I’ve seen quite a bit of dance since I have been in Jerusalem. Most of it has been by young emerging artists such as Iris Erez, Maya Brinner, Maya Weinberg to name a few. It has also not been what I expected. What Israel exports to the world often has been the big theatrical and full throttled dance of Batsheva and the work of Ohad Naharin, Isik Galili, and Emanuael Gat. The work from these emerging artists, however, for the most part is the opposite. It often appears small in scale, myopic, bleak, very cerebral, minimal in its movement value, and unfathomably deep. There is a sameness about much of it, much like the Bauhaus International style of the buildings in Tel Aviv the city where I believe most of this dance is originating. At a recent performance I attended, it occurred to me that if I didn’t know better I would have thought that it was all the work of a single artist rather than three different choreographers. This was very disappointing especially since one of the choreographers presenting a new piece that I was excited to see was Iris Erez whose Homesick I had admired in an earlier performance.

However, there was one performance I attended that was truly surprising and definitely not disappointing, Ka’et Ensemble. This is a group of orthodox Jewish male non-professional dancers. They brought a level of honesty and earnestness to their performance that I rarely see on the professional dance stage. There was neither a hint of the professional dance post-modern irony, nor 21st Century apocalyptic jitters, nor amateurish smiley cutesiness. It was spirited, spiritual and full of a radiant joy, as only true believers seem to posses, (religious and artistic). And their joy was contagious. I caught a glimpse of a few of the ‘dancers’ their faces washed in the after glow of their performance speaking with friends and relatives after the performance, and their joy was projected on to and reflected back on the faces of those who had experienced the performance and to whom they were now speaking. Their joy was not a ‘look I’m dancing’ joy or the community center’s dance troupe’s proudness (maybe a tad) but something much deeper and profound. It was transcendent with a touch of the holy, the spirit elevated. It was beautiful!

This is a kind of religious dance, I think (but it is also serious and rigorous choreography that any contemporary dance company could conceivably perform). It seems to me that what Ronen Izhaki (choreographer), his music/sound collaborator Emmanuel Witzthum along with these men has done is to create a form of ‘charismatic’ modern orthodox body based prayer, especially with the piece Highway # 1.

I use the term charismatic (this maybe is a mistake and might open me up to all sorts of attack); perhaps, Jewish ecstatic body prayer might be a better term. I say this because the outward display of passion in their work brings to mind, while clearly not the same thing, those in charismatic Christianity. Ka’et (a Hebrew acronym that means “timely”) is to my thinking especially ‘timely’ at this particular period in Jerusalem’s artistic and cultural life given the exodus of young thinkers and artists to Tel Aviv. While Tel Aviv, a modern secular Mediterranean city clearly looks to Europe and the West for it aesthetic affinities, Jerusalem a venerated religious site and a contentious political capital is Middle Eastern in its sensibilities. One wonders then at how its art should be or how it should speak here. I am reminded of Dvořák’s (the 19^th Century Czech composer famously know for his Symphony No. 9 in E Minor “From the New World”) newspaper articles reflecting on the state of American music. He conjectured that African-American and Native American music should be used as a foundation for the growth of American music and only through the ‘native music’ would Americans find their own national style of music. In Jerusalem the ‘native musics’ are religion and politics so it is only fitting that the dance here at its most authentic should be manifest with religious and/or political signifiers. Ka’et is indeed timely, truly of this place Jerusalem and that for me is why it succeeds.