About half a year ago, choreographer Emanuel Gat received a phone call from Paris: Brigitte Lefevre, the director of the dance department at the Paris Opera, had seen one of his works and was interested in working with him, he was told. Two months later he flew to Paris to meet her and her colleagues. "They gave me a two-hour tour of the building, to the cellars and behind the scenes of that amazing building," relates Gat. "I left there with my knees shaking; they had taken me to places you can see only in documentary films."

The dance that Lefevre had seen, and which led her to invite him to choreograph for the most famous operatic ballet in the world, was "K626." The work, which is based on Mozart's "Unfinished Requiem" (K626), has been performed throughout the world and has won praise from critics. After a performance at the Marseilles Festival, for example, Le Monde declared that "the Israeli choreographer has done it again" and defined the performance as "a visual delicacy."

"In all the 15 years that I've been a creative artist, there have been two moments that made me understand that I had 'arrived,' says Gat, "the invitation to Lincoln Center, when they asked me to put on my 'Rite of Spring' there, and the phone call from the Paris Opera. These were the formative moments that gave me the feeling that I really am succeeding and it's not just in my own mind."

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Next month Gat will return to Paris, where he will present preliminary ideas for a work, and then he will embark on the Sisyphean work of auditioning all 147 of the Opera Ballet's dancers, work with the musicians of the Opera Philharmonic Orchestra and so on, until the premiere of the work, in March, 2009.

'The hardest period'

The prestigious commission that has been won by only one other Israeli choreographer, Ohad Naharin, testifies to the respected status that Gat has acquired in the field, to which he turned at a relatively advanced age. When he was 23 years old, about 15 years ago, his wife, Yifat Gat, showed him an advertisement for a workshop given by dancers Nir Ben Gal and Liat Dror, intended for people with no prior experience. Only two months after Gat began to study, the pair already invited him to rehearse with their troupe and immediately after that he became a full-fledged member of it. Within about half a year he was participating in the troupe's tours abroad.

"All my life I had engaged in various kinds of sports," he relates, "and there too I was always interested in the aesthetic side more than in whether I won or not. When I played tennis, for example, the aesthetics of the serve held more interest for me than the outcome of the match. I remember that in my childhood I would watch slow-motion footage of athletes from the Olympics for hours... Now, in retrospect, I can connect this with dance."

Gat remained with the troupe for only one year, and then embarked on an independent path. "I decided to bang my head against the wall alone," he says, adding immediately: "I was naive, of course. I was certain that within an hour I would succeed in putting a dance together."

Gat rented a studio in Netanya, where he had grown up, to which he traveled every day from his home, in Tel Aviv. "I would arrive at the studio in the morning," he recalls. "Put on music. Look in the mirror. And fall asleep in front of it. All I did was sleep. Then I would get on the bus, drink some Turkish coffee at the central bus station, go home and tell my wife how hard I had worked and how much progress I had made."

Fifteen years later, as he recalls "the hardest period of my life," Gat sips from a glass of lemonade after an exhausting rehearsal at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv. "It was a radical change: from work in a troupe, where you don't have to worry about anything, just dance, I became a freelancer, who had no idea what to do either as a dancer or as a producer or as an administrator."

The end of the process was the work "Four Dances," which premiered in 1994 in the Gvanim Bamahol dance festival. That was followed by "Trio," with Niv Scheinfeld, "Two Stupid Dogs," which was commissioned for the 2003 Israel Festival, and his big breakthrough, "The Rite of Spring," which premiered at the festival in Uzes, France; a critic in Le Figaro called this dance "amazing."

In his new piece, "3 for 2007," which has already premiered in Germany and will be performed next Wednesday and Thursday at Suzanne Dellal, Gat has gone back to dancing himself, after a five-year hiatus. "I didn't dance in my previous works because I wanted an external perspective," he says. "Now I felt that the right thing to do was to go back in."

The performances this coming week are the only ones currently planned for Israel. The reason is economics. This year the Emanuel Gat troupe received an allowance of only NIS 170,000 from the Culture Ministry, NIS 20,000 less than last year.

"They are punishing me because I don't perform a lot in Israel, and they're right," he explains, "but every time I do, I go into debt that I don't get out of for months. Abroad, I don't have costs, just profit. But in Israel I stand alone: I have to rent a hall, a crew and take care of the advertising. In most cases I simply lose money. In April and May, I gave four performances of 'K626,' and I spent everything I had earned three months earlier in performances abroad. Abroad, a dance troupe of a magnitude like mine gets support of at least 1 million euros a year from the state, whereas for me 90 percent of the money comes from earnings."

The gap between the budgets that troupes like Gat's receive and their success among the local audience, like the enormous difference between their prestige abroad and the small space occupied by the area of dance in Israeli culture, causes many artists to ponder whether to remain in Israel; many of them in fact do their creative work and perform abroad. Gat, too, says that he is now at this crossroads.

"Until now, somehow the feeling of home, the unwillingness to be a foreigner, and personal and cultural comfort mixed with naivete have caused me to remain in Israel," he notes. "But I admit that I am now rethinking. Being involved with dance in Israel is like living in Antarctica and wanting to grow cherry tomatoes in a greenhouse. To insist on being an artist in Israel, especially in a hallucinatory field like dance, is an internal contradiction that is difficult to resolve."

He says these things a week after having met with a senior official in the field of dance at the Culture Ministry. "He said something to me that shook me up," relates Gat. "'There isn't going to be another Bat Sheva troupe here,' he said, and he was referring to the attitude toward the troupe and the funding that it gets every year. Then I realized for the first time that the system and the mechanism simply can't contain more than one large troupe, and as far as they are concerned the icon Bat Sheva is a one-time thing. And since it is possible to assume that the culture budgets in the state of Israel aren't going to get any bigger, and certainly not the budgets for dance, this will continue to be the situation."

Kiryat Gat adventure

Nevertheless, there is no need to hasten to eulogize the Israeli Emanuel Gat troupe. Gat has always been a nonconformist unthreatened by social conditioning. Even the decision to marry at the age of 23 and have five children since then was not suited to the environment in which he lives.

"My friends viewed this as scandalous," he relates. "This is suitable for people from poor neighborhoods, not for young people in Tel Aviv. But I have pursued what I think is right for me. A family with five children sounds like something from the ultra-Orthodox or Arab world, but I have chosen something that in the intimacy between me and my wife is right for us." About five years ago the family left Tel Aviv and moved to the South to live: initially in Moshav Lakhish, and more recently in Moshav Nir Chen, between Ashkelon and Kiryat Gat. The connection to the region has also engendered in Gat a desire to settle there professionally as well, and about two years ago there was a report in the media that "a dance center will be established in Kiryat Gat." But this has not happened.

In fact, for about two years now, Gat has been renting a large hangar in Kiryat Gat, but to this day it stands empty of people. "There's a limit to what I can do on my own," he explains. "There comes a moment when one needs help from partners: the state, the town and private donors."

But the donors have not been good to him either. "Chicago Jewry has adopted Kiryat Gat," he says, "and when I met with them for this purpose, they barely smiled in my direction, even though I had come prepared with research studies that show that a project like this can help the future generation. It's impossible to convince these people, who are pouring millions of dollars onto the population of the South, to donate to anything apart from welfare, hot meals, the unemployed and youth in distress. They have a one-dimensional perception that donations to regions like that have to be to misery and not for culture."

In the meantime, he says, "After having invested half a million shekels of the troupe's money in the center, I can say that the project has moved two millimeters, and even that is only in my mind."