Tel Aviv Dance Festival 2024 Danced Through Eshkol’s War Pause

The Tel Aviv Dance Festival 2024 ran 10 days at the Suzanne Dellal Centre with 19 Israeli performances and no visiting companies. It was the 24th annual edition, dated August 1 to 10, and it opened on a Thursday at 8 p.m. in Dellal Hall.

The war then under way had cut the foreign guests. In their place the centre kept a local bill, and it used the same week to mark 100 years since the birth of Noa Eshkol, the choreographer who in 1973 had stopped her own dances until a drafted colleague came home.

Tel Aviv Dance 2024 Cut the Visiting Companies

Anat Fischer Leventon, chief executive of the Suzanne Dellal Centre, said during a live preview that the festival still had to give Israeli dance a stage “even on days like these.” Naomi Perlov, the centre’s artistic director, framed the week as a meeting space for work that gave form to what people in the hall already felt.

The centre, founded in 1989 in Neve Tzedek as a home for contemporary dance, has long mixed Israeli companies with visitors. In 2024 that mix stopped. The program listed only local creators, among them Orly Portal, Yossi Berg and Oded Graf, Hillel Kogan, Eyal Dadon’s SOL Dance Company, Stav Struz Boutrous, the Kaiser Antonino Dance Ensemble, Ori Lenkinski, Lior Tavori, Michal Samama, Roy Assaf, Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor, and Kazuyo Shionoiri and Dror Liberman.

THE 2024 COUNT

• The run: Ten days, August 1 to 10, billed as the 24th annual Tel Aviv Dance Festival.
• The bill: Nineteen performances by Israeli creators, with 7 premieres inside that total.
• The guests: No visiting troupes, a change the centre tied directly to the war.
• The house: Dellal Hall, the Zehava and Jack Dellal Studio, the Ora Studio, the Yaron Yerushalmi Hall, the main courtyard, and one night at Soho House Jaffa.

Those 19 performances on the 2024 program sat beside open rehearsals, a film, a book launch, and a small show of Eshkol’s wall carpets. The Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Tel Aviv Municipality backed the week. Berg and Graf, whose catalogue the preview put at more than 30 works, took three slots under the heading Cult Fantasy and Love: The Rite of Spring #2, 4 Fantasies and a Monkey, and When Love Walked In.

No Time to Dance Was Her Line in 1973

Noa Eshkol was born on February 28, 1924, at Deganya Bet, the daughter of Levi Eshkol, later Israel’s third prime minister. She founded the Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group in 1954 and, with the architect Avraham Wachman, built a system for writing human movement that still carries both names. She died on October 14, 2007.

In October 1973, when the Yom Kippur War began, one of her dancers, Shmulik Zaidel, was called up. She halted work on the dances until he returned.

This is no time to dance; we shall wait until the war is over.

Noa Eshkol, choreographer, October 1973

She turned the same surplus of making toward scraps of fabric, which she and the dancers assembled into large wall carpets. The Holon archive’s movement-notation timeline tracks that shift beside the notation research, the Chamber Dance Group, and the professorship she took at Tel Aviv University in 1972. A federal foundation’s Eshkol research project later helped stage her centennial in Germany, where the Georg Kolbe Museum kept the No Time to Dance exhibition in Berlin from March 15 to August 25, 2024, overlapping the Tel Aviv week.

In Israel her company did the opposite of the 1973 pause. The current group, including Racheli Nul Kahana and Ruti Sela, who had worked with her, and newer members Mor Bashan, Noga Goral, and Dror Shoval, danced a selection of her spare pieces under the title A Warrior and a Dreamer, with war in the titles and in the steps. Plans for a wider 100th-birthday year had already been interrupted; the festival still put her at the close of the 10 days.

NOA ESHKOL AT THE FESTIVAL

1. February 28, 1924: Born at Deganya Bet; 2024 marks 100 years.
2. 1954: Founds the Chamber Dance Group and begins the movement-notation work with Wachman.
3. October 1973: Stops the dances after Zaidel is drafted, then starts the wall carpets.
4. October 14, 2007: Dies in Holon; the group later reconstitutes with original and new members.
5. August 7, 2024: Chamber Dance Group talk, moderated by Naomi Perlov, at 8 p.m.
6. August 10, 2024: 1976 notation film at 3 p.m., A Warrior and a Dreamer at 5 p.m., then a book launch of Movement Notation at 6:30 p.m.

Berlin hung the carpets that came from the decision to stop. Tel Aviv put the dances back on their feet, 51 years after 1973, in a city that was again at war. The centennial events for Noa Eshkol were not a sidebar. They were the festival’s argument about whether dance waits.

Orly Portal Opened on Umm Kulthum After October 7

Portal had started a new piece in late September 2023, built on the music of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum and on the poem by Ibrahim Nagi that the song Al Atlal carries. After October 7 she stayed out of the studio for several weeks, then went back and rebuilt the work. The official title is Al Atlal. It opened the festival on August 1 at 8 p.m. in Dellal Hall and ran 55 minutes.

I had a hard time, but ultimately working on the piece saved us.

Orly Portal, choreographer and dancer

She said the Arabic song was holy to her and lived in her body, and that it was still very hard to hear during the war. Her task, as she described it, was to find a Hebrew connection to that music and to treat the two as one language. Portal came up through Kol Demama under Moshe Efrati and through the Batsheva Ensemble, then studied Arabic music at Bar-Ilan University and traveled to Morocco to learn Gnawa and Berber dances. The centre’s preview of Al Atlal described bodies wrapped in shrouds, hands bound, feet stamping, a lament for lost life and faith, and a push toward tarab, the lift that the music is built to reach.

The Suzanne Dellal Centre posted its own short preview of the all-local week before the doors opened.

That is the tension the opener refused to sand down. The same festival that barred visiting companies began with an Egyptian voice, sung into a room of Israeli dancers who had to learn how to hear it again.

Farewells and Shhh Put Mourning in the Studio

Several new works did not treat the war as atmosphere. They named what the year had done to families, to silence, and to the act of leaving.

WORKS THAT FACED THE YEAR

Avi Kaiser and Sergio Antonino built Shhh… as a quartet of two women and two men from different generations. The sound in the title is the one that tells a room to be quiet. After October 7, the centre’s own note said, that hush had a heavier echo, and the family unit had been pulled between fracture and a hard kind of staying together.

Boutrous, born in 1990, a former Batsheva Ensemble and company dancer and a 2022 Ministry of Culture prize winner for early-career work on Israeli cultures, made Farewells as a homage to how people live with death. The official page calls it a dance of lament for those no longer here, with physical eulogies folded into the steps. Tickets for that 50-minute studio show sat at 70 to 100 shekels.

Tavori’s CRUST closed the last night in red smoke and unclear borders. Roy Assaf’s The Fall of a Structure, another premiere, went up the night before. Hillel Kogan’s THISISPAIN, a tourist’s argument with flamenco and with Michal Nathan, asked what is Spanish, what is Israeli, and what identity is doing in a room like that. None of those pieces needed a foreign company to make the week feel inward. The missing guests had already done that job.

The Courtyard Rehearsals Cost Nothing After Dark

For the first time the festival opened rehearsals to anyone who walked into the central courtyard, with no ticket. The point, Leventon said, was to pull the public closer to the making, not only to the finished hour on stage. That is a small procedural change with a large social one: the plaza in Neve Tzedek became part of the bill.

WHAT YOU COULD SEE WITHOUT A FULL-PRICE SEAT

• Open rehearsals: Courtyard sessions with free entry, listed on the first night with Berg, Graf, and Eyal Dadon for 45 minutes from 7 p.m.
• Blue Balls: Kazuyo Shionoiri and Dror Liberman’s outdoor mix of circus, dance, and objects, 45 minutes at 7:30 p.m. on August 8 in the main courtyard, free, and aimed at families.
• The 1976 film: Encounter with the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation, 58 minutes on August 10 at 3 p.m., 20 shekels, and free to anyone holding a ticket for A Warrior and a Dreamer.
• Wall carpets: A selection of Eshkol’s fabric works on view with the centennial performances.

Blue Balls is the second chapter in a trilogy the pair call labor shows, a requiem for the body as it now is, built from effort, rest, and the clash between a person and an object. Shionoiri was born in Tokyo in 1984; Liberman in Beersheba in 1988. They have made work together since 2015.

Not every night stayed on campus. Disco, Baby!, by Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor, partners since 2004, moved to Soho House Jaffa with doors at 8 p.m., a 75-minute Bal Moderne lesson in 1970s disco, and a DJ set after. Ori Lenkinski’s Jackie Pink and Black, a premiere at 9 p.m. on August 7, put Jackie Kennedy’s public images in a solo that tried to fill the gaps between magazine stills. Gon Biran’s 2020, Michal Samama’s A Group Of, the 1|2|3 solos and duets, and a shared evening for Avshalom Latucha and Roy Assaf filled the midweek studios. ZIFT, Dadon’s SOL Dance Company work, took Dellal Hall on August 6 at 9 p.m. for 55 minutes, with seats from 80 to 160 shekels.

What the 2025 and 2026 Festivals Kept

The 2024 edition did not stay a one-off closed shop. Festival listings for 2025 put Tel Aviv Dance back on August 6 to 16, 11 days, with 20 performances and again 7 Israeli premieres, and they named two foreign guests, Julyen Hamilton from Britain and Charly Santagado from Austria. The city’s official account called that run a return, 11 days of premieres and open rehearsals at the same centre. Local work remained the spine. The guests were the change.

Listings published in July 2026 described a shorter 2026 edition, July 29 to August 5, 8 days, with 12 Israeli premieres, 9 of them full-length works. Dellal Hall was under renovation, so some of the large shows moved to the Arison Auditorium, while the Yaron Yerushalmi Hall, the Zehava and Jack Dellal Studio, the Ora Studio, and the Inbal Dance Theatre Hall stayed in use. Eyal Dadon, who had brought ZIFT in 2024, opened that later festival with Patrol. Stav Struz Boutrous, Berg and Graf, Roy Assaf, and Hillel Kogan were again on the sheet.

What carried forward from 2024 was the habit of building the week around Israeli premieres and free courtyard time, even after foreign names were allowed back in. What did not carry forward was the 10-day, 19-show, zero-guest shape of that wartime bill. The 2024 festival remains the one that had to dance without visitors, and the one that answered Eshkol’s 1973 pause by putting her group on stage anyway.

Frequently Asked Questions

When Did the Tel Aviv Dance Festival 2024 Take Place?

It ran from August 1 to 10, 2024, a Thursday-to-Saturday span of 10 days, and the centre billed it as the 24th annual edition, with support from the Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Tel Aviv Municipality.

Why Were There No International Companies in 2024?

The centre dropped visiting troupes because of the war then under way and filled the week with local companies, new Israeli works, and, for the first time, free public rehearsals in the courtyard so audiences could watch the making as well as the shows.

Who Was Noa Eshkol?

She was an Israeli dance composer and textile artist, born February 28, 1924, at Deganya Bet and deceased October 14, 2007, who co-created Eshkol-Wachman movement notation, founded her Chamber Dance Group in 1954, and from 1973 made wall carpets after she halted the dances during the Yom Kippur War.

What Is Al Atlal?

Al Atlal is Orly Portal’s 55-minute opening work from August 1, 2024, set to Umm Kulthum’s singing of Ibrahim Nagi’s poem, with original music by Ori Alboher and a cast that included Portal, Artour Astman, Maya Tamir, Lal’el Pilorra, Noa Gronich, and Daniel Costa.

Where Is the Suzanne Dellal Centre?

It stands in historic Neve Tzedek, Tel Aviv’s first neighborhood, a few minutes from the Mediterranean, in restored late-nineteenth-century school buildings that opened as a dance centre in 1989 and received the Israel Prize in 2010.