VERTIGO DANCE COMPANY - DANCED SPECTACLE
Dancers ecstatically plow through the air, swirl across the stage like snowflakes in a storm, circle around their partners in a breakneck but controlled manner, explode like dynamite and freeze in fractions of a second, they bend and stretch virtuously and find themselves in contemplative calm. The Vertigo Dance Company was in town - and, as is so often the case with their performances, they left a massive mark: In the memory of the audience.
Several things impressed during their performance: the dancing skills, in general, of the troupe founded thirty years ago by Noa Wertheim and Adi Sha'al in Jerusalem. The fascinating choreography of Noa Wertheim, which seems to be built around a feather-light center of gravity. And then there is the content of the performance "One. One & One," which can be summed up as: How do I manage to live out my individuality without being marginalized as a part of the whole? How can I form true relationships without losing myself and still remain unassailable in my personality?
These are temporarily relevant and current topics, especially in a society that is predominantly characterized by self-reflection. And they are topics that, on a small scale, a group of artists also has to deal with on a daily basis if they want to be perceived successfully.
Noa Wertheim and her dance ensemble have incorporated a number of parables and solution models into their program in order to make these apparent paradoxes visible. Some of them come quite close to a free (dance) suggestion. Emotions are given over to the unconscious and simply transformed into movements. The Vertigo Dance Company succeeds impressively in this immense balancing act between demanding material and sensual execution.
The stage, covered with desert dust, hints at a fleeting archaicness, with the dancers creating constantly changing structures on the stage floor. These are also the temporary traces of individual causality, also as a symbol of a driven longing for belonging. And so, at times, the group moves as one, like a surging ship on a stormy ocean, until the individual dancers reveal and lose themselves again in individual figures, underscoring their self-sufficient character. It is life as a controversy between challenge and fulfillment, between keeping one's composure and letting oneself go, between aspiration and reality.
Kulturkomplott, Jörg Konrad, 21.4.2022

HUMAN UNITY AND DIVERSITY
At the end, when the lights slowly go out and the group has reunited after all the individual bodily explorations, they stand side by side in several rows, flapping their arms like wings, while an individual moves from one to the other, needing to lean. A content-rich final image of Wertheim's "One. One & One," which was among the most impressive dance events of the Forum season now drawing to a close.
Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung, Dietholf Zerweck, 26.4.2022

A TRAVERSAL BETWEEN THE WORLDS
It is a powerful dance that reflects the external and internal world, constantly alternating between an explosive physical presence and meditative more delicate interjections.

One sees a rich movement language full of drama and quiet undertones, suggesting different perspectives between near and far, the individual and the other. The world, the individual and the community, the oneness and the mass is seen from very different angles.

There are grandiose scenes of rebellion, between attraction and repulsion, sometimes there is gloriously casual and lanky dancing, then again with almost gymnastic and artistic elements, interrupted by contemplative islands of calm.
Above all, the choreography shows a dance art full of emotion, energy and penetrating power.
Weiler Zeitung, Jürgen Scharf 4.5.2022

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