Dancing to the Stars
Posted on September 30, 2007 • By Jennifer Lawson
Category: Art and Culture, Featured View Comments
When Sally Anne Friedland got THE phone call in the summer of 2005, she hit payola. Artistic director and choreographer of Israel’s Dance Drama Company (DDC), Friedland was being invited to present her troupe at a prestigious Manhattan dance event – an invite she says resulted from a chance, New York layover the year before.
“I stopped into the 92nd Street Y dance offices and dropped off a tape of my dance troupe performing,” Friedland recalls. “I hoped someone would view the material and be impressed enough to invite us to the annual showcase.”
Months later the telephone rang and months after that, her company was off to the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival – an annual event featuring top tier, expressionist, dance-multimedia, modern and dance drama companies hailing from the U.S. and now Israel. Funded by heavy hitters like Capezio, The Village Voice and The Harkness Foundation, the festival relocated in recent years to Manhattan’s prestigious Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater.
“It was unbelievable,” claims Sally-Anne of the experience.
South African-born Friedland grew up in a liberal household during the apartheid era and began studying dance at age three. She danced with Capetown’s ballet company and at twenty-two traveled to Europe where she caught the “modern dance bug” via exposure to performances and classes. But her background remained at the fore.
“Here was this well known, Martha Graham teacher in Germany teaching class and she was a black woman! I’d never seen anything like it before. The blacks in South Africa were servants. Here, we danced with them and ate with them,” Friedland recounts. “It was amazing.”
She returned to Capetown for a brief stint and then made her way to Israel and settled in Tel Aviv. She started a family, carved a name for herself as a dancer and in 2001 seamlessly transitioned to the role of dance architect.
“When I started creating, I was starting from zero,” Friedland relays. “I had to go inside, dig deep and find out what my dance is. This is my thing and these are my ideas. I take the layers from the library in my mind and when I start to work physically, they come out in stories. I’m communicating through dance.”
In August she celebrated five years of choreographic creation with a gala event at Tel Aviv’s Suzanne Delal Center. Celebrities and friends turned up to view her company’s hallmark Red and her most recent Concerto for 4 Dancers and Orchestra incorporating dancers and Raanana Symphony Orchestra members on the same stage.
At that gala, Eli Mizrachi – a fellow judge alongside Friedland on Israel’s popular “Dancing with the Stars” television series – sent her a congratulatory SMS message; She was sitting on the backstage steps maintaining a low profile. “I didn’t really mingle with the audience so I’m not sure who was out there,” she confides.
What does the future hold? Friedland recently completed work on Bereysheet Children’s show – a traveling event for 5-8-year-olds showing throughout Israel during the September holidays. In 2008 she’ll debut new works.
Until then, mum’s the word…
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She hit payola? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Tim – LOL! Too much time in Israel, maybe…