BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY

DECA DANCE

'DECA' REINVENTS BATSHEVA WORKS
n "Deca Dance," Batsheva Dance's Ohad Naharin offered a fragmented retrospective of almost two decades of his choreography. The program the company performed Wednesday night at the Paramount was made up of bits and pieces of a number of distinctly different works, cut and reshuffled. The diffuse effect created a fascinating statement of its own, a vision of the threatening unpredictability of contemporary life with its bombardment of changing stimuli.

The incredible focus and intensity of the dancers cut a unifying swath through the disconnected pieces. So did Naharin's space-devouring, expressive choreography.

Israel's Batsheva Dance was founded in 1964 by Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild and Martha Graham. As artistic director since 1990, Naharin has brought the company into the forefront of contemporary dance. (He recently yielded artistic directorship to dancer Yoshifumi Inao and now goes by the title house choreographer.) His distinctive style is hard-edged, with lovely moments of both stillness and exuberance. He emphasizes the individuality of his dancers while also deploying large segments of tight unison work.

When the 16 Batsheva dancers launch themselves downstage at the beginning of one section, it feels like a force field blasting the audience. These dancers seem to fill the entire theater with energy, anger and complete commitment in a burning projection of themselves. (Interestingly, in their daily classes based on Naharin's technique and supplemented by ballet, they are forbidden to train with mirrors.)

The excerpts were taken from "Black Milk" (1985), "Passomezzo" (1989), "Queens of Golub" (1989), "Mabul" (1992), "Anaphaza" (1993), "Sabotage Baby" (1997), "Zachacha" (1998), "Moshe" (1999), "Naharin's Virus" (2001). The program noted, however, that the selections were subject to change and not presented in that order. It is clear that Naharin is less concerned with the provenance of the dances than with how their new arrangement creates new meaning. The effect was of different worlds colliding, like television news intruding in an airport waiting-room. A garishly dressed nightclub dancer on stilts, for example, walks through a primitive ritual of men smearing themselves with mud.

In one delightfully humanistic section, dancers in black Hassidic suits and hats went into the auditorium and chose a variety of audience members of all ages with whom to tango, treating them with gentleness and skillfully incorporating them into group movements.

One of the most exhilarating and touching works was based on a Passover accumulation song, each verse adding another layer of movement. The dancers, sitting in a semicircle in their suits and hats, ran through the increasingly complex pattern, tossing off layers of clothes until their shoes and suits were briefly piled in the middle, subtly reminiscent of the horrifying post-Holocaust image of similar accumulations of clothing.

In his rich body of work, as glimpsed on Wednesday night, Naharin has created textured, multilayered dances, and in the Batsheva Company he has assembled dancers with the passion and ability to perform them at their best.
Mary Murfin Bayley The Seattle Times March 19, 2004

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