Noah Eshkol Body Orchestra

She was a pioneer who reimagined the art of dance: a tribute to Noa Eshkol to mark her 100th birthday

By Irene Sieben

Celebrating luminaries is a challenge for art—one that requires not losing sight of the bigger picture. What takes center stage, and what remains in the shadows of a life that began in one of the first kibbutzim and unfolded on a grand scale amid armed conflicts since the founding of Israel? Noa Eshkol was many things: a dancer, choreographer, pianist, and artist. But as the inventor of an analytical-geometric movement language, she captured the most fleeting of all arts and challenges us to see, think, and understand. If she were still alive today, in times of new deadly battles, would her response be just as creative as it was in 1973? When dancers from her Chamber Dance Group were forced to fight in the Yom Kippur War, she sought an outlet in the spontaneous arrangement of colorful fabric scraps. The first of her fantastic tapestries was born.

Dance without costumes, music or stage design

The creative impetus of this catastrophe was forward-looking. During this period, she collaborated with her dancers to create opulent tapestries, which she “choreographed” from multicolored patches without ever using a pair of scissors. “No rules, no theory—just passion,” she said of her obsession. Whether in the form of blooming patchwork gardens, luminous landscapes, desert birds, or somber collages of mourning, these tapestries still stand today as a striking contrast in form and color to her strictly minimalist dance, which makes do without lighting, costumes, music, or stage design—composed on the drawing board as movement structures that come to life rhythmically to the click of a metronome. It seems as though one art form has nothing to do with the other. Yet Noa Eshkol, a citizen of the world, pursued a strategy throughout her life—in the intuitive ecstasy of shaping patterns and materials—that was similar to the way she constructed her dances in the neutral emptiness of the stage: free from any routine, open to the subtlest nuances. 

Noa Eshkol’s life began in 1924 at Kibbutz Degania B, which her father, Levi Eshkol, had founded. An emigrant from Ukraine, he served as Israel’s third prime minister from 1963 to 1969. Noa was born to Levi Eshkol during his first marriage to Rivka Maharshak. After the divorce, Rivka moved to New York with young Noa and taught Hebrew. In 1931, mother and daughter returned to Palestine and settled in Holon in the early 1940s. Over the decades, their home evolved into a research center for dance, architecture, and science. Even after Noa Eshkol’s death in 2007, it remained a place of practice, exchange, and analysis, alongside the Center for Movement Notation at Tel Aviv University, which she founded in 1972.

Noa first studied piano with Frank Peleg and was thus familiar with the system of musical notation. At age 19, she began studying dance in Tel Aviv with Tehila Ressler. Having trained under Gret Palucca in Dresden as Tile Rössler, she was forced to leave the school in 1933, like many Jewish students, and found a new home in Palestine.

When Noa was searching for a method of recording dance that resembled musical notation, Ressler introduced her to Laban’s Kinetography. In 1946, Noa went to study with Rudolf von Laban in Manchester and later with his student Sigurd Leeder in London. Her early dance experiences were thus rooted in expressionist dance and were closely linked to “Labanotation,” the standard system for notating modern dance.

The first blueprint for her much more complex notation system had already emerged in England. While Laban used an icosahedron—a crystal shape—as a model for the surrounding space and developed his movement scales within it, she chose spheres as her reference system. She analytically broke down the body into independent parts, like a stick figure or a “man without qualities,” as she puts it. Each limb is reduced to a longitudinal axis, bounded by joints (spheres) that can be moved along a continuum of curves, ranging from a cone to a full rotation. A direction on the horizontal plane of the sphere is chosen as the starting position, the zero point. By taking measurements at 45-degree intervals, eight positions are obtained. Four vertical planes intersect the horizontal circle; they are perpendicular to it. Every complex sequence of movements can thus be broken down into gestures, much like lines of latitude and longitude on a globe. A precise system for differentiating movement in three dimensions. 

Learning Movement

Noa Eshkol wanted to prove that dance and knowledge are not mutually exclusive, that people who dance are not illiterate and do not need to be trained like horses. At the same time, she tested the method’s suitability as a universal movement notation in fields ranging from physical therapy and neuroscience to sports and zoology. She gathered a close-knit research collective around her, which made it possible to gain insight into the complexity of every action. 

In London, Noa Eshkol had gathered a circle of friends in her basement kitchen, which included Moshé Feldenkrais. He had a major influence on her understanding of functional relationships. The physicist and judo expert had fled France to escape the Nazis and had been involved in the development of sonar equipment for the British Navy. At the same time, he created his method of movement learning and introduced it to dancers at the Sadler’s Wells Company and, later, the Royal Ballet. He introduced Noa to judo. She sparked his fascination with notation. In this way, they engaged in mutual learning.

Practice and Theory

Back in Israel in 1958, she developed the fully formed “Eshkol-Wachmann Movement Notation” (EWMN) in collaboration with architect Avraham Wachmann, a professor at the Technion in Haifa. At the same time, she founded her Chamber Dance Group. Both practice and theory were closely intertwined, for her dances did not arise spontaneously through improvisation or aesthetic planning; they were composed in written form. Feldenkrais gave the dance group practical lessons; conversely, written notations of his practical lessons were published in three books. In the foreword, he pays tribute to the original way in which Noa Eshkol adopted what she had learned from him. 

John Gabriel Harries, who was Noa’s student in London and a dancer in her group, writes that both were trailblazers far ahead of their time. “Eshkol was undoubtedly drawn to a system in which the body’s movements were treated as pure movement. The dialogue between Moshé Feldenkrais and Noa Eshkol was an unusual meeting of minds that became relevant to two branches of physical culture: therapy and dance.” In addition to creating the notation, Harries not only produced delicate drawings but was also a co-founder of the Noa Eshkol Movement Notation Society.

While modern dance was flourishing in the United States, Martha Graham was inspiring the Batsheva Dance Company with her expressive works, and expressive dance was giving way to dance theater in this country, Noa Eshkol had strictly rejected all these concepts. She believed that “pure movement” could also evoke the deepest emotions. She strove for a form of abstraction resembling musical notation. In 1991, she wrote: “In retrospect, I see that practically all my dances are exercises in movement notation. The purpose of composing with notation is to break down a movement theme into its elements, without preconceived ideas of a story. It is always a matter of treating the elements as parts of a continuum—that is, systematically.”

Watching and listening in silence

That sounds cold and austere. In reality, the pieces—often danced in pairs, trios, or quartets, and almost in unison—develop a magical pull in their simplicity, like a human orchestra. You can’t look away, because a head tilted slightly to one side, steps that meticulously curve forward, backward, and sideways, and arms that cross like broken wings seem to tell a story. Watching and listening in silence becomes an event in itself. What a blessing that her Chamber Dance Group still makes this miracle visible, tangible, and conceivable today. Because her legacy lives on, and the art-historical reception of her work has grown over the past decade. She herself, however, had no interest whatsoever in such fame.

This text is an abridged version. The text first appeared in “tanz – Zeitschrift für Ballett, Tanz und Performance”, February 2024 issue, p. 50, Der Theaterverlag – Friedrich Berlin GmbH, Berlin. We are very grateful for the opportunity to publish this.