The author company of Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat, based in the south of France since 2007, has quickly won over international audiences. This success is due to its founder, whose rigor in choreographic writing—delicate and profoundly musical, virtuosic yet unassuming—has identified him as a rare and unconventional creator. This uniqueness has led Gat to create for historic academies such as the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris and the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, as well as the most recent American company of Benjamin Millepied, L.A. Dance Project.
Having arrived at dance late, at the age of 23, Gat soon debuted as a creator. In 1994, at just 25, he launched his first independent work. In 2004, he founded Emanuel Gat Dance at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv, where he created memorable pieces such as Voyage d’hiver, K626, and 3for2007 before moving to the Maison Intercommunale in Istres, France. A fervent opponent of narrative dance, Gat argues that the ability to distance oneself from the operational strategies of metaphors, symbols, and speaking about something is the essence of art, particularly his own. “What I aim for,” explains the choreographer, “is to completely surrender to the open creative act, to continuous questions.”
Consistent with this vision, the titles of his works are never the result of thematic research. Rather, they arise from coincidences and randomness: such is the case with Plage Romantique, his latest creation, which owes its title to the famous French song by Pascal Danel from the sixties, discovered by chance while browsing the internet. Plage Romantique, currently in the process of realization as of this writing, promises to be a kind of choreographic musical where voices, songs, text, and movement scores converge in the bodies of ten dancers stripped of all embellishments to bring forth the truth (which for Gat is the ability to ‘be’ and not to ‘represent’) of the visible and the audible, without artifice and with a close observation of the mechanisms of time.
