Philosophy
Vertigo is a contemporary dance company, offering a physical meeting place for artists and audience. Vertigo takes the viewer every time to a new or an unexpected, exciting and challenging journey into unfamiliar territories. Vertigo represents international standards of artistic excellence, with a social and community touch.
We see Vertigo as a messenger of Israeli Art at its best, at home and abroad, that comes to bring people closer together and touch them through the language of the body. As such, the company combines, in addition to its performances, master classes, workshops, co-productions with other companies from around the world and invites artists from different fields to create together with the company.
The community branch of Vertigo includes the Dance School, which operates alongside the company and enables everyone to study dance; the Vertigo Dance Workshop, which provides a professional framework for training dancers. Performances and workshops for every community, including the disabled, out of the belief that the dance language of Vertigo is unique yet universal and challenges the limits of the body.
Who we are
Shortly after her graduation from the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem, Noa Wertheim was accepted into the Jerusalem Tamar Dance Company. It was there she met Adi Sha’al whose professional dance experience included both the Bat-Sheva Ensemble and the Kibbutz Dance Workshop. Partners in life and dance, Wertheim and Sha’al founded the Vertigo Dance Company in 1992.
Wertheim and Sha’al’s first professional collaboration, a short duet called Vertigo, led to the establishment of their company of the same name. The inspiration came from the first-hand experience Adi had with the sensation of vertigo during his years in training with the air force. Vertigo – the performance – was built upon the concept of spinning out of control, not just in the air, but in relationships as well. Sha’al remarks, “Noa and I created a piece which looks at the loss of direction – the dizziness – in the human duet.”