LAST WORK (2015)

BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY
STATE THEATRE, ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE
AS PART OF MELBOURNE FESTIVAL
SATURDAY 17TH OCTOBER, 2015
SUNDAY 18TH OCTOBER, 2015

CHOREOGRAPHER AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: OHAD NAHARIN
PERFORMED BY BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY DANCERS, SEASON 2014/15

SEGMENTS FROM OHAD NAHARIN’S CREATIONS:
ANAPHASE (1993), MABUL (1992), NAHARIN'S VIRUS (2001), ZACHACHA (1998), SADEH21 (2011), TELOPHAZA (2006), THREE (2005), MAX (2007)

From the archives: Craftwork, my response drawn up especially for Fjord Review, October 2015.

Motion builds slowly. In the form of a wave that ripples through the body. Omri Drumlevich moves as if possessed, eyes fixed on a point somewhere behind me. With his left arm outstretched in counter balance and his supporting leg bent, the right side of his body gives over to an undulation of controlled movement. His right hand rests upon his bent suspended right leg, his forearm in direct line with his shin, as if fusing two parts of the body previously independent. The hand now fixed on the knee, the familiar line of the body altered, through Drumlevich’s body courses an inward sensation made outwardly visible. As his stirring builds, the pace quickens, and I am mesmerised. Without theatrics and pomp, he appears to have altered the range of movement in the ball and socket workings of his knee joint.

Motion is steady. In the form of a lone dancer on a treadmill, tirelessly running. Dressed in bright blue, the runner remains a constant, adjusting how I perceive time and space. Their pace never alters, their direction never changes, their destination, never reached. The runner remains steadfast as the dancers on the stage before and around them explore an impossible range of motions. The juxtaposition between the runner's enduring pattern and the uncertainty of the dancers, itself a beautiful conversation. Both represent unwavering determination, but both runner and dancers reach it differently. The message I read in Ohad Naharin's Last Work (2015): more things unite us than divide us.

Motion is frenetic. In the form of wild energy unleashed, unmasked, unrobed. It pulsates and shakes to the relentless 4/4 beat of Hysteric’s 'Club Life'. The driving sound of Baltimore rapper, Sagat’s aptly named ‘Few Mysteries Solved in a Year of Contact’ and the accompanying action on the stage above all reveal to me how hard it is to remain true to your own course as those around you do otherwise. As Oscar Ramos, in low runners’ crouch, moves his head forward and back, forward and back, as if ‘eating sound’, Zina (Natalya) Zinchenko thrusts her hips side to side as she whips her right hand in-out, in-out, in-out before her face. In a tight knot on the stage, each dancer repeats their own looped, instinctual movement and a machine is made of varying parts: all linked, all different. Converting movement into heat and energy, an engine of dancers appears, with Maayan Sheinfeld, a spark plug, and no shortage of dancers vying for the role of crankshaft, connecting rod, and piston. For though I’m likening this engine to a machine, it is completely animal. Primal impulses, unmistakably, front and centre, an echo of Nijinsky’s erotic Faun.

Motion is carefully measured. In the form of the pas de deux performed by Hsin-Yi Hsiang and Adi Zlatin. Moving as if one body, side by side, the cruelty of this metered tenderness comes from the fact that I cannot truly look at both their expressions at the one time. I leap from face to face, limb to limb, like some frenzied bee in search of nectar, trying to take it all in, again noting more similarities than differences. And while I cannot understand the words of the four Romanian lullabies that feature alongside the likes of Luminox’s high-key tinkling ‘Tantrum’, I understand their universal meaning, or rather, I feel their meaning. As Naharin explains, lullabies are sung by horrible parents and wonderful parents, too. And it is this expression of joy and pain and sadness [living] in the same space; [that] don’t contradict each other[i] that Last Work drives home for me.

Though we don’t remain in the nursery for long, as William Barry, clad in yellow shorts, relentlessly wields a grogger, a Purim noisemaker, and drowns out the gun-polishing suggestive actions of his fellow dancer, the Haman villain to Purim’s story, perhaps.[ii] With momentum causing the board to clack against the gearwheel, Barry has become an instrument. On the heels of the joyous Decadance (one night only at Melbourne Festival), fresh from its Tel-Aviv premiere, Last Work challenges me to work. It demands the audience work at keeping pace. It demands and deserves engagement.

In the temporary seats installed in the State Theatre above the filled-in orchestra pit, the audience participation that only the other night I had longed for. In the second row, I feel in the midst of the rapidly shifting convulsions of the eighteen dancers. Bathed in the bright lights, up close, real close, so close as to reach out and touch, the reverberation fells almost forbidden. Privy to every twitch and flex, above my head soars the embodiment of Naharin’s Gaga. “Body builders with soft spine,” aware of their “explosive power”[iii]. When Ian Robinson lands crouched at the foot of the stage and appears to look right through me, I fail to return his gaze. Seated up close, the intensity of expression across the faces of all the dancers is fantastically unnerving so as to feel almost voyeuristic.

As Hsiang crouches like a small pebble atop Shamel Pitts, I am reminded of moments within Sadeh21 when one dancer stood atop another in a cat-like pose. As Iyar Elezra in small white tutu vibrates before the convulsing Berry: the familiar tapping into of unconscious, animalistic movement. As Pitts slithers beneath three dancers in bridge pose, the fluidity of their upper bodies, hypnotic. The recurring motifs of balance, sensual connectedness, and the ability to yield, are all in evidence. “Gaga is a lot about developing bigger awareness, so what is delicate becomes more delicate, what is wild becomes more wild, what is quick becomes more quick. It’s about the flow of energy and being available, open. Even if we don’t move, it is a state of mind that you are available — for anything.”[iv] Just as there are recurring motifs within the choreography, within Gaga there are recognisable tendues, arabesques, and bourrées alongside jaw-dropping backbends that hover, teasingly, just above the floor from a wide-legged stance (Elezra and Zinchenko: I’m looking at you). The emphasis feels always about expression over an overt display of virtuosity, even though I am frequently left in awe by its energy and power.

As coloured confetti not gunfire rains, a white flag is proudly waved, and Robinson sets to making a structure from packaging tape, radiating from a standing microphone. A cacophony of noise! The screech of tape, that deafening sound! Binding the dancers together, one at a time, with an endless roll (a seamless transitioning between three rolls of tape worn as bracelets), the independent parts become one. Resistance, in this case, literally means tape garrotting your neck. The tape at first seems playful in its futility, but the resulting restrictions read as anything but. Unable to move in the free means previously relished, Last Work draws to dramatic, inevitable close. However, I read a message of hope in the curtain call where the dancers share two pairs of small scissors[v] and cut themselves free. As with Decadance beginning before it started, so too, Last Work does not end, and I cannot wait to see what follows.

[i] Ohad Naharin quoted by Anna Della Subin, ‘Going Gaga of Ohad Naharin’, The New York Times Style Magazine, 19th September, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/t-magazine/ohad-naharin-dance-profile.html, accessed 16th October, 2015.

[ii] Rabbi Shimon Apisdorf, ‘Grogger: The Purim Noisemaker’, excerpt from The One Hour Purim Primer: Everything a Family Needs to Understand, Celebrate and Enjoy Purim, Leviathan Press, 1995, http://www.torah.org/features/holydays/grogger.html, accessed 19th October, 2015.

[iii] Naharin on his movement language of Gaga, Batsheva Dance Company website, http://batsheva.co.il/en/gaga, assessed 19th October, 2015.

[iv] Naharin quoted by Francesca Horsley, ‘Deca Dance, by the Batsheva Dance Company’, New Zealand Listener, 9th January, 2014, http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/dance/dance-deca-dance/, accessed on 16th October, 2015.

[v] A small aside: as someone who works with collage, I especially delight in seeing scissors being used on the stage. To anyone who has even wrapped multiple packages: you will undoubtedly enjoy the brown packaging tape sequence as you marvel at Robinson’s dexterity. The tape doesn’t split! The end of the roll appears easily found!

Lighting Design: Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi)
Soundtrack Design and Edit: Maxim Warratt
Original Music: Grischa Lichtenberger
Stage Design: Zohar Shoef
Costume Design: Eri Nakamura
Assistants to Ohad Naharin and Maxim Warratt: Ariel Cohen and Guy Shomroni
Production: Hila Razon
Running Trainer: Mark Or

With Batsheva Dance Company dancers, season 2014/15:
Olivia Ancona, William Barry, Mario Bermudez Gil, Omri Drumlevich, Bret Easterling, Iyar Elezra, Hsin-Yi Hsiang, Rani Lebzelter, Ori Moshe Ofri, Rachael Osborne, Shamel Pitts, Oscar Ramos, Nitzan Ressler, Ian Robinson, Or Meir Schraiber, Maayan Sheinfeld, Zina (Natalya) Zinchenko, and Adi Zlatin.

Image credit: Batsheva Dance Company in Last Work, by Gadi Dagon