“Seascapes is the first dance suite composed by Tirza but the last to be published. Working on a composition and enhancing the dances lasted more than 30 years, new dances were added, new movements and variations of choreography were created. Tirza was working all the time, even when she was travelling abroad. Several years ago, she came back from a trip to Japan with the text of the hands in the third verse of the dance Conches. The last dance that she composed for the suite, Starfish, was conceived in our joint breakfasts when we were together in Germany, where we travelled in order to watch some of the seascape dances performed by the students of Dr. Henner Drewes.

Every time Tirza and I sat together to write the opening article which depicts the structure of the suite, we talked about its amazing complexity. Its multiple templates, the variations, the coordinated layers and the inspiration for the movement, created, according to my belief, something brilliant that has always puzzled me. With the passage of time, we delved deeper into the explanation and I realized again and again how rich the structure of this suite was. We tried, and I hope we succeeded, to explain in an accessible, clear and as simple as possible manner, the dances created out of the basic movement templates. At the first moment we too did not know where to start and then we decided to start from Tirza’s opening point, when she created the first dances – the six arms movements.

The starting point is apparently simple but it allows a richness of movement with the addition of the forearms, hands and fingers, embracing the movement of the upper body that carry it and the legs movements leading it in space. Hence, the created layers trace the seascape which Tirza imagined for each and every dance. The other voices are all changing from verse to verse, creating the coordinated layers and the rich simultaneous movement of the suite.

The Seascapes dance suite comprises 12 dances, which are a variation of several templates of movement. The dances were composed and inspired by the framework of Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN). Each dance corresponds with the various seascapes and with the ‘motion painting’ that serves as its background. The movement templates attribute a physical, spatial and visual meaning to the seascape.”