TA’AMIM asks: What is the flavor of the woman? How does the female body read the world through action, matter, and memory?
In Hebrew, TA’AMIM means tastes, flavors,
meanings, and the trope symbols- that guide how a text or a body is read.
It is a dance–performance work that explores the female body through the notion of taste – as a sense, as emotion, and as a cultural and political system of reading the world.
Like in the tradition of biblical cantillation marks, a small sign can shift the entire reading.
The work engages with familiar materials: body, food, color, voice, and sound. It activates taste as a subtle incision that emphasizes, displaces, deconstructs, and rewrites what is present.
At the center of the work are four qualities of body, consciousness, and femininity – four women who move between ritual, instinct, materiality, and memory. The women are not different psychological characters, but bodily frequencies: a state of taste.
Through color, voice, movement, and matter, a sensorial space is created in which the body shifts states of consciousness and generates embodied memory. Live and industrial sound operates as the nervous system of the stage, turns into the beating heart.
The dramaturgy moves between bodily states: acidity, incision, chewing, tension, and suspension. “Taste” becomes a force that guides the body and memory, opening a possibility for transformation and freedom.
Ilana Sarah Claire Bellahsen (Marseille, 1982) is an Israeli choreographer, dancer, painter, and mother based in Tel Aviv. Her work is rooted in research of body, movement, and audience encounter, and combines performance, voice, text, and material practice. She began her career as a solo dancer with the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company from 2000 to 2008, has been a member of the Clipa Theatre since 2010, and joined the Yasmeen Godder Company in 2025. Her works have been presented in festivals and venues in Israel and abroad, and she received the 2007 Minister of Culture Award and the 2005 Yair Shapira Award.
Credits:
Performers and creators: Yam Ashkenazi, Roni Milatin, Mila Levi
Choreography and performance: Ilana Sarah Claire Bellahsen
Dramaturgy: Tal Shochat
Artistic guidance: Naomi Perlov
Costume design: Yasmin Wollek
Music:
Sapporo Blues – Mina Aoe
Tabula Rasa – 2. Silentium
Senza Moto – Arvo Pärt
Live music: Yam Ashkenazi
Photos: Asya Skorik
Thanks to the
Clipa Theater, the Yasmeen Godder Company, Dr. Haggit Aldema, my beloved family, and my son Lev.
