Keren Levi at Theatre Kikker with unique documentary and smart performance.

'Inside Envelopes' is a unique documentary because it shows the reality of contemporary theatre and dance makers: working hard to bring an idea to fruition, without falling back on an existing recipe or classic methods. Creating a performance is always an adventure, with its attendant struggles, existential questions, arguments and disagreements. It is a practice that has been around for decades but is rarely portrayed. Which is a pity, because it would give a wider audience an inside look at a highly inventive and life-changing practice.

Israeli documentary-maker Shelly Kling followed choreographer and dancer Keren Levi and her likewise dancing younger sister Reut as they prepared the production 'Envelopes' (2010) together with musician and composer Tom Parkinson and his twin brother and musician Alex, without a script ready. Everyone has input, everyone bears responsibility, Kerin Levi as choreographer and initiator just a little bit more.

A nothing-insightful jack-of-all-trades, Levi has to get things done. A scene with the management of co-producer Grand Theatre in Groningen is telling. 'What more can I do, than just make a beautiful performance?", Levi wonders aloud. Like a true contemporary maker, she feels she is always pushing the limit, always asking something more, something new, something different from her colleagues, not only in the artistic - but also in the production process. Tom Parkinson puts it smilingly at the end of the film: it may have been hell from time to time, but everyone has once again jumped over their own shadow.

A quartet also performs in the performance 'The Dry Piece'. Levi does not dance with them, did the choreography and together with Assi Weitz the video installation, which plays a major role in the performance. Once again, Tom Parkinson created the music. Inspired by Naomi Wolf's 'The Beauty Myth', Levi confronts the viewer with the nudity of four young women. As Levi notes in the documentary: by using formal means, she can not only bring out the emotional value of something, but also question it.

The Dry Piece is kaleidoscopic. The women slowly disappear in a halickening stream of staged and projected images. The in and in symetric choreography for camera-eye and audience makes you, the spectator, dream away in an unparalleled, decorative language of form, reminiscent of Bellini, of fractals or of Hollywood musicals from the 1930s. The relentless flow of female nudity not only fascinates but also confronts, because it is fabricated on the spot. Pornographic connotations, just actors doing their best, fellow spectators who can't get enough - it raises the question of where the line is drawn. What is dancing interest and what is being reduced to an obscene, attractive object?