Will you dance for me
Gersht, Ori (2011) Will you dance for me. [Film, Photography]
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This film depicts an 85-year-old dancer, Yeudith Arnon, rocking back and forth in a chair, slowly recounting her experiences as a young woman in Auschwitz. Her punishment for refusing to dance at an SS officer's party was to stand barefoot in the snow, and she pledged that if she survived she would dedicate her life to dance. In 1962, she created the Kibbutzim Dance Company and became internationally renowned for her dancing and choreography. Now she no longer dances, but in the rocking chair she can dance one more time. Will You Dance For Me is constructed from a specific, pre-existing personal narrative. The viewer is encouraged to feel both the absence and presence of Arnon's dance within the cadence of her rocking chair. She moves backwards and forwards meditatively, drifting in and out of focus, fading completely from the darkness as snow begins to fall; eventually the rhythmic falling of snow replaces the rhythmic rocking, giving way to a virginal, white landscape.
The film was produced in Israel and Ukraine, in association with Photoworks and CRG Gallery, New York, Mummery & Schnelle Gallery, London, Angles Gallery, Los Angeles and Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv.
The related publication is presented in a case containing three books, each focusing on one film, plus a paper insert with an essay by Robert Rowland Smith. These books use the films as a starting point to a journey juxtaposing my own work with paintings and images from diverse films and other visual sources. The juxtaposition was not to be hierarchical: all the images were treated equally and edited into flowing sequences. The intention was to set up a dialectic that does not attempt to illustrate but to create an independent experience that is more complex conceptually, as well as visually, than a film alone.
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