IN YOUR FACE A member of the Tami Dance Company closes in.

Photograph: Anatoly Michaelo

An Israeli summer, notes the choreographer Nimrod Freed, is hot and full of flies—an irritating combination, to be sure, but a stimulating one when it comes to cooking up a new dance. “In Israel,” he notes in a telephone interview, “when I open a newspaper and read what is there, I also feel like I’m being attacked by flies. There are also a lot of flies in the air. When you start to move your hands and to fight those flies, very interesting movements come. Those were my images.”

As part of the latest dance installment at SummerStage on Saturday 26, Freed presents his Tami Dance Company in PeepDance, which draws upon the everyday tension of living in Israel, the aggravating conduct of flies and the art of voyeurism. The program also features the more established Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company in Kef Kafim, a high-energy work “named after the joy or freedom of movement,” according to its choreographer, Rami Be’er.

While Be’er’s production is a collage that builds from different sections of his dances (it sounds a lot like Ohad Naharin’s Decadance, though the choreographer insists he’s never heard of it), Freed’s PeepDance takes place in seven colorful cells. Dancers are visible to the audience only through peepholes; each cell has 25 holes, which means that 175 spectators can watch at once.

“Everybody likes to peep,” Freed says, pointing out that when he lived in New York during the “happy ’80s,” telescopes were commonplace. “I like to peep. And peeping now is happening all the time, everyplace, everywhere, especially on TV. Sometimes when I watch the news, I feel like I’m peeping—there is very intimate stuff going on. In Israel, when they show an explosion on TV, they will show bodies and wounded people. But maybe somebody’s wounded, and she doesn’t want to be photographed?”

For Freed, PeepDance is an experiment with perspective; the viewing arrangement creates what he refers to as a “village of peepers.” Viewers peering inside the cells are greeted with the sight of dancers moving at odd angles (their movement is based on improvisations inspired by humans fighting flies) and—even spookier—holes filled with eyeballs. “Part of the performance is that you can peep on people that are peeping,” Freed says. “By peeping, you see dance with a new angle, with a new perspective. Also, sometimes a dancer will come very close to the peephole, and you see only a part of his body—a shoulder or a piece of an arm. Choreographically, I worked on the dialogue between the fly and the person and the body language of when you fight the fly. We are catching flies, we are fighting flies, we are the flies.”

Choreographers have challenged the audience-dancer relationship for years; Freed sees PeepDance as taking that effort even further. “This piece has a few layers,” he says. “I like to watch the audience; when they peep, they smile. It’s a very good energy, and it’s a whole event. But one audience member called me afterwards and was comparing the experience to peeping at a person or an animal in a cage, in a very intimate state. The dancers really get into it. It’s very difficult to dance in a peep cell. This is a box, and they dance in a limited space—it is only three meters by three meters. Their interaction with the audience is totally different, totally new.”

During some early incarnations, Freed tried to place restraints on the viewers in an attempt to direct them to specific cells instead of letting them choose their own. It didn’t work. “The audience did not like it, and I let it go,” he says. “I prefer when they have the freedom to move from cell to cell. You see people who are peeping for three seconds and then they are sure that they’re missing something amazing in the other cell, so they run to it.” (Such behavior isn’t necessary; you will grasp the point of the piece if you simply stay at the same cell and occasionally change the peephole or perspective). “It’s a different process for each person in the audience. I like this freedom. It works.” Freedom is on the choreographer’s mind; living in Tel Aviv, he notes, is particularly intense at the moment. “Now, people are coming for vacation,” he says. “I just met a dancer who is Israeli and lives in Norway; he is here for a few days and he told me, ‘I’m on vacation, but still I feel the tension—it’s unbelievable.’ There is a big question mark here. If you want to be positive, Israel is full of energy. People move around all the time—like flies.”

Tami Dance Company and Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company perform at SummerStage’s Ramsey Playfield on Sat, Jul 26.