Oshra Elkayam-Ronen, who belonged to the pioneer generation of Israeli movement theater, was one of the important Israeli choreographers in this style. One can discern two main theoretical topics in her work: questions about the nature of life, and the relationship between men and women. She maintained that she felt like a human being who has been cast into the world, searching for a place to hold on to. She saw life as a paradox but at the same time had a drive to create, ambition to realize herself, “to climb on the ladders”—all of which require incessant pursuit. “The only permanent element that cannot be stopped,” she maintained, “is time, which acts like a local train going through a series of life stations that lead in the end to an unattained goal” (interview with author). Her work appearsed as if it were immersed in a pool of fantasy, humor, and optimism.

Elkayam was born in Netanya on September 24, 1939. Her father, Ovadiah Elkayam (1908–1987), was a farmer who graduated from the agricultural school at Mikveh Israel. Her mother, Rahel (née Payekov) Elkayam (1915–2000), was a nurse. Her parents were born in Tiberias and married in 1937.

At the beginning of the 1950s Elkayam began to study Ausdruckstanz (Expressionist Dance) with Gertrud Kraus and even participated in the dance company in Händel’s oratorio Samson and Delilah (1955), Kraus’s last work. After she saw Martha Graham’s troupe in Israel in 1956, Elkayam decided to study her dance style. That same year, she was awarded a scholarship by Bethsabée de Rothschild and traveled to New York to study with Graham. After two and a half years in Graham’s studio, she registered for dance and choreography classes at Juilliard and even staged a number of performances with her own company.

In 1960 Elkayam married Haggai Ronen (1938–1969), a member of Kibbutz Afikim, who was a pilot in the Israel Air Force. The couple had three children: the twins Itai and Amir (b. 1966) and a daughter Sivan (b. 1969).

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Elkayam-Ronen was the first guest choreographer to be invited to create a work for the Inbal Dance Theater, where she staged Requiem for a Warrior (1972), And the Sea is Not Yet Full (1976), and Song of Songs (1979). Influenced by her husband’s death, these dances dealt with fate and death. She also choreographed Journey to Nowhere (1974) and Eclipse of Lights for the Batsheva Dance Company. The former dealt with relationships between people, while the second focused on the Holocaust. She was asked by Kaj Lotman, the artistic director of Batsehva, to choreograph a work to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The dance opened with a semi-transparent curtain through which the audience saw movement that looked like a frantic, pointless mass running about in an extermination camp encircled by an electrified fence. It resembled an event remembered in a dream of something beyond belief, that is and is not. In the journal Musag, Leah Dov wrote a rave review entitled “The Ghastly Possibility Is Possible.”

Elkayam-Ronen also created several works for the kibbutz company, including Triplet’s Trip (1979), a comic-sarcastic-philosophical bent that related to the absurdity in the lack of proportion between man’s fierce desires and the brevity of his life. Elkayam claimed this work showed the first signs of her transition toward movement theater. “The subject deals with human beings’ lack of control over their fate. I expressed this idea through the imaginative journey of a group of wanderers, two men and a woman, who come from nowhere and go to nowhere. Although I was working with dancers, I allowed myself to use the whole gamut of physical expression, including movement, dance, pantomime, song and speech” (interview with author).

The success of Triplet’s Trip imbued Elkayam with the confidence to continue in this artistic direction, but with an ensemble of her own that would include artists from different theater disciplines. In this she joined the path of the Independent choreographers, who burst on the scene in 1977. The first work she created for the movement theater setting was Terminal (1980), which has an urban quality, with people hurrying from place to place, moving from side to side like pendulums between the past and the future, unable to stop in the present for even a moment. The performance won the Kinor David prize in 1981 and was staged at the Israel Festival, the Berlin Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, and the Pompidou Center.

At the Israel Festival in 1984, the Oshra Elkayam Movement Theater presented One-and-a-Half-Inch Tremolo, which deals with loneliness and the lack of communication between people. It is a kind of surrealist dream about a demented plumber who happens upon the home of an unremarkable couple and repairs the telephones and the homeowner as though he were a piece of sanitary equipment that was not working properly. Elkayam used plastic pipes of all sizes, including huge sewer pipes, that served as the plumbing, communication devices, and cables.

In 1989, Elkayam staged Ladders, which dealt with the desire to get ahead, to climb the ladder despite gender limitations. Elkayam’s woman is portrayed as a curious and creative person who, despite her relatively inferior beginning with regard to the man, manages to get the better of him. This was a strange story-line in the spirit of Baron Munchausen, in which a man goes fishing, casts his line, and “catches” his wife. The work was set on an imaginary planet, tying into the movie world that Elkayam recalled from her youth in the 1950s when fun was going to the movies. Those were the days of flashy Hollywood movies, as well as the neo-realism of films by directors such as Vittorio de Sica, Federico Fellini, and others, where there was no difference between imagination and reality.

After about a decade of protracted silence, Elkayam choreographed her last work, And Then I Went, to texts by Israeli poets, performed by actress Odelya Moreh-Matalon. This multimedia production was a rich combination of video art and animation, which conduct a dialogue with the written word of Hebrew poetry. Created from a feminine perspective, it is a nostalgic work of yearning for a time long past. Elkayam ends the show with a poem by Dalia Ravikovitch: “I don’t need to get there.” This does not mean that we are not meant to get somewhere, but simply that we must put the emphasis on the journey, not the destination.

Elkayam died in October 2022.