JERUSALEM.- The art of staged dance in Israel has undergone a long journey to become one of the country’s most successful performing arts disciplines. Out of the Circle: The Art of Dance in Israel, a new exhibition on view at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, celebrates Israeli dance and choreography since the 1920s and honors two of Israel’s most prominent dance institutions on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Batsheva Dance Company and the 25th anniversary of the Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theatre.

Through photographs, videos, posters, drawings, and other ephemera, Out of the Circle explores critical milestones in the development of contemporary dance in Israel through the central theme of the circle. The earliest form of collective Israeli dance can be traced back to the hora circle dance of the young pioneers who came to Israel at the start of the 20th century and established the first kibbutzim. The hora reinforced a sense of brotherhood and group unity, a feeling strengthened by the physical closeness of the dancers as they joined hands. As the circle dance grew to become a symbol of Israel, it contributed an important element to the creation of a cultural identity that was formed well before the establishment of the Israeli State.

“The circle, which has no beginning and no end, is the great cross-cultural equalizer,” said James S. Snyder, the Anne and Jerome Fisher Director of the Israel Museum. “Out of the Circle embodies the beauty of the world of Israeli dance, adding another chapter to the history of modern Israeli culture and society.”

The motif of the circle mirrors the evolution of modern Israeli society. The circle alternately crystalizes and breaks, illuminating tensions between the individual and the group; between agricultural myth and urban reality; between open and enclosed space; between ordinary movements and gestures of pathos. The circle is at once a clear form of order and equality, yet it is also demanding and threatening to the individual in its overpowering closure. Exemplifying these tensions is Ohad Naharin's groundbreaking dance Echad Mi Yodea of 1990—the year he was appointed artistic director of Batsheva—which opens the exhibition as a prologue.

Israel’s early dance performers and choreographers emigrated from Europe to pre-State Israel in the 1920s and 30s, importing Expressionist Dance from Germany and Austria, which would have a formative impact on the nascent scene in Israel. It was during this time that Baruch Agadati, considered a pioneer of “the new dance in Israel," created and performed compositions featuring mosaic of popular characters found in the Israeli landscape, including Biblical personalities, pioneers, Yemenite Jews, and Jaffa Arabs, all wearing costumes that he designed. Three drawings of Agadati by such renowned Russian Constructivists as Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov are presented in the exhibition.

Arriving in 1936, dance visionary Gertrud Kraus continued the European mode of expressionistic dance. Kraus and her contemporaries modified and evolved the medium to incorporate features of their newly adopted country: light, open space, a search for commonality, and the excitement of being “at one with the homeland.”

Many photographers who chronicled these dance pioneers also arrived from Central Europe. Among them was Alfons Himmelreich, who immigrated to pre-State Israel where he began photographing Tel Aviv’s burgeoning modern dance scene. His artistic style, influenced by German art and photography of the time, incorporates contrasting light and shadow to illustrate the drama and emotion of the dancers.

The founding of the Batsheva Dance Company in 1964, and other prominent companies in the 1960s and 70s, reflects the growing professionalism and institutionalizing of the art of Israeli dance. This was followed by a growing shift in Israel from the collective "us" toward a more individual "me," and, as the circle fell apart, dancers began to search for their private voices and left the dance-troupe circle in favor of personal creativity in the work of such choreographers as Rina Schenfeld, Moshe Efrati, Liat Dror, and Nir Ben Gal.

"Israeli dance artists today look outward to the world and inward to timeless human concerns," said Talia Amar, Curator of Interdisciplinary Art at the Israel Museum and curator of the exhibition. "Against the background of modernist Western traditions such as expressionism, the modern American dance of Martha Graham, and Pina Bausch’s dance theatre, along with the search for ethnic roots, dance in Israel is no longer attempting to make and define “Israeli Dance”—an elusive term in any case. Today it is global: challenging boundaries—whether national borders or the confines of the stage—and inhabiting realms both real and metaphorical, both in and out of the circle."