LungA School: Week 2: The Titanic Issue

performed 150 times a year. So you get to swim and to realise it’s also a different dimension with people watching you perform, it is very different — time is feeling different there, and space is different — so feeling very comfortable there, eventually. I performed hundreds of times with Batsheva Dance Company, and after four years I left and freelanced with choreographers, performing internationally and around Israel.

The music part started at Batsheva — one of the dancers there is called Bobbi Jene Smith, and we were very good friends. She started to write poems and I started to compose them. We had this rock band… we were really, really bad. But I found a drive to compose, and I took it more seriously.

I went to study, I did a BA in Composition, and at a certain point I started an orchestra, and found myself conducting that orchestra. And I continued composing to dance pieces and all the media in between — composing, dancing, conducting and playing.

C: Do you play any instruments yourself?

M: I play piano, yeah.

S: Earlier this week you said that you had gone to the summer program at Juilliard School in New York?

M: Yeah. So my father lived in New York, I lived in New York from age two to age six. At the age of six I moved to Israel with my mother and he stayed there. I just went to visit him in the summers. So as a kid I went to a tennis summer program — it was very fun to play tennis all day long. But when I started to get serious with dancing, each summer I went to a different program there, like Alvin Ailey, and Juilliard, and others.

C: In terms of your background, going back and forth a little between Israel and the US, I’m interested in your experience of language through all of that, and whether that has shaped some of the work that you do now — especially with the composition, where it’s about developing a new language that is maybe more intuitive of physical?

M: I’m not sure it has been an influence so much, because I never dealt with language. Movement-wise there’s no language involved. And music — usually I compose to instrumental music, I’m not so much a text person. But now recently I started working with Sound Painting, which is a live composition multi-disciplinary sign language. That brought the language aspect into the thoughts. And being able to communicate live without words, it’s