Mica
Kupfer

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Mica
Kupfer

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Mica Kupfer is a choreographer, performer and a multi-disciplinary artist. Her artistic practice brings together an amalgam of visual and movement languages oscillating between choreography, visual theater and performance-art. In her projects, she explores inherent and hidden tensions in human behavior, Through an investigative mode and a deconstructive – yet minimalist – focus on the moving body. Through this approach, she aims to expose physical mechanisms and unfold stories, in their multiplicity, of what and how it is to be human bodies in our world. Kupfer graduated from the ‘School of Visual Theater’ in Jerusalem with honors of the mayor. Her debut independent piece By virtue of the Same movement premiered at the ‘Akko Festival’ in 2019, and won four of the official awards. Performed her works at: Officine CAOS (Turin); Hazira theater, Puppet Train theater festival (Jerusalem); ‘kelim Festival’ (Bat-Yam); Intimadance festival, Habait theater, Hanut theater (TLV). She participated in various residencies and programs such as P.A.R.T.S/ROSAS, Brussels (2023), Kelim Center (2022-2024), ‘Mamuta’ center (2022-2023), Pitching program of Suzanne Dellal Centre (2023), and received various grants for her works.

Full CV

Photo: Liron Weissman

Copyright © 2023 Mica Kupfer. All rights reserved.
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ATTITUDE
A movement and music duet, 45 minutes, 2024 

Two performers, a choreographer and a contrabass player, set out on a wandering journey. With meticulous precision, they present fragments of movements and musical phrases they have gathered. Through repetition and the stretched sense of time, they are looking for a way to create intimacy with the action, while they experience the drama of the relationship between representation and the thing itself. 

Credits

Choreography, directing and design: Mica Kupfer

  • Performers: Erez Meyuhass, Mica Kupfer
  • Original music, soundtrack and sound design: Erez Meyuhass, Mica Kupfer
  • Music: Béla Bartók – 3 Hungarian Folksongs from the Csìk District, BB 45b, Sz. 35a
  • Artistic Advice: Menahen Goldenberg, Tal Adler
  • Lighting Design: Oded Kommi

The piece premiered at Kelim festival 2024 under the artistic direction of Ayala Frankel and Uri Shafir. With the financial support of ‘Mifal Hapais’ Foundation for the Arts, the ‘Rabinovitch’ Fund and the choreographer’s association.

THAT SQUARE SPACE
Experimental Film, 9 min, 2020

In collaboration with video artist, Tal Kronkop

Two people inhabit a space tailored to their dimensions. Chair, bed, bath, door, hallway, toilet and refrigerator – all adapted to their average human bodies. In this state, they begin to disrupt the boundaries of the interior with the exterior to generate minimalistic natural phenomena. 
They lose grip so they can drift for a moment. Just until everything will come together again. 

Credits
Written and directed by Mica Kupfer & Tal Kronkop 

  • Editors: Tal Kronkop, Mica Kupfer 
  • Performers: Uri Duvdevani, Mica Kupfer 
  • Cinematographer: Avi Siman-Tov  
  • Sound Design: Chen Dayan 
  • Post Production: Michael Schwartz
  • Developed in: ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ festival

BY VIRTUE OF THE SAME MOVEMENT
A movement performance, 4 performers, 55 minutes, 2019 

Power is a raw material, a driving force. It creates and destroys, gives and takes, expands and deflates, a vital condition for existence. New realms emerge through actions that blur the lines between body, material, beauty, violence and humor. Within the body’s persistent resemblance to a sculpture and this persistence’s downfall, the performance journeys through construction and dismantling, reality and refutation, abstract and concrete.

 

Credits
Created by Mica Kupfer

  • Performers: Meshi Olinky, Ben Kobi, Mica Kupfer
  • Music and Sound: Yaniv Hayoun
  • Stage design: Mica Kupfer, Elad æladin Kalai
  • Construction Planning and building: Elad æladin Kalai, Eden Bar Sever
  • Lighting Design: Oded Kommi
  • Artistic accompaniment: Nava Frenkel
  • External eye and production: Adi Helman


The work was developed at The School of Visual Theater, HaZira Theater and Akko festival.

WALKING ON TWO
A solo dance piece, 30 minutes, 2023

I emptied what I could
so I can see and listen better.
Now, it is easier to tame the body.
to rearrange the existing forms in it

In this solo piece, I am looking to interrupt and play with the regular physical and imaginary logic of the body, in order to find and concretize its poetic capacity. The starting point is rather simple: a body that wants to move. There’s ‘nothing’ in space but the moving body itself – always the same body, same matter – but in different arrangements, with different musicality, different order, something new unfolds, which shines a light on the relations and connections between those familiar parts and forms. Through this minimalistic focus, I wish to expose the body as a being which behaves, acts and wonders in and from the world.
The work itself is the exposition of the process of finding or making this world. There is ‘no’ pre-existing language, ‘no’ ready-made system of meaning but rather a raw investigation of choreographic possibilities. Through construction and deconstruction, invention of mechanisms for production of movement, manipulation and variation, and drawing inspiration from musical production I am finding the vocabulary to my language, and am reflective of the process while doing so.

Credits
Created by Mica Kupfer

  • Dramaturgical consultation: Menachem Goldenberg
  • Musical accompaniment: Yaniv Hayoun
  • Music: Arvo Pärt – Fratres
  • For Violin, String Orchestra and Percussion: Gil Shaham & Roger Carlsson & Gothenburg
  • Symphony Orchestra & Neeme Järv Arvo Pärt – Fratres
  • Drumming Cellist Kristijan Krajncan



The work was developed at Kelim Choreographic Center, ‘Intimadance Festival’ Tmuna Theater, ‘Yael – a home for independent dance and performance creators in Jerusalem’.

With financial support of ‘Mifal Hapais’ Foundation for the Arts, the Rabinovich foundation and the Fund for Independent Creators’.

FOREST THRESHOLD
Dance performance for 5 performers, 56 minutes, 2021

A habitat where you can look at human-animals, movements, and lines; on moving closer and further away, human development and withdrawal; on all that did not survive over time, on all that is here, on stage; on an illusion.

Forest threshold stems from ongoing research and its processing into a coherent movement language. It is a choreography of gestures and images that examine natural and human-cultivated environments. It is an exercise in ‘retrieving the wild’ and an observation on relationships and scale, which stems from a naive wish: to create balance. In the piece, we balance different wood branches with our bodies while balancing our own selves. We try to balance between maintaining and progressing, keeping and releasing, holding carefully and letting go: allowing destruction and deconstruction. Through this search for balance, we immerse ourselves in a state of increased attention. We are alert to what happens at the present moment, and attentive to the elements and concepts with which we build our habitat.

From within this immersion in which the performers are, certain tensions arise. An absurdity is created by the attempt to detach two elements which are inseparable: human and nature. There is an eagerness to create a relationship of control and domestication of a space which is vast, and much more complex than us. This absurdity expresses the inherently disharmonic state to which we as humans are born into, and in which we try, at times, to halt and observe, reflex, find sense and non-sense, practice our instinctiveness and live the nature which is within us. The stage thus becomes a vital atmosphere, onto which the audience is welcome to observe and identify patterns; look not only on the characters, but on the inbetween, on the relations they produce in movement, on what unfolds in the collision of matters, people, wills and ideas, and adopt a critical, but nevertheless empathic gaze.

 

Credits
Created by Mica Kupfer

  • Performers: Naaman sheltzer, Aviv Horovitz, Yuval Finkelshtein, Mica Kupfer
  • Live music: Erez Meyuhass
  • Scenography and costumes: Mica Kupfer
  • Sound design and original music: Lior Pinsky
  • Sound design and technician: Marco Milevski
  • Light design: Valentin Abramov, Mica Kupfer
  • Planning and building lighting fixtures: Eyal Bitton Lally

 

Produced by ‘Hazira’ Theater. With financial support of Mifal Hapais Foundation for the Arts.