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Memory and farewell are the central themes in this personal solo performance by Keren Levi. In contrast to most of her other pieces Levi has taken autobiographical material as the starting point. She navigates in between dance and storytelling in a solo piece which she creates and performs herself. She brings to life a multi-faceted and almost, but not quite, gossipy portrait of intimacy and distance within a family. The audience takes a peek in her secret diary and is invited to reflect on the loss of previous generations.

Keren Levi has been working on a series of solo performances called Departing Landscapes since 2018. THERE SHE IS is the most recent incarnation of this work. Departing Landscapes is a work in permanent progress, a wet canvas on which Levi reworks, sculpts, reinterprets, erases, applies and refines the same idea. The piece evolves along with her and becomes richer and more layered because of the time, attention and care she puts into it. For this series Levi asked long-term collaborators dramaturge Igor Dobričić and composer Tom Parkinson to join her on this very personal inquiry.

Dramaturgical reference

Overwhelmed by desperation while attempting to escape Nazi prosecution, on September, 26th 1940, Walter Benjamin ended his life at the border crossing between France and Germany, by injecting himself with an overdose of morphine. On the flip side of his final performance of the self which embraced death as a vanishing point of an intellectual project, stands the magnificent metaphor of the Angel of History as described in Benjamin’s enigmatic text: Thesis for the Philosophy of History. I am sourcing my dispositive about disappearance, memory and personal redemption from this amalgamation of personal destiny and philosophical imagination. By hybridizing it with a notion of an angelic (diva) body and Morton Feldman's composition Triadic Memories (from whom I am borrowed the title of the solo series), I aim to create a symbolic gesture for what is forever lost and yet always in a process of being recovered, redeemed in an act of remembering.

Departing Landscapes

This term comes from a quote by composer Morton Feldman, one of the sources of inspiration for this work:

“The attack of a sound is not its character... Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing — leaving us rather than coming towards us. “

In deze persoonlijke solo van Keren Levi staat afscheid nemen centraal. In tegenstelling tot veel van haar andere voorstellingen werkt Levi ditmaal met autobiografisch materiaal. Ze switcht tussen verhalen en dans in een solostuk dat ze zelf heeft gecreëerd en uitvoert. Op het randje van roddelpraat schetst Levi een geschakeerd beeld van intimiteit en afstand binnen haar familie. De toeschouwer leest als ware in haar geheime dagboek en wordt uitgenodigd te reflecteren over het verlies en afscheid van vorige generaties.

Vanaf 2018 werkt Keren Levi aan een serie solo’s onder de naam Departing Landscapes, waarvan THERE SHE IS de huidige versie is. Departing Landscapes is als een nat schildersdoek, waarop Levi steeds hetzelfde idee opnieuw herinterpreteert, aanschept, uitwist, aanbrengt en verfijnt. Het groeit met haar mee en wordt door de tijd, aandacht en liefde die zij over een langere periode in het stuk steekt steeds rijker en gelaagder. Voor deze serie werken vroeg Levi dramaturg Igor Dobričić en componist Tom Parkinson waarmee zij al jaren samenwerkt, om mede vorm te geven aan deze persoonlijke zoektocht.

Departing Landscapes
Deze term komt uit een quote van componist Morton Feldman, een van de inspiratiebronnen van Keren Levi’s werk: “The attack of a sound is not its character... Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing — leaving us rather than coming towards us. “ (Morton Feldman)