Choreographer Barak Marshall is making his way back to L.A., following two back-to-back performances of “Rooster,” his new work recently performed as part of the Tel Aviv Dance Festival at Tel Aviv’s Opera House. The cast includes opera signer Lilia Gerzova, his mother, dancer Margalit Oved and the Suzanne Dellal dancers, including two from the L.A. Jewish Federation’s L.A.-Tel Aviv Partnership choreography master class this past summer.
“It was really great,” said Marshall. “The master class is a very intensive screening opportunity and it allowed me to work out certain pieces over a period of time.”
The master class that Marshall has long been a part of is Bridge – Choreographic Dialogues, an exchange program through the Jewish Federation’s Los Angeles-Tel Aviv Partnership, bringing choreographers from Los Angeles to Israel and Israeli choreographers to UCLA – in the spring — to conduct two-week intensive workshops in each city. Now in its third year, the aim of the two-week master class is to foster a connection between dancers and choreographers in Los Angeles and Israel and to understand the role of dance in Israeli society.
Bridge is a joint project of the Partnership, in cooperation with the Suzanne Dellal Centre, the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance and Department of World Arts and Cultures, with the support of the dance department of Israel’s Ministry of Culture and Sport and the U.S. Embassy.
This past summer’s workshops brought from UCLA hip-hop teacher Jackie Lopez, also known as Miss Funk in the high energy world of hip-hop and choreographer Sheetal Ghandi, who had already been to the workshop before at the invitation of Marshall.
Lopez taught ‘house’ hip-hop in the workshop, an energetic fusion of salsa, mambo, rumba and jazz, while Indian choreographer Sheetal Gandhi was teaching her students Kathak, a classical North Indian form of dance.
But it was two of Marshall’s students that made it into Rooster, A series of overlapping myths and stories about the Middle East experience. According to Marshall in an interview with Ayelet Dekel, the literary influences in the work are powerfully balanced with his intensely physical choreography, nurtured in a rich cultural context. Marshall told Dekel that he is thankful that he was raised with an appreciation for the richness and resources of his own Mizrahi culture, and is getting his dancers to “move ethnic.”
