In a process that lasted more than nine hours, Alys pushed down a heavy ice block on the streets of Mexico, While the block is melting into a tiny cube, until it disappeared completely.

The swedish choreographer Mats Ek is appointed artistic director of the Cullberg Ballet. His works are a combination between classical and modern dance.

The American artist Gordon Matta-Clark cuts, slices, carves and performs a deconstruction of architectural structures.

 Lloyd Newson and DV8 Physical Theatre explore violence and sexuality in a work about the life of serial killer Dennis Nielsen.

The Video artist Bill Viola stretches time and space and introduces a new plasticity and physicality to video art.

On the threshold between documentary and poetry, the first collaboration between director Peter Sellars, composer John Adams, and writer Alice Goodman reintroduced opera to the contemporary audience.

A group of Non Dancers and French chorographer Jerome Bel, exposes the performativity of Dance's most elementary concepts.

Sylvie Guillem leaves the Paris Opera in favor of the Royal Ballet in London.

British artist Jeremy Deller stages more than 1000 participants in the reenactment of the violent conformations during the minor strike of 1984.

Part of the Fluxes movement, Yoko ono allows/invites the audience to cut her cloths. A performance of trust and abundance – where at the end the artist is left bare naked.

 The choreographer Maggie Beckett translates Samuel Beckett to the language of movement. Her work determine theater in a new way - the dance through abstraction and materiality.

the theater group The Wooster Group is exploring the beat generation. A show that moves between extreme situations, both physical and mental, including reconstruction of a LSD trip, and the play "The Crucible" performed in double speed.

Trisha Brown is collaborating with the artist Robert Rauschenberg and the composer Laurie Anderson. She uses improvisation and process it, repeating it again and again.

The experiment theatrical group “Forced Entertainment” creates paranoid and poetic spaces, as an apocalyptic gesture to the movie "Emmanuel". The show examines how much can we stretch the fluid operations of characters, objects, fatigue, energy and the border of the language itself.

William Forsythe is becoming the main choreographer of Frankfurt Ballet, and creating “Artifact”. Forsyth is using the ballet vocabulary to tell a frameless story.

Joseph Beuys is flying to New York and getting with an ambulance to a Gallery in Broadway. He shared this room with a wild coyote, a walking stick, and thick blanket. At times he is wrapped in the blanket, at other times he is watching the coyote. At the end of the three days he is taken to the airport, again in an ambulance, leaving America without having set foot on its ground.

Pina Bausch, a dance icon, whose every creation is a defining moment - returns to an early work from 1978. This time she chooses to work with performers over 65 years old, which reveal a different side of sex and courtship - and particularly challenges the body of classical dance.

Matthew Barney makes five full-were liberates the same years. Together they create a mythical, metamorphosis, biological world, that is a constant evolution of beauty, horror, and mystery.

Sophie Calle follows Henry B, a John Doe, from Paris to Venice. Over a period of time she takes photos of him wandering around, walking a few steps behind. An action of surveillance and exposure, a ritualistic journey, a detective story about existing down and out of anonymity.

Over the minimalist repetitive music of Steve Reich that fuses Western African sounds and rhythms, the choreographer Jiri Kylian composes a geometrical, sculptural piece for 8 dancers in black and white. A tribal dance for the 20th century.

Vsevolod Meyerhold, an actor and director, invents body language to the social political theater of the 20th century. The biomechanical body is a dictionary of forms, expressions and movements taking place in the present, the revolution and the utopia . A true pioneer of avant-garde theater.

Santiago Sierra pays for a 133 immigrants and foreign workers, all of them have a dark skin color, for agreeing to dye their hair blond. Openly manipulative, Sierra presents on stage invisible people refugees of the capitalistic machine

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, then 25 year-old young choreographer, creates Rosas Danst Rosas. A work both abstract and concrete, out of time, out of fashion, at a time when dance theatre was at it’s peak - the precision of Keersmaeker becomes a dance classic - all the way even to Beyonce.

Canadian dance team of Édouard Lock makes “Human Sex" - dance as intensive sexual relations. Aggressive punk-dance, ecstasy and terminal, which leads by one of the great dancers in history - Louise La Colina. A show who shook the Israeli dance (even Ehud Manor).

Lori Andrson - multidisciplinary artist, a pop star, and a pioneer of the multimedia art - all at the same time - create the show/album and movie "Home of the Brave". Electric Journey through the American consciousness, historical and futuristic, electric and poetic. A milestone in the visual theater history.- 

The dance piece created by Wim Vandekeybus in the eighties is a punch of dance in the danger zone. Nothing is safe - the space, the sound and especially the dancers are at the limit, and limits of the physical injury and collapse are blurred.

Musician and director Heiner Goebbels makes musical patterns to machines of light, objects and actions. Hashirigaki, based on the writings of Gertrude Stein, is a magic show without stunts, is an epic spectacularly musical show that runs gently and simply by three non-recurring performers.

The video work of the Swiss duo Fischli & Weiss, uses everyday objects to create a complex and ongoing operations, explosions, a domino of order and destruction, a parody of cause and effect, of necessary and unnecessary and art in general. why? Just because that’s the way things go.

Due to the growth of the Nazi Party, the German choreographer Kurt Jooss created the first political ballet as as an anti-war protest. "The Green table" was introduced only a few times, and in 1933 Jooss escaped from Germany.

Snake Dance is one of the only film documentation of one of the modern dance pioneers, Loie Fuller. Her works were based on a fixed format, groundbreaking of its time: a long cloth projected on by lights in move, that changes color. The lights were developed by Fuller herself.

Meg Stuart is developing her characteristics movement in her first full-length choreography. Out of the fragmented body, damaged, ludicrous, impossible born the dis-figurative - the distorted. Or in the opposite sense- the poetic.

In 1903, Isadora Duncan wrote a text that called to read to changing the status of women in dance. She wrote that a woman dancer doesn’t need to dance as a nymph or fairy, but to dance "the freedom women dance." She actualized her vision herself - she presented the natural beauty of the woman body by dancing barefoot, taking off the corset in favor of clear tunic and just danced herself.

Peter Brook directs "Midsummer Night's Dream" by Shakespeare in 1970 as a visual, materialistic, with real humor and a physical poetics performance. This is the empty space in its basic form - leaves place for imagination, dreams and magic.

There is Samuel Beckett's longs and there is Samuel Beckett’s shorts. While long plays swallowed in repertory theater and the bourgeoisie, the abstract plays - Quad, Not I, play, Krapp's Last Tape - became fixed as a model of subversive performance and refinement of the theater operation.

Dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones Jones creates Still/Here in 1994, a dance-theater piece with video combined. The choreography inspired by interviews with people who are dealing with terminal illnesses, and also woven as part of the show itself.

Peter Campus is an American artist the explored the medium of video In the early seventies. He was one of the pioneers of video art, and examined issues of identity and reality and tried to undermine the relationship between viewer and artwork. In the video work. In the video piece "Three Transitions" Campus uses experimental editing techniques from that period in order to reveal and conceal images of identity.

A creature made of hands and feet, wanders around the space and performs daily activities. Xavier Le roy’s work (a biologist by training) is a laboratory for body, dance and look. Modest and epic, intimate and spectacular - is an icon of a new generation of dance makers.

Sergei Diaghilev founded The 'Ballet Russes' out of a desire to connect the language of ballet to the West and modernism in art. He believed that the dance should not completely abandon the classical language but update it to expand its boundaries and the possibilities of expression. Over 20 years of operation, the ballet brought a revolution about creating context, conventions of choreography and the physical appearance of a ballet dancer.

German choreographer Sasha Waltz returns to the basic material. "Bodies" is a piece on the most elementary, the material and physical in its raw form. This dance was born out of the skin, of hairs, from the feet and of sweat.

From the Bauhaus architectural ideology, from the view to the world new-organizer, the the painter Oskar Schlemmer organizes shapes, colors and movement in abstract space. Schlemmer's suggestion to ballet of form, dance as sculpture in time - remains to this day as a representation requesting continued.

Two years after the protest riots in Paris in May '68, director Ariane Mnouchkine creates a new version of the French Revolution. Tremendous theatrical piece, that returns the historic moment to its physical, to its urgency to its now.

Akram Khan teamed up with Anish Kapoor and Nitin Sawhney to present his company’s first full-length work. The Hindu symbols were the starting points for this work in - Kaash continued Akram Khan’s quest to build bridges between the worlds of contemporary dance and the Indian classical dance form Kathak.

The series of short works "Panoramix" of the Spanish artist La Ribot is a series of minimalist works. The artist uses several objects to create actions. The works, that occur in the same space where the audience is present, tells a story of and pain, using the object in a non-standard way.

 In one defining moment, the choreographer Boris Charmatz diverts the glossary, the point of departure and the practice itself of contemporary dance. More than a museum doctrine, this is a manifesto of liberation and adventure, an expansion that redefines the territory of the act of dancing itself.

In1990, the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin becomes the artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company. "Wall", his first show as the director of the company, is an ecstatic, exemplary, sexy, mythological piece - "wall" is the Big Bang of Israeli dance, defining it and at the same time outlining its borders - even today.

The theatre of Tadeusz Kantor was born in the underground of World War II, abandoned the churches of Poland, in the shadow of communism, in the darkest places. “The Dead Class"- perhaps the most universal show of Kantor, is a possessed how of the living-dead, a parade of residues and illusory memories, a show where - according to Kantor itself - the maturity killer children.

The opening night of "The Rite of Spring" was recorded as one of the greatest scandals in the history of music and dance. The audience was shocked by the discordant notes and the wild dance, that challenged the airy and delicate body of the known ballet. Nevertheless "Rite of Spring" was awarded as a masterpiece.

 In continuation to the African-American choreographers who worked throughout the thirties and forties, Alvin Ailey set up an independent group in 1958, in which the works are dealing with African-American heritage and daily life of blacks in the United States. The iconic piece “Revelations”, which relies on the technique of ballet, played a crucial role in bringing "black dance” Into the mainstream of American dance.

The choreographer George Balanchine and the art patron Lincoln Kirstein established in 1934 the first school of ballet in the United States, a bastion of modern dance, followed by the group which received in 1948 the official name - New York City Ballet. As part of the group, Balanchine created several of his iconic abstract ballets, such as "Four merge". along with American works, in terms of movement, music and content, such as "Who Cares?".
The following video is from “Who Cares?”

Tim Miller, American and queer performer, deals with sexual identities, AIDS, minorities and immigration in his works. Miller was part of Act Up!, a movement that has grown with the spread of AIDS and, and created political events for determination and confrontation on the government.

The Documentary Theatre of Rimini Protokoll is extremely diverse , yet their “100% cities” Project is the one that broke geographic and cultural boundaries. The show is based on the city statistics and mapping of the urban population and the environment. In 100% - it’s the city itself appearing on the stage and it's the local community that is celebrating its own staging. Meanwhile, the show slowly outlines the ridiculousness of mapping and cataloging in the face of human presence.

 An unknown band, a German model, dancers from the Factory and screening of films. In one alchemist moment, Andy Warhol mixes a happening that changing the face of music, inviting the multimedia show and set the pop culture up until today.

Under the influence of the composer John Cage, the choreographer March Cunningham began to investigate the effects of randomness and arbitrariness on the creative process of dance. One of the formats that have developed as a result is the "event": an occurrence that lasted 60-90 minutes and consisted of excerpts of works performed various spaces. The first event was conducted at the museum in Vienna, and through this format Cunningham wanted to give the viewer an experience of dance, and not a dance show.

After more than a decade of taking the movement out of dance culture, Lucinda Childs creating in 1979 “Dance”, which is also an example of one of the most important creative collaborations between artists from different disciplines of dance history: the work is performed to the music of Philip Glass and accompanied by screenings of visual artist Sol Levitt.

 British sculptor Rachel Whiteread decides to mold an entire Victorian house designated for demolition. Whiteread uses the classical tradition of molding and makes it to a performance of documentation. A tremendous monument to anonymity.

Robert Lepage is a magician of the theater. His Works are sets of stunts and film angles - real magic show. But surprisingly, his one-man show about drug addiction, love and art has become the classic and his most known work. A small/large modest/pretentious work about obsession and loss of formative moments to great art.

Bela Tarr for his work: "In my films I want to describe human nature in all its diversity and all its volume. I would like to present the totality of the human condition. I am not a religious person, not a man of philosophy and ideology. I am not affiliated with any political perceptions certain; but I am a believer. I believe in human beings ".

In 1965, the choreographer Yvonne Rainer is writing No Manifest. denies every aspect that defined the ballet and modern dance by then, such as virtuosity, illusion, glamor and even the movement itself. Respectively, Rainer created choreographic works that reduced every known choreographic mechanism, as seen of Trio A 1966.-

Three years after leaving “Denishawn” the dance school she studied in, Martha Graham founded her first dance group. As part of the group, Graham has created over 70 works, even when passed the age of 90, and became a key figure in contemporary dance. Her early works were about the American identity and heritage, and then focused on psycho-mythic creations, which were influenced by the theories of Freud and Jung, and sometimes offered a feminist reading of the founding texts in Western culture.

In an unusual encounter, director Christoph Marthaler juxtaposes his bureaucratic, grey, anonymous stage world with the Monumentality of le Palais du Pape at the Avignon Festival. A theatre of the holy and the banal, a performance of small sins.

Tino Sehgal has been already widely recognized as a conceptual artist, but his tremendous work at the Tate Modern, is realizing the humanistic potential that resides in the artist’s action, in performance. The reaction of the Guardian’s, Laura cumming:

"We often speak of art as life-changing; this event truly has that potential in all its fullness and humanity. One learns about other people, and one learns about oneself. I shall
never forget it."

In the shadow of World War I, Hugo Ball collects the exiles of Dada in a small crowded cafe in Spiegelgasse street No.1. It all starts here - poetry, painting, music, sculpture, performance, theatre, rock, pop, art, life, Vladimir Lenin. Cabaret Voltaire is a moment that ignites the 20th century.

The work of vocalist Meredith Monk in 1969 is the first performance that was performed at the Guggenheim gallery. Monk, who at the time was 26 years old and worked in small ensembles, builds an epic, spatial vocal work, inside the spiral architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. For the first, "Juice" claims the institutionalize, archiving space of the museum, , as the space of human presence and voice.

" On the Art of the Theatre," accumulates all the research and experience of the theatre pioneer Gordon Craig. The publication of the book is a defining moment of declaration, a manifesto and a vision of total theatre in which all is action - theatre of light and shadow, color and shape, action and movement, of performance- of visual theatre.

For eight hours (a full workday) everything is stretched to its limit - the physicality of the performers, the patience of the audience, the aesthetics and the ethics of the art of performance. Jan Fabre's first stage work is an explosive tour de force and a celebration of theatrical genius and madness.

 In the eighties, after years of shows, cabarets, performances and clubs, the complex stage persona of Karen Finley is slowly formed. Her performances are driven creatures, blazing, explosive, possessed. A transgressive cocktail of sexuality, gender, autobiography, fiction – Finely trespasses all the contraction of Self-Performance.

A visionary avant-garde director and inventor of the theater of the 20th century - Adolphe Appia saw his vision come to life at its best in Wagner’s operas. In the abstract and mythological landscape of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Appia is sculpting spaces of light, shadow and time, a universe that mixes pagan with the hyper-modern. In one defining moment of theater, the stage becomes a place of contemporary art.

At one defining moment, Jackson Pollock turns the painting arena from the wall to the floor, the brush stroke to dripping and splashing, and the canvas to a scene of happening and ritual. Inspired by the works of Native Americans, The Action Painting of Pollock is the practice shamanic art of living. After it, it’s no longer possible to think painting without thinking performance.

It only took an historical misunderstanding to get Stanislavski, the father of the avant-garde, appropriated to the conservative theater. The production of "Hamlet" at Moscow brings together three geniuses - Stanislavski, Isadora Duncan and Gordon Craig. Their "Hamlet" is no less than a revolution, and the vision of Stanislavski and Craig is an earthquake.

 In the stage of the still picture, the artist Cindy Sherman is directing a theatrical-cinematic photographs in which she becomes infinity of fictitious personas. Like a frame that has left on the editing room floor, Sherman's photographs are an encyclopedia of characters and performance of the self, with all its cliches potentials.

 At the art cocktail Yves Klein, the naked model is the brush painting, the band played twenty minutes of one sound and twenty minutes of silence, and the artist is wearing a black jacket - making sure that he will never get dirty. Nudity - the classic theme of Western art, is translated to provocative performance that frees the artist's action, with all of its contradictions - charlatanism, honesty, deception and absolute truth.

Just before World War II breaks out, poet and film director Antonin Artaud releases an attack on the western culture. "The Theatre and its Double" is a manifesto for theater - Possessed, epidemic, a virus. There's no way to know how Artaud dreamed of the realization of the theater of cruelty, but he became a resounding vision of the current stage works everywhere - from Peter Brook to Romeo Kasteluči.
In the video, Peter Brook directing "Marat Sad" Following Artaud's theater of cruelty.

It's difficult to reduce the work of Richard Schechner into a single moment. Many years of research as the director of The Performance Group, as the editor of Theatre Drama Review, his many books about theater, ritual and performance, all of these are fundamental. Nevertheless,the pedagogical and artistic process that led to the opening of the first-class Performance Studies at Tisch, is a pioneering step that affects the teaching of art all over the world, and of course - the School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem.

John Cage is revealing the performative potential of the musical action, the connection between the tool and the instrument, and particularly frees the music to the intuitive and

connective, to noise and quiet that things are made from.

Years of writing, research, and artistic experimentation crystallized and drained in 1923 into the Threepenny Opera. The artistic theater of Brecht explodes on the stage, and almost overnight becomes a canon (and a musical hit), and places Bertolt Brecht (together with Antonin Artaud) as the central theater in the twentieth century.

Vito Acconci created in the 1960s an impressive collection of physical experiments. These actions are very crude, undermining, in which Acconci appears (and establishes the image of the artist) as a demon, wild creature. In this work, he masturbates under the floor/stage of the gallery while he indulges in sexual fantasies. An act (masculine in this case) of hide and seek. This action became whole when Marina Abramovich created her own version, a space of discovery and concealment of feminine sexuality.

Heiner Muller rewrites - and perhaps even reinvents - the play of the Now: compressed, urgent, facsimile of restoration and recycling. This is a poetic machine of text that swallows Hamlet's classic play and creates a new, relevant and urgent play. Hamletmachine releases the text from the narrative responsibility and allows an endless connections of theatrical uses and inventions for the future.

The dance theatre reached its peak in the 90s in Belgium, where Alain Platel brought with him almost every possible edge. Iets Op Bach has made it a worldwide success and contains all the elements of Patel's world: a circus of cruelty and beauty, ballet, street and drag, children running around danger and sexuality. Patel - who has worked extensively with children with disabilities - creating a broken, neurotic community that oscillates between baroque and CNN, between the hyper-physical and the hyper-void.

After a research journey in Europe and Asia, director Jerzy Grotowski sets up one of the most influential theater laboratories in one of the most unexpected places - the city of Opole in Poland. At the Acropolis, the vision of the "poor theater" - theater in its naked form - crystallizes flesh and shape and reaches maturity. In a space that surrounds the crowd, Grotowski builds a prison camp of blood and sweat, a place of brutality and sincerity. A defining moment that takes place only a few kilometers from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

 The Italian theater group Societas Raffaello Sanzio and members of the group Romeo Castelucci, Claudia Castelucci, Chiara and Paulo Guido begin a four-year journey in the capital cities of Europe. Cesena, Avignon, Berlin, Brussels, Bergen, Paris, Rome, Strasbourg, London, Marseille and back to Cesena. This is an epic journey, to the dark, mythic roots of the tragedy, to the overt and covert forces that shaped European culture. In a cynical, anxiety-filled period, this is a masterpiece that restored faith in the power of theater and the importance of the preformance in the 21st century.

The Futurist manifesto of Luigi Russolo begins with the phrase- ”Ancient life was all silence”. It was a life without industry, without cars, without train and airports. A life in silence. Yet, it is out the noise of this modern world, that Russolo creates a new musical universe, played by exceptional instruments that create a score made of squeaks and shrieks. Many years before the invention of Rock, before Techno, befor Brian Eno and Hip-Hop- Russollo ignites a sonic revolution and lays the ground to a new musical culture and the performance of the sound of contemporary life.

In 1922, the german artist Kurt Schwitters begin to unite his drawings, writings, poetry under a singular title - Mertz. Under Mertz- that became his life Project- Schwitters deconstructs and glues together artistic mediums, cultural references, Language, materiality, form, meanings. The wok itself is vast and varies from painting, collages work, writing to the reshaping of spacs, architecture and habitat. It's a Total Art project that demands to redefine a new environment to the new human.

 There is of course no artists filed in which Duchamp is not cited as its inventor and main influence. However, even in his most sculptural works- performance is always a central and pivotal element.( his work Rrose Selavy - where he creates his own Female alter ego - is a defining moment of gender performance). Still the Étant donnés has a particular statue. This Alchimic installation creates a performative situation for the object and for the viewers themselve who become activated by the work. It is a defining moment that reshapes the act of viewing and transforms the body of the spectator into a performance.

There is of course no artists filed in which Duchamp is not cited as its inventor and main influence. However, even in his most sculptural works- performance is always a central and pivotal element.( his work Rrose Selavy - where he creates his own Female alter ego - is a defining moment of gender performance). Still the Étant donnés has a particular statue. This Alchimic installation creates a performative situation for the object and for the viewers themselve who become activated by the work. It is a defining moment that reshapes the act of viewing and transforms the body of the spectator into a performance.

The School of Visual Theater was founded in 1986 by its first director, Israel Prize winner, Hadas Ofrat.

To mark the 30th anniversary of its establishment, we are closing the project # 86_defining_ moments. Thanks to everyone who read and followed with us through the most important moments of visual theater.

On this occasion, we would like to thank Guy Gutman, who was the school's director between 2009-2017, and led this project with high dedication.