With dance and physical theatre , Somnambules is a magical and evocative performance inspired by The 7 Deadly Sins, a voyage through our emotional spectrum, questioning once again what it mean nowadays to be human?

Award winning dancer & performers Tanya Khabarova and Yael Karavan have been collaborating artistically for over 10 years. They have worked together in the exceptional multiple awards winning company Derevo, of which Tanya is a founding member. They have now come together again to create a new version of Somnambules. -‘We feel the need to react to a world on a breach of collapse, a life devoid of values where money and power have taken the place of conscience and sensitivity, where the individual is worth what he earns and where we are bombarded with external stimuli detaching us from the nature that surrounds us raping its resources and losing touch with our own souls and intuition. A world in which the Media and Television has become our new gods’

2011

ANIMA

Argus Angel Award winner

Press here for Article

switch on switch off
we appear and disappear
revealing whispers from the past and stories from the present
suspended between light and darkness
a life
ride on
breathe in
its time to venture into the realms of human nature.

Illuminated by orphan lamps and stories gathered from Brighton households, Anima is a performance combining dance, physical theatre, live music, visual imagery and intimate encounters.

Supported by Arts Council England

photos by Andy Towers & Claire Wearn

Press

'In Anima, Yael Karavan and her brilliant company of international performers, the Karavan Ensemble, invite you to leave the everyday behind and go with them on a journey, an exploration of light and dark in a “magical feast”. - The Argus

'This is undoubtedly another strikingly original production' Total Theatre

'Powerful and subtle, this piece from the Karavan Ensemble managed to convey through art a human experience not easily defined – transient and infinite like light! Magical.' - Latest 7

'The experience was carnivalesque, hypnotic, and derealised: a non-sequential trip through the human psyche. The phrase ‘weird but wonderful’ springs to mind, as Anima was precisely that' The New Current

2010

The Dressing Room

The Karavan Ensemble has created a site specific performance at Chorus Room-1 of The Dome- Brighton, for In-Habit- in December 2010. In The Dressing Room the audience encounters performance artists from the past trapped in space and time and thus re-living the exciting moments of their exsistance being just before or just after a show.
created by Yael Karavan with Linda Remahl, Bruno Humberto, Tamar Daly, Rachel Champion, Marion Deprez & Sara Popowa. Music by Tristan Shorr.

A Light Through the Night

“…we arrived and watched an avant-garde dance in which women with the long gowns and opiated stares of Edgar Allan Poe heroines performed with a series of household lamps (…) Dreamlike as well as surreal, it suggested the sort of obsession that strikes in the small hours.” The Guardian (press here for The full review)

With Linda Remahl, Bruno Humberto, Rachel Champion, Tamar Daly, Marion Deprez & Sara Popowa

Music by Tristan Shor.

Directed by Yael Karavan.

A Ship of Fools

a site specific performance created by Yael Karavan

with The Karavan Ensemble- Linda Remahl, Bruno Humberto, Ana Fernandez M, Sofia Fernandez M, Rachel Champion, Pepa Ubera, Howard Sivills, Tamar Daly, Marion Deprez and Jo Donaghy with Special guest Renee Ansell @ Coachwerks

Supported by Arts Council England and Hollingdean Youth Trust.

Open a door within and be taken by a unique unfolding Site Specific experience.
A journey through dance, physical theatre, music, installation and the realms of human nature.

Within each of us there sails a ship of fools. These fools represent the different traits that shape our personality. At any given time one of them may lead the boat; the lover, the thinker, the joker... This is a theme that I have been exploring through my dance research for many years, constantly asking 'who is dancing?' I have thus developed methods of finding these 'traits' through the use of character-based work, searching to enable these various fools within us to dance their stories, like a journey within our own archetypes.

Photos by Javier Otero, Jason Wen and Paul Kondritz. Design by Sara Popowa.

PRESS

'A Ship of Fools is an unconventional, challenging, often magical show... and Karavan has made glorious fools of us all.' Fringe guru

'We are in a kind of dream world, an imagination space, a mood-space, an atmosphere where the fourth wall has fallen and yet is also strangely a kind of ghost haunting the experience... The fourth wall is tossed about on this sea of invention. It's full of heart, warmth and welcome.' The Fringe Review

'A Ship Of Fools is the brainchild of Israeli Yael Karavan. Herself a gifted clown whose every arched eyebrow and flared nostril as the black pen mustachioed ‘Ceremony Of Masters’ is spot on, Yael has gathered together an international band of actors, dancers and musicians whose credentials and commitment are impressive.' Latest 7

http://karavanensemble8.wordpress.com/ Face Book Karavan Ensemble

Etude

A time based installation where Yael creates white masks from the audience faces through a ritualized sequence of gestures. She later uses this installation made of the audience face-masks as part of her performance.

photos- Jason Wen

In Between -long version - watch short video here!

45 minutes Dance / Theater performance
Created and performed by Yael Karavan
Light designed by Socrates Mitsios & Kristina Hjelm

Suspended between two Chairs, two realities, two lands, two lovers, the tragic and the comic, In-Between is a choreographic poem about the interior duality and the exterior solitude of a longing magician.

With elements of dance, physical theater, clown, mime, butoh, two chairs and a microphone, yael creates a fantastic universe and takes us into a journey through our own emotional tunells.

photo- Cyril Charlot

2009

The Nature of Things

solo/instalation by yael karavan
music by Roman Dubilnnikov
inspired by Lucretius writings De Natura Rarum
this piece is a journey into the invisible

let your eyes be fooled
let your mind rest
and let your heart fly.....

photos Chiara Contrino

Alongside White

Yael Karavan and Linda Remahl started their artistic collaboration in 2003
Our work is exploring the boundaries between dance and performance, reality and dream, abstraction and simplicity with a poetic physical vocabulary.
This is a work in progress for our new duet.
Inspired by parallel pathways, shared thoughts and distant trails.
Created in at Coachwerks during a one week residency.

ADMETO

Admeto, re di Tessaglia, by George Frideric Handel
at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival
& the International Handel Festival in Göttingen, Germany.

Directed by Doris Dörrie
Choreographed & danced by Tadashi Endo & the Mamu Dance Theatre

Conducted by NICHOLAS McGegan

'with sunny playing, striking design and some very appealing dancing...

Mamu Dance Theatre provides the other highlight. The Japanese style Butoh is associated with angst, but here it's downright cuddly. The dancers pop up as flirty ladies-in-waiting, scampering deer and adorable sheep...' The Independent

Photos Linus Fellbom

‘CONTRE-IMAGE’ extrait vidéo

[FR]

Géométries intérieures désordonnées

Touchés par le travail de Francesca Woodman, photographe, et "La chambre claire" de Roland Barthes, dans leur questionnement sur l’identité humaine et ses représentions, Quatre artistes interrogent cet entre-deux de l'image fixe à une image mouvementée... dans le déplacement d'un médium à l'autre où l'image se révèle dans ce qui s'efface tout autant que dans ce qui apparaît.

Comment traverser le miroir? Est-il possible de se cacher pour mieux se révéler?
L’appareil photo nous offre des métaphores uniques (reflets, surfaces, enveloppes, transparence, luminosité) et nous propose des moyens de repenser les notions de temps et d’espace à partir du corps.

« La photo de l’être disparu vient me toucher comme les rayons différés d’une étoile. Une sorte de lien ombilical relie le corps de la chose photographiée à mon regard : la lumière, quoique impalpable, est bien ici un milieu charnel, une peau que je partage avec celui ou celle qui a été photographié. »

Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire

‘CONTRE-IMAGE’ short video edit

[EN]

disordered interior geometries

“In my imagination, the photograph represents the very subtle moment where I am neither subject nor object, but rather a subject which feels himself becoming an object: I live a micro-experience of death (of the parentheses): I become truly phantom.” Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire

CONTRE-IMAGE is a choreographic project that searches to translate metaphors coming from the medium of photography into dance. Created in collaboration with dancer/ choreographer Ephia, visual artist Céline Pierre and musician (bass player and composer) Benoît Cancoin This project is mainly inspired by the work of the young American photographer, Francesca Woodman and the essay ‘La Chambre Claire’ by Roland Barthes. Playing with the different layers of reality: the audience is taken in a journey to traverse these layers, to peel open the photograph. We play with tears, with what is missing and what is uncovered and suggest the serene violence of a fragmented body.
CONTRE-IMAGE has received the following residencies for its creation & development;

December 07- at the RAM DAM centre of choreographic research in Lyon run by Maguy Marin

February/March 08- at the Opera house of St. Etienne

June 08- in Nogent- sur- Seine at the Studio of video Artist Céline Pierre November 08 at the Atelier de Paris Caroline Carlson.

January 09 – at MICADANSE, dance centre in Paris supporting the creation of New Dance

February 09 – at the CCN (National Choreographic Centre) at Rillieux-la-Pape directed by Maguy Marin

LOVE & TEARS

Improvisation Danse Butoh à paris
Le samedi 24 janvier 2009
Entre 16h et 22h
Au Vent se Lève

Danse: Atsushi Takenouchi, Nanami Koushou, Ippei Hosaka, Tombo, Jean-Daniel Fricker, Céline Angèle, Guillaume Cefelman et Yael Karavan

Musique
Hiroko Komiya, Lena Circus (Guillaume Arbonville; Nicolas Moulin, Antoine Letellier), Jean Dussin, Jean Bordé
et Claude Parle

Lights
Nadim Deaibes

love&tears

2008

‘FALLING’

a physical theatre/site specific performance/instalation in memory of Nagasaki August 1945 Commissioned by the Nagasaki prefecture museum for the opening of the retrospective exhibition by Dani Karavan

Created and performed by Yael Karavan,
Music by Tomo Japan

Falling, falling, gonna drop like a stone
I’m falling through the atmosphere on a warm afternoon
Your breath, my air
Fog lifts, I stare
I’m gone, but you’re there.

Performed in November 08 in the Shunt Lounge, London
December 08 in Nagasaki prefecture Museum

October 09 at the Queen's Elm gallery- Chelsea, London

September 2010 Fresh from the oven Live@Coachwerks, Brighton.

SPECTHALIUM – The many moods of heart

Work in progress in collaboration with dancer designer Anat Zafrir of DandA
Specthalium is a multimedia dance performance, combining various disciplines of dance, performance and visual arts.

We are searching for a new style of interaction and inter-relations between a spatial design and the choreographed spatial movement, a new dialogue between the form and its content.

Specthalium is unveiling the many moods of heart.

2007

KI ME RA - a Dance spectacle

Produced by: BUTOH CENTRUM MAMU, Göttingen/Germany
Tadashi Endo was inspired by his own memories of childhood and the film "DREAMS" by Akira Kurosawa, creating a dance spectacle.

Walking through the path of our lives, carrying an invisible burden on our backs, with each step the weight seams to grow, is it our soul? our life experience? memories or dreams?... we each carry our own chimera, through the journey called life.
Concept & Dance : Tadashi Endo & MAMU DANCE THEATRE
Fran Barbe, Yael Karavan, Yumino Seki.

ASSEMBLY-Part 1

Assembly Part-1 is a mysterious, dynamic, humorous and visually stunning Dance-theatre performance, inspired by ballroom dancing in Black & white with no facial expressions. Performance length- 50 min.

Performed at the Robin Howard Dance Theatre as part of RESOLUTION, London, at Atalate theatre in Gothenburg, Sweden & at ‘Le Theatre des deux Rêves’ in Paris.
Concept & Choreography by Linda Remahl
Directed by Yael Karavan & Linda Remahl

"When the dance becomes a kaleidoscope
6 women meet in a ball of reflections Where they compete with grace and elegance yearning to become the uncertain queens of a majestic mechanism.

As time passes their presence pierces the stage with black and white stars"

PRESS:

‘Yael Karavan proved herself a charismatic entertainer in Solas Dance Company’s Assembly part 1. Framed by oversize fairy lights in gaudy colors, Karavan blitzed through klezmer, gypsy and tango fiddle in a glorious parody of a ladies’ night out. Backed by a chorus of deadpan cookie-cutter girls in a variety of garish outfits, Karavan’s vaudeville clown stumbled into mimes of flirtation and femininity, insecure, questioning and sometimes melancholy. Albeit with little sense of progression, choreographer Linda Remahl explored rituals of womanhood, with a beautiful, bold and self-deprecating humor.’ Lucy Ribchester- LONDON DANCE MAGAZINE

Assembly

2006

HUMAN FOREST

A Site Specific performance in collaboration with ‘J.A.M- Dance Company’ and artistic director Yasu Ohashi for the official inauguration of Dani Karavan’s sculpture site in Mouro, Narah- Japan.

Human Forest

SOMNAMBULES

Site specific performance created & performed by Yael Karavan & Tanya Khabarova At ESPACE KARAVAN in paris- October 2006

The audience is peeping through a windowed gallery into the private moments of a man and a woman searching for each other through their passions and dreams. (Inspired by the work of Bruno Schultz)

THE WAY HOME

Winner of the ‘TEATRONETO’ one man show festival, Tel-Aviv 2006

‘Transforming the concept of Home into the belly button of the world.’

solo performance 55mins
Created by Yael karavan and Naomi Silman
Performed by Yael Karavan

What is a home? What does it represent for us? And which forms does it take in our life? A home as a physical and material concept, as a feeling or as a metaphorical symbol, forever changing its representations during a lifetime.

The Way Home is an anachronistic voyage through three generations, within their cycles of life and death, searching for the fragile balance between the need to adapt and the lack of identity.
It is a journey through our internal landscapes, questioning the concept and meaning of a Home.The Way Home is a physical theater performance. The actor’s work is in constant metamorphoses, using a rich physical vocabulary, various stage disciplines and beautiful visual imagery, from this process a mysterious, humorous, fragile and breath taking world is unveiled.

REVIEWS:

‘An exceptional non-verbal theatrical experience which creates an inspiring, aesthetic, touching and precise physical language, the high professional level of the actress, and the natural way in which she has bridged between the physical and the textual parts of the performance, as well as the wide variation of characters that she enacted with much talent, all of the above have brought us to the prominent conviction that Yael Karavan deserves to receive the price of the TEATRONETO festival.’ Jury of the TEATRONETO one-man-show festival

‘The Way Home is exceptional and different in its character and quality, not only in the context of a one-man show festival. It is a total theatre performance, created mainly from visual imagery around the subject of femininity and the concept of Home. Yael Karavan, with her body and face - mainly with her eyes - full and rich of expression, is leading the audience through a chain of beautiful images and thus transforming the concept of Home into the belly button of the world.’ Michael Handelzalts- ‘HAARETS’

‘The Way Home is an independent and original creation with astounding visual imagery… Especially breath taking are the opening and closing images of the piece...The creation of Yael Karavan and Naomi Silman is full of beauty, enriched by a magical lighting designed by Uri Rubinstein and a moving soundtrack mixed by Uri Frost.’ Zvi Goren- ‘HABAMA’(The Stage)

2004-5

FRAGMENTS FROM THE ARK

December 2005
Created and performed by Tanya Khabarova , Yael Karavan & Marco Di Stefano
A commission by Macherata Festival (italy)

Just before the rain a stream of air appeared in the atmosphere
As if time stood still
And all rational concepts and logics disappeared
Only a transitional sensation remained.

Time stopped
It stopped counting the downfalls of the past
And the rising heroes of the future Then a light premonition arose
‘All which existed will continue to exist’
As a confirmation for the next to come

Exactly at this moment the sky expanded into an ocean
Where the unique essence lives its true moment
And where aspirations to rescue the world
Spills the ancestral experience
Into the everlasting rivers of being. T.K

An exiting and inspiring dance theatre performance, vibrant and poetic
Created by former members of Derevo Company
A multi ethnic and multi-disciplinary creation (Russia-Israel-Italy)
Full of energy, imagery and magic
Touching the wounds of our world with the benevolence of hope.

NOCTURNAL THOUGTHTS

2005, at the Incontro Teatro Internazionale festival of Amandola, Italy
Solo performance created and performed by Yael Karavan
Inspired by the poetic biblical texts of the ‘song of songs’

‘At night in my bed
I searched for thee whom my heart longed for
I asked for thee
but found him not

I shall rise and wander in the town
Through the markets and the streets
I will search for thee whom my heart longed for
I will ask for the…’
canticles from the ‘song of songs’

TRAMPOLINA

Solo performance created and performed by Yael Karavan
Live music by Andre Sizintsiev
at the ‘Vertical’ festival in St. Petersburg, Russia 2004

‘Again and again we are reborn.
It is not enough simply to be born of the mother’s womb.
Many births are necessary.
Be reborn always and everywhere.
Again and again.’
Tatsumi Hijikata

A journey through the cycles of life In constant metamorphoses

Trampolina is born from a melting candle
Alone, she finds a branch of a tree and adopts it as a friend and a guide
Through oceans, landscapes and time
They travel...

During the Second World War, my mother’s life was saved by escaping from Poland to the Siberian forests.
This performance is dedicated to her life journey.

UP YOU GET

a video installation

ZOO

An absurd physical theatre performance
Created in 2004 at DEREVO laboratorium in Hellerau Festspielhause, Dresden- Germany

Created and performed by
Adam Read and Yael Karavan

In 2004 we’ve found ourselves in a ruined piece of history, a haunted organ of this world’s memory, in the east of Germany, where we have created, lived and dreamt during 6 weeks…
From this process many parallel stories, worlds and atmospheres have revealed themselves, creating 35 short moments of various characters and moods which have emerged during this time.

ZOO Is a voyage through various styles of physical performance and dance.
It is the soft liquid one can find inside a vertebra, or between the articulations.
ZOO is a timeless journey through humans, animals, species, myths poetry and the absurd all living within 2 characters in a constant metamorphosis.

Zoo

2003

WAY TO THE HIDEN GARDEN

July 2003
A site specific performance on the sculpture site of Dani Karavan in Sapporo
Commissioned by the Sapporo open air contemporary art museum in Japan
A collaboration with ADAPT- theatre picture collision
Choreographed by Yael Karavan
in collaboration with dancers: Shinichi momo Koga, Yuko Kaseki, Minako Seki, nils Willas, Sten Roudstrom and Special guest Tadashi Endo
Live Music by Qasim Qnaqvi and Shezad.

BERESHIT

‘Site Specific’ Performance in collaboration with Butoh dancer/choreographer; Tadashi Endo,
in the sculpture site of Dani Karavan at the Museum of Modern Art of Kagoshima- Japan. 2003

A rusted metal corridor expands from a mountain peak
Marked by splits of sunlight and thus creating a game between light and shadow.
A corridor of passage, a journey across time and space.
At the end of the corridor a glass window reveals a pastoral landscape and a never-ending sky.
We remain in a state of suspension.
On the glass there is an inscription, the first words of the Genesis (Bereshit) :
‘In the beginning god created the sky and the earth’
Black and white, man and woman, a game of oppositions, the friction of creation.

THE COLLECTOR 2003

Created by Marie Gabriele Roti in collaboration with Yael Karavan and Linda Remahl
Performed at the Robin Howard, The Place Dance Theatre- London
Funded by The British Arts Council
Music by Nick parkin
Light design by Karen Norris
Costumes by Lindsay John The collector takes its initial inspiration from the best-selling novel by John Fowles and research into the 19th century hysteria. Each performer inhabits their own demarcated installation space created through objects and projected film images. A fragmented journey through themes of confinement, freedom and divided selves sees the unfolding of a haunting interplay between character and space.

IN BETWEEN

(As part of ‘Fleshmirror’ event curated by Yael Karavan at ‘the space’ London in collaboration with Fran Barbe, Yumino Seki and Shane Irwin)

A Solo Performance created&performed by Yael Karavan in 2003 in London.
IN BETWEEN is a dance theatre performance.
Music - Sako
Lights - Socrates Mitsios

Suspended between two realities, two continents, two lovers, the tragic and the comic, In-Between is a choreographic poem about the interior duality and the exterior solitude of the human condition.

DYING LAUGHING

Duet with Shane Irwin as part of ‘Fleshmirror’ event 2003 London
Inspired by the poem of Rumi entitled ‘Dying Laughing’

2002

TEST LABOR Z.0005

As member of Ten-Pen-Chi Company directed by Yumiko Yoshioka
Schloss Broellin/ Berlin- Germany 2002-03
Installation by Joachim Manger

The chimera of gene technique, a contrast between the aesthetics of movement based on butoh and contemporary themes, which Yoshioka relates to her search for basic feelings.
One of the most extravagant projects so far has been ´Test Laboratory Z.0005´, enclosing four dancers in a threatening 2.50 m high metallic machine. Hares, set free in the surroundings, activate one or another light-installation, which in turn activates mechanisms for opening or sealing enclosures. The body is hermetically caught then free to move in two water basins. Picturesque and metaphorical, TEST LABOR is a hard core dance/performance installation.

Test Labor

2001

MIGRATION 01

Göettingen-Germany 2000-03
As member of MAMU DANCE THEATRE directed by Tadashi Endo

’ Their wings open wide
Two butterflies, glide
Across Manclmhuria
A vast open land, white as snow.
And the voice of lost loves
Calling back from the dead
Make echoes.’
By Waka Morinishi, Tadashi Endo's grandmother
MAMU DANCE THEATRE was founded by Tadashi Endo in 1992. Alongside his own successful solo career, he wanted to work with European dancers using Japanese Butoh as the starting point, but encouraging each dancer to work from their own personal and cultural history to find new approaches to dance.

The three dancers in MIGRATION 01 originate from three different countries - Frances Barbe (Australia), Yael Karavan (Israel), and Yumino Seki (Japan) though they have all been based in London for many years.

1999-02

FROM THE EARTH - a memory

Solo Performance
Created and Performed by Yael Karavan 1999-2002 London/Japan 55mins
Lights- Socrates Mitsios
Scenography and costumes- Yael Karavan and Désirée Domec

FROM THE EARTH- a memory is a visual poem, between body and sculpture, with elements of Butoh, Dance and Physical Theatre, it was premiered in July 1999 at the Asbestos-Kan studio, the memorial theatre of Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of Butoh dance and was later performed in Brazil, London and Israel.

A song of the soul as it takes form from the earth.
A journey of creation, birth and becoming
Inspired by; nature, butoh dance and the eternal cycle of death and rebirth.

“Dance when you are broken open.
Dance if you have torn the bondage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance when you are perfectly free”
RUMI
Press
“With elements of Butoh and Dance, Karavan’s physical discipline is extraordinary. Every pulse and movement count as she lets us into the intimate womb she inhabits. In this sensual piece… all is communicated” TOTAL THEATRE

2000

PICKNICK

a short B&W silent film

Boris & Blanche go for a pick nick
when suddenly love shows its possessive face...

a tragic comedy
created by Yael Karavan, Socrates Mitsios and Naomi Silman

filmed in Hampstead Heath- London in 2000

SPRING & TO LOVE

Commissioned by the Stoke Newington Festival –London 2000

Evenings for Lewis Carroll
At Les Voutes Paris 1999
A site specific performance for 7 dancers/performers