Who are we?
The Jerusalem Ballet is a small but ambitious theater company developing at the crossroads of world cultures. Just as her dance styles are diverse, so is her troupe, made up of representatives of various countries and dance styles. Some of them are graduates of their own dance school, who just recently ran to classes as children. Some are representatives of aliyah of different years and waves.
Jerusalem Ballet
We at the Jerusalem Ballet put much emphasis on conveying a story to our audience. With each ballet and with each new production, our goal is to sweep the audience into a story that will touch them, make them laugh, arouse nostalgia, be thought-provoking, and prove unforgettable – all in keeping with the language of neo-classical ballet. Alongside a strong foundation of classical ballet and remarkable physical abilities, the Jerusalem Ballet dancers employ theatrical skills to convey the story behind the ballet.
The repertoire of the Jerusalem Ballet includes a diverse variety of tales: The Classics (such as Shakespeare), comedies, tragedies, children’s shows, original stories, and Jewish-Israeli works. The past three years have yielded three unique productions when the Jerusalem Ballet’s Artistic Director, Naday Timofeyeva, decided to develop the Jewish story. To this day, there have been no neo-classical ballet adaptations of Jewish plays or novels, nor of historic Jewish events. Thus, Timofeyeva created a trilogy, of which the first installment is an adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s “Fiddler on the Roof” (2018), which is set at the end of the 19th century, during the pogroms against the Jews of Europe. The ballet production received rave reviews and became a huge success, performing on almost every stage in the country, and continues to do so to this day.
The second installment of Timofeyeva’s trilogy is “Memento: Franceska Mann’s Last Dance” (2019). The ballet is set in 1943 and tells the tale of Franceska Mann, a renowned Polish ballerina who is sent to Auschwitz. In her last moments, right before the gas chambers, she seduced an SS officer, Josef Schillinger, took his gun, and shot him. “Memento,” choreographed by Nadya Timofeyeva, pays tribute to the heroic ballerina who met with a tragic end.
The third installment of the trilogy takes place during the “Second Aliyah” (second immigration wave) as the State of Israel was established. The ballet “He Walked in the Fields” (2022), choreographed by Igor Menishikov, is an adaptation of Moshe Shamir’s novel of the same name. The ballet portrays the Israeli “Tzabar,” life on the kibbutz, the settling and building of Israel and the recruitment to the Palmach, accompanied by the music of Jewish composers and music from the film soundtrack.
