About the show
Saga is a live stage show fusing dance, live singing and original music written just for it. On stage — a company of dancers and singers telling one story, from the first note to the finale. No playback, no intermission, no way to stay indifferent. Seventy unbroken minutes that move between moments so intimate they are almost whispered and peaks that shake the hall, while set, light and sound shift around the dancers like one long breath.
The idea began with a simple question: what happens when you stop separating dance from song, and let the body and the voice tell the exact same thing at the exact same moment. Instead of a dance piece with a soundtrack laid over it, we built a work in which every movement was born out of the note sounding beside it. The composer sat in the rehearsal room from day one, wrote in front of the dancers, changed keys and tempos according to what the body asked for — and out of that came a language whose music and movement cannot be pulled apart.
The movement vocabulary leans on contemporary dance but borrows freely from folk tradition: circles, clapped hands, stamped feet that become percussion in their own right. The dancers do not only dance — they breathe audibly, sing mid-movement, and sometimes stop entirely and leave the stage to silence. The audience, seated closer than usual, hears those breaths. That is deliberate: to collapse the distance between stage and hall, and give live performance back the one thing only it can do.
The process took roughly two years. It started with small improvisation workshops with no music at all, moved through the writing of eight original songs, and passed through three versions that were thrown out before the show found its present shape. Much of the material was built with the dancers themselves — personal stories that turned into solos, family memories that turned into lyrics. Every cast that steps on stage therefore brings something that cannot be reproduced by copying.
The show fits both large halls and intimate rooms, and tours in two formats: a full production with a company of eleven performers, and a reduced format for five. It is performed in Hebrew, yet built to land for audiences who do not speak the language — the story is carried in the body, the dynamics and the sound. It has played twenty-two cities so far, and has grown from forty minutes of material on the first run to a closed seventy-minute piece.
The creator
Noa Shpindler is a creator, choreographer and director who has worked between dance and music theatre for more than fifteen years. She trained in dance at the school of performing arts, went on to a two-year residency in the Netherlands, and returned to dance with an independent company she toured seven countries with. Alongside that she taught choreography, worked as an assistant director on two large theatre productions, and discovered that what really interests her sits exactly on the seam — the moment movement becomes narrative and a song becomes a body.
The move to independent work came after years of making pieces on commission. She wanted to build something from the ground up: choose the dancers, write the dramaturgy, sit with a composer and say "here I need a breath, here I need a wall." Saga grew out of notes she kept in a single notebook over two years — fragments about family, about migration, about the things that pass from one generation to the next without anyone ever explaining them. The first version of the show was twenty minutes performed for fifty people in a studio.
She insists on two things in her work: that the dancers are co-authors rather than only performers, and that the audience sees something that cannot be filmed and passed along. Rehearsals therefore always open with a conversation, and every touring run brings small changes to the choreography. She is equally firm that the show reach not only the major cultural centres but small halls outside the metropolitan area, and that every date holds back a quota of subsidised tickets for school and university students.
Beyond Saga she teaches composition workshops for young dancers, mentors creative processes in independent companies, and runs an education project bringing teenagers into professional stage work. She lives in Tel Aviv, travels a great deal, and believes live performance is one of the last places where a whole room of strangers agrees to sit together and feel the same thing at the same time.
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