Five Beds / Children of the Dream

Length: 55 minutes (No Intermission) Choreography/Text/Direction: Neta Pulvermacher Original Score: Yuval Gabay and Neta Pulvermacher Cast: 7 dancers Props and set: 5 beds, 2 empty metal cans, 6 recorders, a bouquet of plastic flowers. Costumes: "Kibbutz" pajamas

Five Beds / Children of the Dream is a collaboration between two Israeli artists; choreographer Neta Pulvermacher and composer Yuval Gabay. It is based on the choreographer's childhood memories of growing up in the children's houses of Kibbutz Lehavot Habashan. The work brings to light the unique communal living situation of the Israeli kibbutz, which represents a social experiment in collectivism that is now being abandoned.

Ms. Pulvermacher's generation is the last to have been brought up in the children's houses, where children of the kibbutz were raised communally. Five Beds/Children of the Dream is also in the repertory of the Repertory Project (Ohio) and Vertigo Dance Company (Israel) and the Belarus University of Culture in Minsk. Five Beds/Children of the Dream is set in a room of the children's house containing five gray metal beds. Using montage film editing techniques as its structure, Pulvermacher combines a mosaic of voices, text, music and the physically charged movement of six dancers to take the audience for a ride through the utopian hells and heavens of the choreographer's childhood. Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice praised the work as "...extraordinary...powerful and moving...bittersweet poetry..." Carolyn Kahn of the New York Planet wrote "Pulvermacher's choreography is fierce and uncompromising.