Four Exercises in Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation

Directed by Sharon Lockhart

Noa Eshkol considered dance to be a piece choreographed for at least two dancers. The film installation Four Exercises in Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation features four of Noa Eshkol’s dances, deemed here to be “exercises” as they are each performed by a single dancer – Ruti Sela, who began dancing with Eshkol in 1969. Sela moves among four identical gray volumes, which were designed by Lockhart to reference the space that the dancer’s body occupies as she moves through each exercise. Changing position for each dance, the volumes are sized according to the dancer’s measurements: the height of each volume is the height of the dancer with her arms raised, the width of each is equal to the dancer’s wingspan. The compositions of the volumes highlight the different spaces that each of the four dances occupy in space.