Furo

About Furo

Furo — A dance installation
By Ohad Naharin and Tabaimo Sound

Design Ohad Fishof
Lightning Design Avi Yona Bueno “Bambi”
Technical Production Tomas Franck and Kenneth Björk
Costumes Rakefet Levy
Theatre Director and Artistic Manager Pia Forsgren

World premiere March 24 2006 at The Jewish Theatre.

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The Jewish Theatre was a laboratory for performance art. Each and every production was intentionally jeopardised by the wish to experiment and make new discoveries, both artistically and technically. At the time FURO was a completely new experiment. A meeting between dance, visual arts and music. A collaboration spanning three continents and countries: Japan, Israel and Sweden.

FURO grew out of The Jewish Theatre’s friendship with Ohad Naharin and his Batsheva Dance Company. For Ohad Naharin experimentation has also been a motivational force, making him one of the most important innovators of modern dance.

When Naharin saw the Japanese artist Tabaimo’s work “Japanese Bathhouse” in New York, he sought out the possibility to realise his idea of an unique encounter. In the course of many meetings, discussions and technical and artistic attempts together with The Jewish Theatre and Tabaimo, he created FURO based on “Japanese Bathhouse”.

The space is that of the theatre. The movment and music are from the realm of dance. The projected scenes are from video art. The fusion of art forms creates the potential for experiments also for the onlooker. For the first time, the audience at The Jewish Theatre was encouraged to behave as if they were at an art exhibition, to enter and leave the auditorium as they wished.

Is it a theatre gallery? Is it a dance installation? It’s FURO at The Jewish Theatre.

Dancers: Leo Larus-Anderson Braz / Matan David-Yoshifumi Inao / Guy Shomroni-Stefan Ferry / Gavriel Spitzer-Yaniv Abraham / Erez Zohar-Hillel Kogan / Matan Zamir-Hillel Kogan / Jussi Pekka Nousiainen-Asher Lev / Luc Jacobs-Ron Amit

Download the program (pdf, 1.77 MB)

Furo in Tel Aviv

2008 & 2012

Furo - a dance installation
By Ohad Naharin and Tabaimo

Sound Design Ohad Fishof
Lightning Design Avi Yona Bueno “Bambi”
Technical Production Tomas Franck and Kenneth Björck
Costumes Rakefet Levy
Theatre Director and Artistic Manager Pia Forsgren

FURO reopened in Tel Aviv New Harbor May 16, 2008

About Ohad Naharin

The choreographer Ohad Naharin (b 1952) was born and raised in Israel, where he trained as a musician until the age of 22, when he chose dance.

He was discovered in 1974 by Martha Graham, the first artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company, when she created the part of Esau for him in her work Jacob’s Dream. Graham invited Naharin to join her ensemble in New York. After a year with Graham, he went on to study at the Juilliard School of Music, under Maggie Black and David Howard. On graduating he was engaged for a short period by Les Ballets du XXe Siècle in Belgium and the Bat-Dor Company in Israel.

Ohad Naharin’s choreographic debut came in 1980 at the Kazuko Hirabayashi Studio, New York. The same year, he founded the Ohad Naharin Dance Company (1980- 1990). In 1981, Naharin created his first work for the Batsheva Dance Company, and in 1987 he was invited by Jirí Kylían to join the Nederlands Dans Teater in Holland, for which he wrote more than fifteen works until his departure in 1990.

He has been the artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company since 1990, with the exception of a one-and-a-half-year period in 2003-2005, when he was the Company’s in-house choreographer. Naharin has also developed his own technique, which he calls Gaga, and which is practised by the dancers at Batsheva.

Ohad Naharin made a guest appearance at the Jewish Theatre in 2000, when he put together the programme LOL, which included the works Two Short Stories, Off White and Ballads 1 & 2.

“Bafflingly original”

Review from Dagens Nyheter
March 26, 2006

Dance installation: Furo

Choreography: Ohad Naharin
Stage design, video: Tabaimo
Dance: Stefan Ferry, Erez Zohar, Hille Kogan and others
Venue: The Jewish Theatre

Someone pulls the plug out of the bathtub – soon the entire animated Japanese bathhouse world covering three enormous walls surrounding the space is overflowing.

Everything is swept away by the deluge. All that remains in the end is the white expanse of death on the three now scorchingly white walls. At the same time, the light goes out above the two dancers on either side of the video installation. I remain seated on a bench in the dark of the Jewish Theatre. This could have been the end of the dance installation “Furo”, the fruit of an equally odd and exceedingly original collaboration between a video artist and a choreographer, Japanese Tabaimo and Israeli Ohad Naharin.

But the end is merely the beginning. The next moment two new dancers walk in. Soon the animated bathhouse world starts rolling as the dancers climb onto two loudspeakers at one end of the room. And begin to dance, move, sing, scream, turn round and round. And thus, “Furo” continues, in ever new forty-five-minute loops, with small but significant changes. Meanwhile, the audience can come in, sit and watch, and leave as it likes at the Jewish Theatre, which is hosting this world premiere. This is the first time ever that Ohad Naharin has premiered a new work outside Israel. Naharin, one of the world’s leading choreographers, has also had a guest performance at Dansens Hus with his Batsheva Dance Company, with the critically acclaimed choreography “Naharin’s Virus”.

“Furo” is something totally different, however. But what? Animated live dance? “Furo” is its own genre, its own space. And this space is created by the young Japanese artist Tabaimo’s animation, Japanese Bathhouse. Tabaimo has obviously been inspired by Japanese woodcuts (we can even see Mount Fuji à la Hokusai in the distance). But she also borrows candidly from the dream-like, sometimes nightmarish phantasmagoria of contemporary manga. For instance when an already nude man pulls down a zipper on his back, takes off his skin costume, only to discover a new skin costume, which he also steps out of. And suddenly he is gone.

Tabaimo’s bathhouse animation is beguilingly beautiful – a good enough reason in itself to see “Furo” – and strongly evocative, partly through the shift in perspective caused by the middle wall’s animations not quite fitting in with those on the side walls. There is a gap, a black hole in space, in time. In that hole, the dancers (from Batsheva) take their stand, each perched on a loudspeaker, outside, alongside, Tabaimo’s stage. Like two pillar saints or striptease dancers they move on a surface of one square metre. Seductively lovesick, spastically, deliciously contorted, all in the style of Naharin’s surprising, impulsive choreographic language.

But there is also an ominous and claustrophobic quality (which also permeates Tabaimo’s animation), as if the dancers were trying to formulate an abysmal physical pain. The dancers are captives, of the loudspeakers in the space, of time, of their own flesh. The sheer mass of flesh and the corporeal weight are enhanced by Tabaimo’s two- and three-dimensional installation.

“Furo’s” fusion of two such disparate artistic worlds is precarious. But most of all, it is challenging, fascinating, perplexing. I have an espresso in the foyer. Reflect. Sneak back into the darkness of “Furo” again. New dancers in place. It feels familiar, and yet not.

No answers. New questions.

By Örjan Abrahamsson

“Innovative voyage worth repeating”

Review from Svenska Dagbladet
March 26, 2006

Dance installation

FURO
The Jewish Theatre
by Ohad Naharin and Tabaimo

Sometimes it feels like you’ve seen “everything”; art is like plagiary loops. And then the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin & Co come to town, and your eyes are cleansed. this week, Naharin’s virus infected Dansens Hus. And in May, his innovative spirit will float into the Jewish Theatre, with Furo, a fearless experiment that combines visual art, dance and music.

Perhaps it doesn’t sound all that original, but it proves to be a multi-faceted idea about space, repetition, change and not least, sensual physical perception. The audience can come and go during the hours the performance lasts. Every 45 minutes, it starts from the beginning, but with two new dancers and more and more yellow plastic bowls on the stage.

Furo means – if you add an ‘o’ at the beginning – bath in Japanese. The artist Tabaimo (Ayako Tabata) has created an animated video work which stretches across three walls. From different perspectives (bird, fish or in between) and with Ohad Fishof’s sound (mumbling voices, meditative harmonies, water, footsteps) we are transported to an atmosphere laden with tradition, a Japanese bathhouse.

The aesthetic of the manga animations is similar to Hokusai’s woodcuts from the early 19th century, not least because Mount Fuji appears in the background. But they also contain bizarre and threatening details, as when two sumo wrestlers stomp in and one of them is reduced by a sucking kiss, like a punctured balloon. In the pool, which overflows with all the bodies that jump into it, some are still wearing suits. One man takes off layer upon layer of skin. Black birds fill the visual plane, which is dissolved. These beautiful but ambiguous images are repeated, with some of the sequences extended.

The two male dancers are most of the time on either side of the visual space, like reflected moving statues on rotatable platforms. The choreography relates fairly freely to the flow of images but alternates the physical expression between jerky “comic strip characters” to “go- go dancers”, depending on the music. Many of us move in time to the techno beats.

The dancers’ oscillation between minimal gesturing, and introverted or ironic posing is a form of play with identity, but the setting and firm structures give a ritualistic and constrained air to it all – like when they rotate with arms dangling to Turbonegro’s rabid All My Friends are Dead. After a few loops with different couples, you nevertheless discern individual differences: in gazes, dynamics and facial expressions.