Choreographic Residency 2025 - Amit Noy
The first choreographic residency for 2025 is Amit Noy.
Photo by Thierry Hauswald
I approach dance as a container for the metabolisation of questions about my life and the world: how am I welcoming history? How am I loving and being loved? How am I present to violence and repair? How do I feel about being alive?
For the past several years, I have been inside an ongoing collaboration with my family members (none of whom are professional performers). Together with my teenage sister, parents, and grandmother, we made several pieces together which culminated in the premiere of a full length work 'A Big Big Room Full of Everybody’s Hope' at Theatre de la Ville—Paris in September 2023.
In working with my family, I was interested embodied relation as a container for complex relationship—the idea that how my body moves alongside my father's body is a reflection of the life we have lived together. I was also working to understand how time, and specifically the time of violence, filters through generations. Rather than dwelling in the rehearsal of a past trauma, the work focussed on the strategies we employ—disobedience, misappropriation, disavowal, and laughter—in order to live in the aftermath of violence.
More recently, I've been working on a solo which continues this research, though particularly through a reckoning with multiple histories and present horrors in Israel/Palestine (a place I have whakapapa connections to). In this piece, called 'Good Luck' and premiering July 2025 at Festival Montpellier Danse, I am wrestling with the violent and bloody history of the Zionist project alongside the historical parameters of Jewish trauma and grief. Through a playfully sadistic appropration and transformation of Israeli cultural fetishes—anthems, folk dances, and food objects—I invoke the blind brutal force of oppression.
Both these pieces are intensely multidisciplinary—they have strong relationship to text and song. I have begun to notice that song and lyric are important vehicles in the work I'm making. They're a melodic gateway to truth.
I am confronted daily by the the present world in a way that indelibly marks my creativity. Whatever is keeping me up at night inevitably enters the studio with me.
I am inspired by my sister, my mother, my father, my grandmother. I am inspired by Michael Keegan-Dolan and Miguel Gutierrez, two choreographic artists who I have deep relationships of respect and collaboration with. Recently, I've worked as assistants for both of them, directing and holding space for larger groups of dance artists. This experience is a large part of what drives me to apply for this residency: since I've mostly worked on my own or with my biological relations in the past, I'm curious and excited to begin working with small groups of skilled and intelligent dancers (which Footnote exemplifies).
When I'm working in the studio, I'm never thinking much about other dance artists though. I'm thinking often about my love for slow cinema, particularly the films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I'm thinking about certain fiction writers, like Eileen Myles or Gary Fisher, and their ability to synthesise real experience into art objects, in dizzying ways. I'm thinking about visual artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Ralph Lemon, who fashion such beautiful artifacts out of a sharp and clear relationship to history and concept.
I'm thinking about how to make something that is both immediately accessible to a range of audience, whilst confounding and expanding each viewer's relationship (including my own) to the topic at hand. I am thinking about how to challenge people, and also how to soothe them. I am thinking about how to create a choreographic container that is fulfilling and stimulating for those inside it—the performers. I am thinking about what healing could feel like, or if not healing, at the very least a slightly less unsettled way of life. I am thinking about dance as a vehicle for all this, and why I remain committed to movement—it changes my world every day.
https://amitnoy.com/
Rose Tapsell in one of Amit’s works, photo by Edith Amituanai.