Sharon Fridman
| Sharon Fridman | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1980 Pardes Hanna, Israel |
| 🏳️ Nationality | Israeli |
| 🏳️ Citizenship | Spanish |
| 💼 Occupation | |
| 🌐 Website | www.sharon-fridman.com |
Sharon Fridman (born 1980) is an Israeli contemporary dancer and choreographer. He serves as the artistic director and choreographer of the Sharon Fridman Company and had his work performed all around the world. Sharon Fridman’s dancing knowledge is made up of Israeli folklore and contemporary dance. He co-produced several pieces together with Mercat de les Flors, Ludwigshafen Theater, Autumn Festival, Madrid en danza and the Tenerife Auditorium, among others.[1] His pieces received many awards nationally and internationally as well. He is an important figure of contact improvisation in Europe.
Early Life[edit]
Sharon Fridman was born in 1980 in Pardes Hanna, Israel. He started dancing when he was six years old with the Israeli dance folklore group Hora Pardes Hanna, with the choreographer Dado Kraus. Ten years later, he decided to volunteer at Ilanit, the mental health hospital where his mother, Ina, worked. There, he held work group sessions where he helped patients through body movement therapy. In 1995, he began to study contemporary dance, and, at the same started to dance with the Yehonatan Carmon Company at the TeI Aviv Opera House. After many months of intense learning, he joined the professional Ido Tadmor Company[2].
Career[edit]
In 2000, with the support of the Parder Hanna Town Hall, he created the Fraza dance group, whose objective was to make contemporary dance known locally. Thanks to this project, he has been able to present his work to the Suzzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theater, directed by Yair Vardi. This is where his work has been presented for the first time. That same year, he is accepted into the prestigious Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, and not long after, for the Vertigo Dance Company of Jerusalem.[3] This is where he began to explore a different way of moving, a new body language, known as Contact Improvisation. With the company, he had the chance to work with different independent choreographers, such as Ronit Ziv, Emanuel Gat and Yossi Yungman, among others. One of his most personal and famous projects is Rizoma, co-produced with the Paris Quartier d’Été theatre and the Chalut Theatre of Paris. It is a macro-representation in which between 60 and 100 people participate whose dream is to dance. It is an artistic and social project in which the philosophy of contact is applied to the daily development of society. Fridman says that to him, “It is the best way to bring my technique universally closer to other people and, therefore, encourage them to question the daily forms of coexistence and social interaction.”[4]
In 2003, he started to work as an artistic coordinator and choreographer touring South America and Europe with the Mayumana Company. This is how he arrived in Madrid in 2006, at the age of 26, to settle down and start his own projects as artistic director and choreographer, founding the Sharon Fridman Company.
Sharon Fridman Company[edit]
The Sharon Fridman Company or, Compañía Sharon Fridman in Spanish, is a contemporary dance group formed in 2006 and based in Madrid. Directed by israeli choreographer Sharon Fridman, many of its works have been seen in several festivals and countries like France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Colombia, South Korea or Singapur.
Many international companies also include on their repertoire some of his creations, such as the National Dance Company of Spain, the National Dance Company of Paraguay, the Vertigo Dance Company of Israel, the Bora Dance Project of South Korea, the Kukai Dantza Company from the Basque Country, the Colectivo Cinético from Italy, the LaMov Company from Zaragoza, the Compagnie Jus de la Vie from Stockholm and the Bielefeld Ballet from Germany.[5]
The company’s first piece was released at the Certamen Coreográfico of Madrid and won several awards for creation and production. The technical foundation Sharon Fridman uses in his work is focused on the relation between gravity and balance. The company’s work in based on three fundamentals pillars:
- The social dimension of dance
The company does not think of dance as something foreign to the conflicts that exist in the world. For them, many of these conflicts are born of a disconnection: with oneself, with the natural world, with each other. In his pieces, Sharon tries to develop a language that he feels can be a metaphor for the possibilities that we have as human beings-as a community, as bodies, as individuals-to find new channels of communication that can prepare us to find new solutions to conflict. He is trying to show that dance is a filter that can help us understand what occurs around us, making up for the deficiencies of this world.[6]
- Breaking the Fourth Wall
The stage is, traditionally, where the magical moment of encounter between an artistic work and the public takes place. In this sense it is a sacred space. It is a space conceived for representation, a representation that has been perpetuated historically generation after generation. Now this evolution continues: sometimes on linoleum, sometimes on paved streets, and sometimes on grass or sand. The company's work explores this line, to force the limits of the fourth wall: how to connect further with the audience, how to incorporate it into the piece, how to make dance a personal experience for them as well.[7]
- The language of contact
According to Fridman, it is a physical technique, but a spiritual one as well. It allows the dancers to explore the complexities and fragility generated by two bodies as they come together and pull apart. The relationship to gravity and inertia, the game of balance, the freedom of movement... One of the company's objectives is exactly that: to investigate contact, to construct and deconstruct it, to polish it, to dig deeper until we discover its essence and then convert it into the main tool for collective communication, in a dramatic language capable of evolving in the hands of the dancers.[8]
He has mainly been inspired by his mother, Ina, who was born with Arnold Chiari syndrome. This medical condition threw off her balance and caused her to fall frequently. As a boy, Fridman was often the one there to catch her or help her up. “Sometimes I look at my work and I see it exactly—falling into the arms of another, trying to suspend myself in space, trying to find a balance in the body”, he reflects. From there, he developed a new body language which he decided to call INA after his mother’s name, Contact IN creation. With this new language, he began a research process on contact. He worked at laboratories with professional and student dancers, at dance schools, both public and private, in Spain and other cities he visited when touring. Nowadays, all of his work is based on the INA technique and is represented all over the world.[9]
Practice INA[edit]
After years of creating choreographies based on his research of balance and its manipulation, developing as an individual his sensibility to gravity and tact, Fridman decided to give his practice the name INA, “The sense of my Balance”, he says. Since then, he has been working on a series of tasks and contact practice in the field of creation and improvisation. The focus of this language is placed on the concept of gravity, on digging deeply into this matter, on discovering its most unexplored aspects. Movement implies the transmission of an element with which it has previously been connected… “I move as a direct expression of what happens inside me, not as a tool of expression, I move out of an internal and irreversible need.”[10]
Choreography[edit]
- FREE FALL, 2013[11]
- ALL THE WAYS, 2016[12]
- HASTA DÓNDE, (in collaboration with the Vertigo Dance Company), 2011[13]
- ERRITU, 2018[14]
- RIZOMA, 2013[15]
- STABLE, 2015[16]
- DOSIS DE PARAÍSO, 2020[17]
- SHAPE ON US, 2020 (in preparation)[18]
Awards[edit]
Many of his pieces have received important awards, such as the best show for Free Fall (2015), the best choreography for Erritu in 2019, first prize and audience award for Hasta dónde…? at the Certamen de Burgos-New York (2011) and award for best dance show at the Dance and Theatre Fair of Huesca for Free Fall and All ways (2014 and 2017 respectively).[19]
Official website[edit]
https://www.sharon-fridman.com/en/
References[edit]
- ↑ Fridman, Sharon. "Compañía Sharon Fridman". Sharon Fridman.
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- ↑ Grotte, Castellana. "Sharon Fridman". World Dance Movement The International Festival.
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- ↑ Brafman, Ora. "Dance Review: Sharon Fridman Company". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
- ↑ Fridman, Sharon. "Sharon Fridman". Sharon Fridman.
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- ↑ "Compañía Sharon Fridman Free Fall". Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive.
- ↑ "Post-Show Talk: Compañía Sharon Fridman | Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 2018". Youtube. Jacob's Pillow.
- ↑ Deket, Ayelet. "Tel Aviv Dance 2019". Midnight East. Retrieved July 14, 2019.
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