Choreography, music and light concept: Amos Ben-Tal // Live music: Dyzack (aka Erik Hofland) // Dance: Amos Ben-Tal, Aurélie Cayla and Milena Twiehaus // Artistic advice: Yvan Dubreuil

We live in hectic times. Society is changing at an ever-faster pace. Digital transactions often take the place of personal interactions. The artist collective OFFprojects offer an antidote. OFFprojects invite you to go OFFline.

OFFline is a sensory experience- an evening of thrilling contemporary dance, live music and audience-interaction.

In this piece, choreographer and composer Amos Ben-Tal and the dancers use only movement, light and sound to create a world that has as many rules and structures as it does chance and chaos. Forced to constantly interact and choose, the dancers acquire a vulnerable yet vital quality. In the second part of the performance the audience is invited into the process of OFFline and members of the public can ask questions and make requests, further affecting the path of the choreography. Accompanying this shared journey is live music by singer-songwriter and guitar virtuoso Dyzack.

OFFprojects is a new group of former dancers of the world renowned Nederlands Dans Theater and Batsheva Ensemble. The collective creates exciting multi-disciplinary performances and events and has already presented its works all over The Netherlands as well as in France, England and Germany.

"OFFprojects succeed in thinking "out of the box" about dance and take the audience with them on this journey. These are all awe inspiring dancers that have tremendous control of their body, while at the same time showing great pleasure in what they do".

… Theaterkrant magazine **** (four stars)

OFFline is a co-production between OFFprojects and Korzo Productions.

http://www.off-projects.com | http://www.facebook.com/offprojects

Movement workshop with Amos Ben-Tal / OFFprojects

5.12.2014: 18.30 -20.30 at Tapetenfabrik

Amos Ben-Tal danced at Nederlands Dans Theater for nine years where he also started his career as a choreographer. For the past 6 years Amos has been free-lancing as choreographer and musician and in 2012 he co-founded his own group OFFprojects, a collective that creates multi-disciplinary performances and events. On December 6 OFFprojects will present their first full-length performance OFFline at Theater im Ballsaal. In preparation for this performance Amos will teach a workshop where participants can experience the unique way in which OFFprojects dancers train. Amos' class consists of guided improvisation and tasks aimed at improving body/mind awareness, precision, creativity and stamina. After warming up with this approach Amos will teach some material from OFFline to demonstrate how he combines set movement and structures with improvisation to create what he calls 'live choreography', a concept which is at the heart of OFFline.

Amos Ben-Tal was born in Israel in 1979. He started dancing at the age of 13 in various schools in Israel and completed his dance training in 1997 at The National Ballet School in Toronto, Canada.

Amos then came to Holland where he joined the Nederlands Dans Theater, performing with the company for nine years between 1997 and 2006. In 2006 Amos left the NDT to dedicate himself fully to his own work. He then created and performed the duet Tangent with Kenzo Kusuda, which was presented at the Cadance Festival in The Hague. In early 2007 he premiered a work named Ziggurat, a trio for dancer, actress and musician, commissioned by Korzo Productions for the program Here we live and now. Amos has been involved in music from a young age and has included this in his work, writing, recording and at times performing the music for all of his pieces. For the 2008 CaDance festival, Amos created We are not humanity, a crossover work involving his band playing live with dancers. This full-length production has since been performed in major music venues such as the Melkweg and Paradiso in Amsterdam. Most recently Amos created a short solo for Korzo productions which he performed himself entitled The Van Manen Effect. He also began a collaboration with Ana Reti and Claudio Stellato under the name Palinka Collective. The first result of this collaboration was the duet Fregoli Syndrome, which premiered in September 2009 at the Trafo Theater in Budapest.

At the moment Amos is working on a series of shorter, stripped-down investigative works aimed at sharpening his understanding and skills as a dance-maker. The first step in this process was a research-residency at Archauz Choreographic Center in Aarhus, Denmark, that resulted in the study-duet 7 in 11.