The Israeli contemporary dance company is returning to Australia after 23 years to perform at the Sydney Opera House.

The story of the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company begins in Auschwitz in 1944. Learning that an 18-year old Jewish girl called Yehudit Arnon was a dancer, Nazi prison guards asked her to perform at a Christmas party. When she refused, she was forced to stand barefoot in the snow all through the night as a punishment. She vowed there and then that if she survived, she would dedicate her life to dance.

Horses in the Sky. Photo by Eyal Hirsch

At the end of the war, Arnon made her way to Hungary and from there, in 1948, to the Kibbutz Ga’aton in northern Israel. In 1973, she founded the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, which 40 years on is still flourishing under the artistic directorship of her personally appointed successor, Rami Be’er. The Company arrives in Sydney this week to perform a new work called Horses in the Sky at the Sydney Opera House – its first performance in Australia for 23 years, having previously appeared at the Melbourne Festival. “I am...