A Memo (Unstoppable)

As our bodies and brains got used to the idea of intense rehearsal for 3 hours a week, Evgenia had to contend with a series of dancers’ injuries, including hospitalization, brains that didn’t retain movement sequences from one week to the next, and dancers who hadn’t worked together as a group before.

Interestingly, because we are all of a certain age, there are often massive events happening in people’s lives between one rehearsal and the next, including births of grandchildren, deaths of parents, weddings of children, graduations, selling of houses....and other major milestones requiring huge emotional input. It is amazing that dancers make it to rehearsal, and
have enough brain cells left to remember whether we started on the left foot or the right.

Evgenia has an expansive style. Her long limbs envelop space easily. She created movement on her own body and encouraged us to find extra length in our own limbs to enfold the space. At times she asked us to create our own movement based on memories of family interactions. Sometimes these movements were literal, like playing cricket or posing for a family photo, sometimes they were more abstract, like a sense of support provided by a mother’s arms.

Evgenia was born in Belarus under the cloud of the Chernobyl disaster. As an only child, born in troubled times, she has a very powerful relationship with her parents. A Memo tries to capture the strong bonds of trust, caring and support that exist in the relationship between parents and their children. Coincidentally, Evgenia was living in Israel and gave birth to her first child on the eve of this performance.