Noa Eshkol: Dance pioneer and textile artist gets first French retrospective at mahJ

The Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme (mahJ) in Paris presents the first monographic exhibition in France dedicated to Noa Eshkol (1924–2007), running from April 16 to August 30, 2026. Eshkol was a dancer, choreographer, movement theorist, and prolific textile artist. Trained in expressionist dance by Tille Rössler, Rudolf Laban, and Sigurd Leeder, she developed her own movement notation system called EWMN (Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation) with architect and dancer Avraham Wachman, published in 1958 and presented at the Brussels World's Fair. She founded the Chamber Dance Group in 1954. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, she turned to textile creation, assembling wall carpets from fabric scraps without cutting, guided by instinct and passion. Her nearly 1,800 works, titled only after completion, evoke personal landscapes like Plateau du Golan and Village en Ukraine, as well as still lifes reminiscent of Henri Matisse. The exhibition includes a black-and-white film of rehearsals in her Holon studio, showing her minimalist, radical approach to movement. Eshkol was the daughter of former Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.