the air like a thick rain cloud.

The Suzanne Dellal Center was inaugurated in 1989 by the Dellal family in London and is situated smack-bang at the heart of Neve Tzedek, on the coastal seam line between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Neve Tzedek was the first Jewish neighborhood, founded in 1887 by Aharon Chelouche, 22 years before Tel Aviv was born. This is where poets, such as Shmuel Agnon and Haim Brenner, created; where salty sailors drew in fresh fish from the sea; where little children ran barefoot in narrow stone alleys. Today, this is a cultural oasis, where urban pulse thumps steady, and Suzanne Dellal is the beating Bongo, attracting a medley of visitors to its performance offerings.

The center is a permanent residence for the Batsheva Dance Company, Batsheva Ensemble and Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollak Dance Company. It is also a place where all dance composers in Israel call home. Its four-performance-hall complex surround a square for outdoor performing arts that also functions as a vibrant town-center for the community, blending with the old-city scenery, palm trees and citrus growing lush all around.

International Exposure is an annual festival drawing Arts Representatives and Dance Writers from the global community to witness, first hand, the latest, original, Made-in-Israel dance work. Dec. 2009 marked International Exposure’s fifteenth anniversary and it showcased the work of twenty-seven notable choreographers, who form the building blocks of contemporary dance in this forever quivering, stirring land.

I have captured just a modest sampler of what went on during this festival in the three teaser appetizers listed below. Bon Appétit!