– Shai Faran – Jan 2022
I am writing this blog post after already finishing my residency at Lake Studio.
i was hoping to write here while having the residency, but there is actually something nice in documenting a month of residency from the end of it, rather then from the beginning.
so my name is Shai, i’m a dancer, dance teacher and choreographer, originally from Israel and living in Berlin for the past 8 (or so) years.
In Israel, I danced for the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company and in some projects, but soon after I started to feel the need to be exposed to new information and moved to Europe, where I expended my knowledge and started to develop my research, practice and methods of teaching and creating.
I have worked with different choreographers such as Maya M.Caroll, Yuval Pick, Maura Morales Alessandro Sciarroni David Hernandez, Martin Kilvady and more, performed around Europe and taught in different frames for professional dancers and high education programs around Europe while developing my own work as well.
this residency was about taking the solo i created last year- “It’s About Time” and making a digital version of it. I started by revisiting the solo, in the space where i actually premiered it, this summer.
the space was inviting, and the solo as well.
this time allowed me to dive deeper into it, discover and unfold more things that were hidden under the layers that i didn’t even know i put in it. this time brought me back to the place where i created it- Iceland. every time i start the piece, i can see in my mind’s eye the mountains, i can feel the cold air in my lungs, i can hear the silence. i can sense the timelessness of the time, the feeling the things never end, they just continue.
something that was very precious and meaningful for me while creating the piece was the fact that i didn’t need to explain it to anyone. after many years of having teaching as my main filter of thought, there was such a liberty in knowing that i don’t have to pass this information on or teach it to someone else. even writing notes to myself felt sometimes limiting, as the sensations were clearer then words.
images and ideas to became sensations and sensations became movement qualities.
towards the end of the month we were filming. how to capture all that in a flat, 2 dimentional screen? how can i bring all that depth, richness, wilderness into the studio, into the camera, into the heart.
how can i go back to that experience again and again and bring the timelessness with me?
during that month, almost every morning i used this song to warm up, its called “who knows where the time goes”:
this month was so intense. so much had to happen and so much happened. and even though i did my best, time still slipped somehow. by the end of the month i told my boyfriend that i feel a bit stupid, that after all this time of being busy with this topic i still don’t manage to figure it out. i still don’t understand time. it changes, it disappears, it slows down, it passes…
