The JISDF is a unique contemporary dance festival, celebrating the solo art, the art of creation, and the artistry of leading dance creators in the international arena. It is an event that focuses on the individual work, giving it an exclusive stage while referring to its artistic uniqueness.

This JISDF Festival sees the art of dance as an act of storytelling that brings to the front stage the personal viewpoints of creators and performers from different parts of the world. The various works touch upon unique statements that correspond with social, environmental, political, and cultural issues, simultaneously touching the worlds of the soul and of human experience – from the limits of space and time to the abstract. The festival opens the opportunity to bring the artists’ individual stories to each and every one of us.

The works chosen to take part in the events bring to the stage a multidisciplinary dance language that is powerful, exposed, and exciting. They emphasize the body as a means of expression and present physicality and movement as tools of communication and as an artistic meeting point that provides a common basis for dialogue between people. 

In this post-pandemic era, amid sharp and destabilizing fluctuations in society’s most fundamental structures in Israel and many other countries, the festival gives meaning through the unifying moment of personal and universal expression by using the broadest human common denominators: body and movement. The artistic discussion and creative action allow for the establishment of a renewed meeting point for observation and listening, derived in the most direct way from the personal narrative and human connection, and manifested through the unmediated physicality of dance and performance as a spoken language.

JISDF 2023 hosts choreographers, dancers, artistic directors, dance artists, and theorists from Israel and the world who will take part in performances and panels that are open to the general public and to the professional community. The festival provides a platform for open discussions, networking, research, exposure, and feedback – an interactive multicultural meeting point that will create a basis for collaborations and a long-term relationship between the artists and the audience. The festival artists stay in Jerusalem, work in the city, create while being inspired by it, and form a diverse international cultural community, together with the other guests and with the audience members participating in the shows and events.

Jerusalem is a home. It embodies beauty and challenge, and it offers a direct encounter with a very wide variety of people and opinions. Here and now, through the body, the story, the gaze, and the extended hand striving to touch – we invite you to a world-embracing artistic experience at eye and heart level.