In the 12 years since choreographers Anat Katz and Dr. Erez Maayan Shalev premiered their dance According to Law, nearly everything has changed: their family status, their professional positions, and the state of the country.
Katz and Maayan Shalev, then a creative duo without children, were busy establishing their choreographic language, rich with comedy, cultural criticism, and gestures. Following According to Law, they went on to create, among others, Multi, a piece for four women, and Can’t Argue with That, a quartet in which the dancers don silicon masks of Maayan Shalev’s face.
Today, Katz and Maayan Shalev are the parents of two children apiece with their respective partners and hold key positions in the cultural sphere.
Katz is the artistic director of Hakvutza, a professional dance school in South Tel Aviv, as well as the current co-artistic director of the Curtain Up Festival. Maayan Shalev is the Artistic Director of Tmuna Theater and is a tenured professor at the University of Haifa.
Within their full schedules juggling all these roles and within the complex reality of today’s Israel, Katz and Maayan Shalev decided to revisit According to Law, which premiered in 2013 at the Between Heaven and Earth Festival in Jerusalem and will now be presented at Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv.
Stepping back in time
“We have wanted to restage According to Law for a long time,” Maayan Shalev explains over Zoom, sitting in a train from Tel Aviv to Haifa, a route he travels frequently.
“It was a piece that was very important to us, we presented it many, many times. Now, with everything that is happening around us, we realized we were really missing this piece. Everything sucks and According to Law is a fun piece. We felt we deserved to have a little fun.”
According to Law was the duo’s second full-length piece and has a cast of three male dancers and an actor. The satirical work challenges the power dynamics at play between a choreographer, his dancers, and the audience.
During the piece, the dancers deliver a contract to the audience and as the show unfolds, they become busy first with the enforcement of the rules outlined in said document and later with their abolishment.
Returning to According to Law was, in many ways, like stepping on board a time machine.
“We were reminded of our old selves, of the way we used to work. We knew how to be silly back then, we felt less self-important. When we were making this piece, we would have these meetings into the wee hours of the night, arguing over this section or that, the types of meetings you can have when you don’t have kids at home. We would talk for hours and, at the end, we would come up with a new idea that we would have to try out.”
Though the concept is the same, the piece has been somewhat altered. “We are older and wiser now and things have changed. We did a lot of adding and subtracting. We rebuilt it,” says Maayan Shalev. “But it’s still very, very silly.”
Having decided to return to the work, Katz and Maayan Shalev reached out to the original cast, only to discover that their lives had changed as well. “Our old cast are either busy with other pursuits or have become hugely successful performers and aren’t available. We took our time finding the right people for the work now and we have a completely new cast,” says Maayan Shalev.
The new cast comprises Irad Avni, Yoav Kleinman, Amnon Peled, and Itamar Baruch.
Maayan Shalev and Katz drew on their new knowledge of the inner workings of power structures in the culture sector to enhance the piece.
“Our works all test out different types of audience engagement and participation. This piece taught us about responsibility on stage and about relationships between dancers, choreographers, and the audience. Now that we are in our roles, we look at the field from above, in a way. We see who decides about whom.
We see the crisis of the hierarchies and the decentralization of power structures.
“Restaging this work has made me think about how everyone can take responsibility for themselves and how power and strength can come from anywhere,” Maayan Shalev sums up.
‘According to Law’ will be staged at Tmuna Theater, Tel Aviv, on Jan. 23 and 24. For more information, tmu-na.org.il