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Israeli dancers inaugurate orphan village in Rwanda
By Roni Dori
Tags: Israel news, orphans, Rwanda 

The Batsheva Ensemble of young dancers from the Batsheva Dance Company inaugurated a youth village in Rwanda Tuesday for orphans of the civil war that took place there 15 years ago.

Members of the Rwandan government and the ambassadors of Israel and the United States also attended the performance of Batsheva artistic director Ohad Naharin's "Quantities."

Together with the ensemble's dancers, the young residents of the village also presented part of another Naharin work at the ceremony.
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The village, which can accommodate up to 500 children ages 14 to 18, was established with the support of the American Joint Distribution Committee on the model of the Yemin Orde Wingate Youth Village in Israel. The staff of the village in Rwanda includes volunteers from Israel and the United States.

This morning the ensemble will return to Israel after five days in the village together with its 190 young residents.

"I believe deeply in the power of "Quantities" to speak to families in Manhattan or children in the village to the same extent," Naomi Fortis Bloch, Batsheva's director general, told Haaretz by phone during the visit.

"The pastoral look of the place is chilling in the face of what happened here 15 years ago," Bloch Fortis said of the village, about 40 kilometers from the Rwandan capital of Kigali.

The Batsheva Ensemble's performance in Rwanda was made possible by contributions from Israel's Foreign Ministry and donors from Israel, the United States, Africa and Europe, which included infrastructure in the form of benches and a dance floor.

Yesterday, before the ensemble preformed "Quantities," local youth presented two and a half minutes of Naharin's 1990 ballet "Who Knows One," taught by Stephan Ferry, a former Batsheva dancer who arrived ahead of the group. Fortis Bloch said the ensemble had been planning on performing the piece themselves, but that after two lessons and two rehearsals the village teens were ready to perform.

Fortis Bloch said the Rwandan and the Israeli teens communicated to some extent in English, but "people are people and there is also the language of the body and gestures. The ensemble dancers are close in age to the teens who live here, so there was interaction all the time."

"We came with so much and generosity, but they gave us a great deal," Fortis-Bloch added.
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