Before heading to Israel to put the finishing touches on “Omniforge,” a new piece for the Kamea Dance Company, choreographer Jacopo Godani was busy packing up his home in Germany. After living for decades outside of Italy, Godani was preparing to return to his childhood stomping ground, a move that has him thinking a lot about the past.
“I’ve been abroad my whole life so to move back to Italy is strange,” he said during a phone call. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I bought a home in La Spezia, where I was born. Part of my family is still there.
“It is a very beautiful small town, on the sea, with a circular harbor surrounded by green hills. It became very popular since I left. It went from the wild to Disneyworld. Twenty years ago, I would walk with my flip-flops and swimming suit up from the sea through the village half naked and there was no one around. Now you can’t walk through the town because of all the tourists.”
Godani began his dance career in Paris in 1988, performing with contemporary dance companies. He then moved to Brussels, where he founded his own company and started to develop his choreographic style. Not long after, Godani pivoted back into the role of dancer, joining William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt, for whom he danced as a soloist for nearly a decade.
Since 2000, Godani has been a prominent international choreographic voice, creating works for companies such as the Royal Ballet Covent Garden, Ballet British Columbia, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, the Israeli Opera, and many others. From 2015 until 2023, he served as the artistic director of the Frankfurt Dresden Dance Company.
Godani explained that musing over “what was” is a big part of his current creative motivation. “I think we have a corrupted vision of what art should be. With social media and the new world, there is a lot of misunderstanding about art. The new generation has a hard time understanding the difference between real art and entertainment or recreation,” he said.
Omniforge
WITH HIS new dance “Omniforge,” Godani devised an exercise to return both the dancers and the audience to what he considers “real art.”
“In this piece, I decided to push the idea of real art to an exercise to go beyond this new generation’s limits,” he explained. “It’s almost like a challenge that requires people to push themselves beyond their own conceptions and understanding of art.
“The art is indeed the fabric of the work. Participating in the work requires producing art out of yourself. It is important to understand that the level of art that we need today is much different from the one we had to provide 20 or 30 years ago.
“I’m trying to make people understand that they should not feel it’s enough to put a mobile phone on your table, improvise, and put it on Instagram. It’s not enough to stand on stage, side by side, staring at the audience and dancing something that could be a mixture between a techno rave and a Beyoncé concert.
“We worked for 50 years to evolve ballet and dance to a science, something that could develop, evolve, grow in every sense. We investigated all the levels, dimensions, directions where nobody went before. We explored.
“Now everything that is considered contemporary is made up of people doing the same movement for one hour. I still want to fight the good fight until I’m sick and tired.”
To make this work, Godani called upon longtime collaborator Ulrich Miller to compose the music. “We use the same system of investigation that I use in dance. We start by asking what we’ve done before and what we cannot do. We use it as a rhythmic and dimensional support.
“The dance is never created with the music. It needs to enhance the pathos and drama of the scenes and give dynamic to the body movement and choreography. We have always devoted time to developing the music from the beginning of the process,” he said.
The rest of the elements of Omniforge, such as lighting and costumes, have been designed by Godani. “If you have talent you can do many things,” he said.
“Omniforge” will be presented alongside “Cosmos,” Andonis Foniadakis’s new creation.
The Kamea Dance Company will perform works by Godani and Foniadakis on March 6, 7, and 8 at the Suzanne Dellal Centre; on May 11 at the Megiddo Center; and on May 14 at the Beersheba Performing Arts Center. For more information, visit kameadance.com.