“Bugs” is a solo reflecting on the duality of a person living inside a mechanical body, and a robot living in a human body.

The machine explores the body’s defective boundaries, tries to disrupt the system with the aim of perfecting it. The search for perfection and the desire for a change causes bugs in the system. The body undergoes transformation and becomes a trained and emotionless machine that gradually destroys the reality in which it lives in.

The body becomes an arena of action, bringing consciousness to a different state, in order to create a transformation of experience within the dimension of the stage, observing the body that disappears from the daily identity it represents. A dialogue between human and non-human action. A dialogue between object and subject.

Bugs performed by Meirav Cohen
Merav Cohen’s work, Bugs, dealt with the relationship between the human body and the machines that surround it, and which to a large extent take over. Cohen chose to dance in the solo she created, and sought to embody both ends—the mechanical and the human through her body. The encounter is mainly expressed in the encounter between the highly programmed and electronic music, Cohen’s most body and almost animalistic movement. In the first part of the piece, the exposed and bright stage was added to this contrast, which created a feeling of alienation on the one hand, and of an almost naked body on the other. Cohen managed to express the name of the work, “bugs”, both from the world of computers and technology and in its original meaning—as insects, living on and below the earth. — Tal Levin, Haaretz