Dana Ruttenberg creates works and dance events that reveal the body-stories of dancing people as individuals and as performers, as well as of Dance as an art form that holds memories, a history and a legacy. Her work is thematically and physically multilayered, wrapping pain with humor, offering a way to cope with the burden of life and the establishment, and to give room to playfulness within the choreographic craft, in a manner that expands existing formats and invents new ones.

Time is a central dimension in Ruttenberg’s works, and is treated as a philosophical and physical matter. Dream Team (2018), created as a site-specific work, was set to exist for only a week and to cherish a specific present moment of five performers. It resembles a peek into a memory box full of movement phrases stored in the body, letters and childhood photos, creating together a stream of consciousness of aspirations and disappointments that, for a moment, unite the performers and the audience. A shared mosaic of three performers also transpires in Everything Must Go (2021) as a choreography of parting with events, objects and people. The weaving of exercises of physical and mental release, together with scenes of recalling meaningful personal and professional losses, reveals the sensual materiality of moments engraved in one’s body and soul, distilling the understanding that letting those go is not forgetting the past, but instead agreeing to live with it in the present, only differently.

Out of the occupation with time, autobiography crystalizes as a a significant choreographic mechanism. God Forbid (2017), a co-creation with Noa Mark-Ofer, brings forth the personal story of Mark-Ofer as a mother to a sick child, through a vocabulary of medical terms and the caretaking actions that comprise her everyday. The work shifts between an intimate exposure of the resolution of her deepest fears and the challanges of the disease, and an ironic distancing, achieved by turning them into a highly accentuated theatrical performance, in which the audience becomes a witness, an active accomplice, and mainly a supporting friend. In 60,000 Gra(ha)m, Ruttenberg weaves her own persona into the collective “Dance” by diving into the body memory of modern dance diva, Martha Graham, as an act of self reflection, demonstrating Graham’s perception that it is through the personal that one can touch upon the universal. By placing her own body within a sequence of iconic lifts from Graham’s renowned works, Ruttenberg reveals her own relationship with her surroundings, and deals with the difficulty of trusting in situations of need.

The stories that Ruttenberg touches upon expose both the medium and the establishment. Naba 2.0 is an interactive audioguide journey through the museum, led by four dancers, in which every viewer creates their own soundtrack by choosing it from a wide and various range of recorded tracks. The live encounter of the texts with the artworks, the architectural space, and especially with the bodies moving next to them, allows viewers to observe them from various and surprising prisms, as well as to imagine multiple ever-changing narratives for them. In I’m All Ears (2023), Ruttenberg becomes an all-knowing narrator of the museal space, and invites the audience to a guided tour of the empty gallery of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. In it, she re-fills the space with personal tales of artists, curators, restaurateurs and museum guards that have been absorbed into the walls throughout the years, representing the visible and hidden narrative of the museum as an institution.

Multiple narratives are also expressed in the choreographic courses of action that extend beyond Ruttenberg’s personal work, which for Dana serve as channels for fostering dialogues and interconnections within the dance field. Project 48 Dance which she founded in 2012 and artistically directs, is a speed-lab for the co-creation of short dance works. The forgoing of the planned by adopting immediacy and playfulness, echoes choreographic practices that began establishing in the 50s by choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, and developed by the radical post-modern artists of the 60s. in Project 48, this viewpoint feeds into the current instant nature of social media, and in doing so creates a performance experience that is accessible, but at a deeper level emphasizes the possibility of building a creative community through close and intensive collaborations. 

As part of Curtain Up, which she artistically directed with Oded Graf, her interest in time was expressed in a continuous direction the two laid down, through the initiation of special events such as Curtain Back (2020-2021) and Curtain Frames (2022), in which they invited Israeli dance makers, as well as central dance education institutions, to work with the written and filmed archival materials of Curtain Up since its inception, and to creatively infuse past dance works and captured images (by the late photographer Gadi Dagon, for instance) into the creative dance present. Similarly, Curtain Future (2021) invited members of the local dance field to envision and present their private and shared fantasies, in order to turn them into a viable present.

Dana Ruttenberg’s works are a dynamic movement between past and present - and particularly of the past within the present - demonstrating the power of Dance to capture moments much like photography, and the body’s ability to speak consciousnesses (real or fantastic) like a story.

Idit Suslik (PhD), Dance and Performance scholar