A Jewish environmental film? Yes, it exists! Courtesy of ChaiFlicks.Happy post-Tu BiShvat! This week, I wanted to revisit a “Jewish ecological” film, a very popular genre… Just kidding. A Jewish ecological film? A Jewish environmental film? A film about Tu BiShvat or that explores both the environment and Judaism? Environmental films, such as An Inconvenient Truth, have always been around, but ones with a Jewish theme are practically nonexistent, at least to my knowledge. I did some Googling, and as I kept entering “Jewish”, “film”, “environmental”, and “Tu BiShivat” in the search box, there was just one film that kept popping up again and again: RENEWAL.
First of all, if you’re not familiar with the holiday of Tu BiShvat, it’s like Jewish Earth Day. Known as the “New Year of the Trees,” the holiday emphasizes spreading ecological awareness, having a fun, festive little Seder, and eating a lot of fruit. And if you live in Israel, you plant a tree. I love this holiday, mainly due to my vegan, “I-love-animals-and-the-planet-and-we-need-to-save-it” Greta Thunberg personality. It’s important to never forget that we, the humans of this Earth, are responsible for it, and we will very easily be responsible for its degradation unless we take better care of it. We are a part of nature. Yes, we live in homes, but where are the homes? On a planet! On an ecosystem. The ecosystem houses the home, and the home houses us.
OK. I’ll shut up now. RENEWAL may have come and gone back in 2015, but its message is 50 times more relevant eight years later. At 40 minutes long, it’s a “long short” film, and in that amount of time, it manages to astonish and educate you with its principal message and dazzlingly surreal dance numbers. Oh yes, there’s dance in RENEWAL. Did I mention that this is a Jewish film, an environmental one, AND a dance one? Three excellent topics. This is also Israeli dance, and I know I’m very biased to admit that it’s truly my favorite type of dance in this universe. I’m not a professional dancer, but my dream in life is to perform with the Batsheva Dance Company. (YouTube them. You will be FLOORED by their performances.)
RENEWAL follows a very different kind of dance company called Vertigo. Located in Jerusalem, it was founded by Noa Wertheim and her husband, Adi Sha’al. When the two met, they were like outsiders in their own city; two choreographers seeking to “birth” modern Israeli dance who just happened to fall in love. They were also very environmentally conscious.
“My theater will be nature,” Noa says early on in the film.
Determined to create a dance company with an ecological mission, Noa and her family found an old chicken coop and transformed it into the Vertigo it is today. To this day, they maintain a sustainable living at the place. They collect water from the rain. They don’t have toilet water. The soap they make is reusable. They compost garbage. Name every sustainable action in the book of “How to Live Sustainably” and Vertigo does it.
For the dancers, their main mission is to connect with nature through dance. They avoid the big, fancy, indoor dance halls with the shining lights and perform outdoors in the rain or sun. It doesn’t matter if they dress up in dazzling clothes or slick their hair back. In their performances, they are one with this Earth. That’s what I especially loved about RENEWAL. I see a lot of dance routines on the internet and as great as some of them are, they all seem so similar. People dance to a hip-hop song or perform inside a colossal stadium with hundreds of thousands of screaming spectators. Vertigo dancers don’t care about that. When you see them dance, they are in an entirely different realm. It’s as if their souls leave their physical selves. An invisible force contorts their bodies, yet they are still in control. Watch a particular sequence near the end of RENEWAL where each of the dancers performs solo. The fluidity of their body movements is so astounding.
Vertigo burst into popularity in 2004 with its “The Birth of the Phoenix” performance. This is danced more than any other routine of the company. The dancers dress in red, almost tribal-looking clothes and enter this circled enclosure outside to a crowd of people. They step on dirt and roll around it. They jump into each other’s brown, dirty arms. The purpose of this “eco-art” performance is not about the spectacle of the routine or the reaction from its audience members, some of whom look very perplexed in this movie. The objective is to embrace our planet. The dancers practically hug the dirt, grateful for its existence. It’s less about “look at me and how good I can dance” and more about “look at how I dance AND how we should be appreciative of the planet.” Everything is responsible for another’s survival in nature. To get to dance, we need the planet. To keep the planet alive, we need to be more aware of it.
RENEWAL’s message of ecological awareness through dance may confound some people. I tried to explain it the best I could here, and apologies if I’ve confused or annoyed the heck out of you. We dance to have fun, but in a time of growing temperatures and a stubborn avoidance to serious issues concerning this planet, it’s a delight to find an obscure movie like this that reminds us that the time isn’t up yet. We can still raise awareness of these issues, be it through dance or any form of art. We don’t need to stick to the status quo on certain topics and dance just like everybody else does. Let’s all be like these Vertigo dancers. Let’s perpetuate ecological awareness through art. Is it impossible or stupid? Absolutely not!
To learn more about Vertigo Dance Company, visit Vertigo.org.il.
RENEWAL is now available to stream on ChaiFlicks.