Freie Universität Berlin Appoints Choreographer Saar Magal as Valeska Gert Visiting Professor for Winter Semester 2024–2025
Internationally renowned Israeli director and choreographer Saar Magal has been appointed Valeska Gert Visiting Professor for the 2024–2025 winter semester. As part of her role, Magal will devise a new project of performative research that explores the histories, memories, narratives, and textual source materials of the three Abrahamic religions together with master’s degree students in the critical dance studies program at Freie Universität Berlin. In an opening lecture and conversation on Monday, October 14, 2024, Magal will present her new topic of artistic research titled “Sacrilege” and discuss how she envisions the process of embodying the topic somatically to transform ideas into a work of performance at an event that is open to the public and free to attend.
Saar Magal was born in Israel and studied at the Laban Centre (now Trinity Laban) in London, for which she was awarded a full scholarship by the British Council. Magal creates dance theater and opera performances and collaborates with actors, dancers, singers, scholars, visual artists, and musicians. Her work strives to enable the convergence of artists, audience, objects, and materials on stage to create new contexts for movement and narrative. In the German-speaking world, Magal has developed projects for institutions as prestigious as Schauspiel Frankfurt (“Ten Odd Emotions”), Schauspiel Köln (“Love Me More”), Burgtheater Wien (“(Ob)sessions”), Staatsoper unter den Linden (“A Monteverdi Project”), and Bayerische Staatsoper (“Jephta’s Daughter,” “Hacking Wagner”). Internationally, she has created several pieces for the Batsheva Ensemble Dance Company under the directorship of Ohad Naharin and has commissioned works for venues such as the Laban Dance Center (London) and Lincoln Center (New York). Magal has also taught at the ART Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and universities in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
As Valeska Gert Visiting Professor, Magal will share dance research forms that she employs in creating performative and scenic material for her physical theater and work alongside the students, empowering them with a collaborative environment that feels like a “playground” in order to enable performative “games” to emerge. Magal’s work with students will explore the topic of sacrilege by drawing from the Book of Genesis and a palette of literary works as source material. The aim is to deconstruct myths and stories from ancient and current narratives, exploring both the loss of values and the births of new ones, and how the decline of human ethics and nature emerges from processes of sacrilege as a physical, political, social, and cultural phenomenon.
About the Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship
The Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship at the Institute for Theater Studies has been in existence since the 2006/2007 winter semester. This program is supported by Freie Universität Berlin, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Akademie der Künste Berlin.
The guest professorship is named after one of the most innovative dancers of the historical avant-garde, Valeska Gert (1892–1978), whose work was characteristic of the city of Berlin. She is thus representative of dancers and choreographers who are yet to be discovered and whose history is still to be written.