About us
We are choreographers and theater-makers Matan Zamir and Gal Naor, and together we create under the name The progressive wave, an ongoing performative project in which we collaborate and co-create with other creative minds.
We have both started our paths in the Israeli art scene as performers, Matan as a dancer and Gal as an actor and performer who is also a Sign Language interpreter. In 2014 we founded our Berlin-based creative independent with our first creation bodieSLANGuage (a collaboration of The progressive wave with duo-choreographers, matanicola, co-produced by Theater Freiburg and Ballhaus Ost, Berlin, and supported by the HKF, Berlin, where we collaborated with eight international deaf and hearing performers.
In our work, we combine dance, performance art, and visual art, along with political and spiritual studies. Our approach to the performance world is inclusive and based on the understanding that each body should move in its unique way and have a different kind of authentic expression. Including a diverse range of performers, our work is encouraging the empowerment of individual identities.
As Israeli artists who come from a place of conflict, we hold art has an essential role in today’s society. We wholeheartedly believe the art of today has the power to change the politics of tomorrow.
About our artistic profile
The progressive wave is an independent GbR company; we produce a variety of works, and both independent and commissioned activities, from dance and theater productions to art installations and site-specific projects, artistic/dramaturgical consultation, and workshops.
We believe in creating working environments where real collaborations can flourish from fruitful and honest encounters with other artists and artistic teams.
Our own creation processes we build on authentic explorations as we study specific themes together with our artistic collaborators, and jointly, we find performative and visual stage-translations to our research questions, which remain open throughout the process.
To each of our explorations, we insist on finding a unique physical-performative approach while paying importance to the aesthetic perspective, as we intend to fill each performative module with original visual meaning.
Bringing together choreography, performance art, and visual art, we experiment with the juxtaposition of different cultural and spiritual motives to examine their mutual fertilization in a thought-provoking theatric setting.
Apart from collaborating with artists from all fields, in the studio, we work with professional dancers, actors, and special performers (such as; deaf, autistic, down-syndrome, physically mixabled persons, and more). We strongly believe in the empowerment of the distinctiveness in each performing body. Moreover, we enhance the performative skills of our performers to come together as a group, bodily and mentally.
We strive for the integration of all kinds of creative performers and artists to celebrate and empower their uniqueness. In our post-Brecht theatric era, where dance became a very playful medium, we choose to enter profound and meaningful explorations together with all of our artistic collaborators, to question varied possible roles performance-art and dance can clasp today. We are interested in the welding of authentic physical searches with hidden or exposed meanings. As an extension to the Brechtian approach, we are aiming to bring theater and science closer together to infuse spiritual/political implications in an engaging performative-aesthetic scenery, in both educative and entertaining ways.
About our working methods
By combining a lively choreographic approach along with speech-acts, body-language, and Sign-Language, we cast content in a given performative unit, which can be abstract or communicative, and match the most fundamental aesthetic approach to portray each idea most accurately.