DANCE/CIRCUS - Chutzpah PLUS
Pli
Les SUBS – Inbal Ben Haim / Domitille Martin / Alexis Mérat (Israel/France)
Co-Presented with PuSh Festival
February 2-3, 2024 at 7:30pm and February 2-4 Online
Vancouver Playhouse

Join Chutzpah PLUS for a special event presented with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.

A circus artist and two visual artists come together over paper. From the blank page to the crumpled draft, paper carries our innermost thoughts and universal truths: a witness to the everyday.

What else can it tell us? 

Seen through the prism of circus and sculpture, a unique conversation unfolds between the suspended body and the paper that has become its rope. Which is more vulnerable, the suspended body or the paper? Between flesh and raw material, the ground and the air, we dive into a landscape that is continually torn down, and rebuilt. Layer by layer, the body and the paper travel together in a fragment of our changing world. At once a captivating beauty and a distressing sound, paper becomes more than a mirror. A projection of our inner worlds, it embodies the poetic expression of life, vulnerable, strong and constantly transforming.

“Serving as equipment, set, and shelter, the material is, for this young circus artist, the foundation for a complex language that speaks, through continual transformation, of the strengths and weaknesses of an artist in the world…The pages that turn in Inbal Ben Haïm piece leave traces in the artists’ bodies and the audience’s memory.”

–SCENEWEB, November 12 2021

Inbal Ben Haim was interviewed on the PuSh Play podcast by Gabrielle Martin, Director of Programming. Listen to the podcast episode here.

About the Artist

Born in Jerusalem in 1990, Inbal Ben Haim grew up in the Israeli countryside. After studying visual arts, she discovered the circus in 2004 at the Free Dome Project then the Shabazi Circus. The call of heights and creating with her body led her to specialize first in the static trapeze, then the rich minimalism of the aerial rope. In 2011 she left her homeland to follow her artistic path in France.

In Summer 2018, she premiered Racine(s) (Root(s)), which developed from her meeting the musician, composer, and arranger David Amar and the director Jean Jacques Minazio. At the same time, she developed a teaching method for therapeutic circus and worked in various contexts in Israel and France.

By blending circus, dance, theatre, improvisation, and visual arts, Ben Haim has created her own form of poetic expression. Largely inspired by the human bond made possible by the stage, the ring, and the street, she aims to create strong connections between the audience and the artist, the intimate and the spectacular, the earth and air, and the here and there.

Dates: February 2-3, 2024 (online February 2-4)

Time: 7:30pm

Running Time: 60 minutes, no intermission

Tickets: $39 and up. Streaming tickets available for $30. Purchase via PuSh Festival website