“One Thing Leads to Another” is a surreal installation and multimedia performance inside an overturned “dead” hot air balloon, reanimated through dance, music and shifting physicality. The project invokes themes of labor, transformation and movement through exploration of multiple vantage points of the itinerant body.

Folding personal narrative into the piece, my experience in a paratrooper’s unit in the Israeli army is linked to the materiality of the balloon and props. In 2010, I began traveling around the US cataloguing hot air balloons and befriended “Home-Builders,” or ballooning enthusiasts, who introduced me to this form of air travel. I was gifted a retired hot air balloon by one of my new acquaintances and used it as the physical and figurative anchor for the performance.

Watching the balloons inflate and transform, I was interested in expanding the boundaries of sculpture to include temporary events that are based on the moving balloon while also addressing sculptural questions. I am interested in inverting the conceived nature of sculpture as fixed and invariable and dance/movement as transient and impermanent. The sculptures changed during the performance; they are taken apart and torn and they fell, broke and existed inside a large breathing hot air balloon that is constantly in movement and designed to fly. The dancers moved from one end of the balloon to another, each making an effort to complete specific tasks while negotiating the changing environment. The dancers were grounded and fixed by their tasks: wearing 150 pound ice skates casted in cement, or balancing a long rain stick sculpture on their head. The virtuosic dancers were limited by the physical demand of the sculptures, and the sculptures were damaged by the interaction, the desperate actions dealing with balance and weight created surreal and spirited situations.

The music played by an ensemble of PVC wind instruments conceived by Yonatan Gutfeld around the concept and physicality of an act of blowing. While playing, the musicians participated in inflating the balloon by moving air particles in a way that manifested the idea of labor. The audience could come and go as they liked and were encouraged to move freely inside and outside the balloon, in a similar way to viewing a sculpture exhibition.