Choreographer Eyal Dadon seems to be able to do everything all at once. He holds positions as artistic director of his own company, as choreographer for companies all over the world, and as sound designer for his own and other choreographers’ projects. When we speak, he is working on a new ballet for Czech National Ballet, Katastrof. It is his second commission for the company following his highly successful Artza in 2022, which has been revived this season.
“I see how genuine communication is being lost,” Dadon says, describing the new piece Katastrof. “We’re all in a rush, there’s no time for anything. This is a catastrophe. An internal catastrophe that slowly reflects and projects itself onto us all. We live in a kind of organised mess. My piece is about doing things too fast, without really delving into the reality of the human condition. Sometimes you want to go slower, but the world is going fast, so you are not relevant anymore. We are becoming trapped in the society that we are building.”
“Society is advancing apace in many things, mainly technology,” Dadon expands, “and I feel that as humans, especially in the West, we are leaving aside our wellbeing. I was born in the 80s, so as a child there were no cell phones. As a teenager and in my 20s, we all began to have them.”
I’m curious how Dadon was first introduced to dance. “I’d always played football, tennis, I was in a judo class and karate. I liked to be active. Then, when I was 15 or 16 years old, I had two good friends from school who used to do Israeli folk dance, salsa and cha cha. They invited me to one of their shows. I fell in love with the movement and with the audience. I was fascinated by the collective nature of the performance. They looked so engaged and happy; it was obvious how much it meant to them. For me, that was a revelation.”
“I was really bad in the beginning,” he confesses, “but I invested my time afterwards to learn ballet, contemporary and many other styles. After I finished ballet school in the south of Israel, I got accepted into a company there, where I danced for two years.”
Later, Dadon saw Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company in his home town, Be’er Sheva. “Everybody was talking about it, saying how amazing they were,” he tells me. “I went to see the show, and I knew it was the company that I wanted to join! Since then, everything opened up for me, because I developed so much during my time there. The repertoire is very physical. The choreographer and artistic director, Rami Be’er, is very musical. He is a cellist. Those two things, physicality and musicality, felt like home.”
Music has always played an important part in Dadon’s life. He explains, “I started editing music myself and slowly, I started to blend that activity with being a dancer. There I was, editing music with Rami for his dance pieces! He recognised that I love to be creative and encouraged me to choreograph. He felt that I had something to offer in that field. I’m not sure I had ever thought about choreography. I wanted to dance, but when I started to work with dancers, I fell in love with fantasies, creation, working with people and creating a world on stage. It made me a better dancer.”
I tell him that several choreographers have spoken similarly about waking up as dancer through early experiences of choreography. He replies that as a dancer, one tends to think the work is about oneself – but in truth the piece is much larger than that. “So when you think about the work from the outside,” he says, “you can see how important it is to do your part in order to support the piece. You see the bigger picture and the community of dancers that you’re working in. Once you manage to do that, you become a better dancer. You work together as a group, your approach to the piece is much more mature, and then you can discover yourself as an artist.”
Later on, Dadon became a rehearsal director for the company and began to create more music. Today, he is the sound designer for KCDC, working with the same artistic director. “For 15 years,” he says, “Rami Be’er has been directing and mentoring me. When I’m choreographing elsewhere, if I don’t know something, he makes suggestions. Not just in terms of choreography, but how to have discussions with the costume department, to connect the dots with the other people involved. He has a lot of experience and we have a good relationship; he’s like a second father.”
I’m keen to know about how work is progressing on Katastrof. In Prague, Dadon is working with ballet dancers rather than contemporary. I ask whether that brings different aspects to the studio and whether his work changes according to the dancers he has in front of him. His answer is that there is a huge difference. “If I work with contemporary dancers or with my own company, the result will be very different in terms of movement. But in terms of devotion, it’s the same. I need to put myself in their bodies and then bring them to my body as well, so somehow we meet in between. It’s challenging me and them, which is fantastic, because we all grow.”
“I’m going to have so many dancers,” Dadon explains. “Two casts of 46 dancers! It’s the biggest production I have done. I’m actually terrified! I’m going to use an empty stage, highlighting the industrial feeling of the theatre, no wings, no walls. I’m using live instruments; I’m going to present it as if the dance is part of a concert; 12 musicians and singers as part of the cohort of dancers. It’s not going to be a ‘nice’ concert. They will represent society and the other dancers will react to whatever they do. It’s going to be a kind of sarcastic, cynical concert, but also very deep and dark.”
Extraordinarily, he is also responsible for the music. He tells me: “I designed the soundtrack, with my friend Gil Nemet, a phenomenal musician who will lead the piece. For me, it’s always the music that drives the movement. As a child I was always immersed in music. After I stopped dancing, I decided to take my music-making in a professional direction and studied music production for three years in Tel Aviv. I feel that it amplified my choreography. It gave me more tools; I’m not limited to music that is already in the world. If I imagine something in my mind, I can produce it.”
I’m interested to know how he finds working in other countries after spending many years working in Israel. “The reason I love dance is that it doesn’t matter where you are,” Dadon says. “You can be in Israel or Hawaii. The studio is timeless, it’s above all other reality, politics and everything. I’ve learned about that especially now. When the war started, for two months we couldn’t work, we weren’t allowed to go out. It wasn’t safe. For the first year, there were alarms every day. When we were finally allowed to go into the studio, we worked for five hours every day, and for those five hours you could forget about everything outside the studio. There was no war, there was only art and movement.
“I do think that the culture in Israel brings a different creativity, because you have such a mix of different people, religions, foods. That quality brings a lot of versatility, many tools and many colours to play with. It all helps the process. For instance, at the moment I’m working in Prague and we have people from Ukraine and Russia. In Israel, we have Palestinian people and Israeli people working at the same studio. So how come, when we share the movement inside the studio, we are friends, but outside the studio, with people who are not dancers, it’s a disaster, with so much fear.
“I truly believe that if everybody were dancing, we would have world peace at some point.”
Eyal Dadon’s Katastrof is performed by Czech National Ballet on 24th, 27th and 30th April at Prague National Theatre.
This article was sponsored by Prague National Theatre.
