About the concept

The male duet Lu Carmella deals with the thin line between naïve and erotic love. A tight spatial composition cages two urge-driven bodes and tries to confront basic questions about human motivations when meeting significant others. Possible extensions of innocent physical connections between the two are being examined and put out of context; a suggestive narrative of a relationship is deconstructed into bits of visual information, offering different perspectives on the meanings of Mutuality... Touch and distance are being used in order to re-look at physical expressions of care, dependency and intimacy, observed through the lens of social traditions, dictations and habits. Supreme thoughts about sexuality and self-sacrifice are degraded into a materialistic incarnation of bodies in space, asking once again: what separates love from love?

Lu Carmella has emerged from a long-term movement research process around the theme of touch, with the wish to embody some main ideas from the theory "art of loving" of the German philosopher Erich Fromm. The physical expressions of love of all kinds and their resources were the opening points for this intriguing quest. The research was conducted in Israel among children youth and adults, and began within age groups. In a later stage participants were mixed together, to form all possible pairings of age and gender. From the different combinations various ways of touch have emerged, and the differences in the way of referring to the other were emphasized clearly. Those differences became a main inspiration in the making process, and set the grounds for the movement language eventually used on stage. The space between every two people - male, female, young and old - quickly became the space between innocent and sexual, between infantile and mature and between instinctive and dictated; in moments of grace that space disappeared, and allowed two people to really meet each other.

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