Melbourne Festival
Batsheva Dance Company: Decadance and Last Work -
State Theatre, Melbourne, 15 and 17 -
The audience waited for the show to "start". They chatted animatedly, stood up, sat down and breathed in as others slid into their seats at the State Theatre Melbourne. Though the lights were still up, on stage a suited dancer performed flat-out, treating us with an exhibition of dance styles performed with tongue-in-cheek humour, acrobatic turns and finessed parody.
Gradually, in waves, the audience came on board as audience, especially when other company members joined the soloist in a playful Latin groove and the lights were dimmed. The question of when an audience deems that dance becomes performance is a conversation for another day but, once engaged, this crowd was riveted for the next hour.
This was the beginning of Decadance, which, along with Last Work, we had the good fortune to enjoy as part of the Melbourne Festival. The former work is an integrated melange from Batsheva's repertoire by choreographer and artistic director Ohad Naharin. The choreographic language ranges from the powerful to the precise, as seen in the opening sequence in which the ensemble, dressed in suits and seated on a semi circular arrangement of chairs, rise up, declaim, deflate and fold, casting off items of clothing as they go through a series of repeated, almost incantatory phrases.
Naharin's choreography evokes a sense of looseness that is nonetheless held tightly within the control of a razor-sharp precision. Dancers break from the pack in some segments, seemly free-willed, but are then reabsorbed into the whole. Movements shift mercurially from ballistic hyper-extensions to gentle fragility to quirky experiments in what the body will do or how silly it can look. The mood is light and playful or abandoned and joyful or tender and understated.
Music too swerves unapologetically from Latin to traditional Israeli, from golden years of Hollywood to crooning. A trio of songs sets up a quite delightful episode where audience members are escorted to the stage to partner the dancers. It begins with some wild improvised limb-swinging and culminates in Dean Martin's "Sway" with the dancers facing back while the apprentices take the limelight. Eventually all the ring-ins are returned to the anonymity of the audience, leaving one good-humoured audience member to find her way "home" from centre stage - pursued by a spotlight.
Last Work brought a very different temper to the Batsheva aesthetic. The movement language is equally recognisable as Naharin's signature "Gaga" vocabulary and style but this work is significantly more challenging. In contrast with much of Decadance's approachability and good humour, Last Work has a harder edge. The work is heavy with ambiguous symbolism which slips away as soon as a narrative seems to be emerging. It is tempting to read political commentary into the dance but attempts to do so elude any firm interpretation. It is enough to say that human nature is laid bare in this work. The grotesque, the delicate, the nuanced are mined for their expressive and movement counterparts.
Throughout is an acknowledgement of human effort. A female jogger marks time as her steady, unchanging gait and posture accompany the entire performance. Wearing a blue dress that is a deliberate clash with other costuming, she runs and runs but gains no ground. She looks neither tired nor disaffected. Her treadmill niche upstage holds her to a steady if unproductive course. She is finally shackled with a large white flag. But who is surrendering is unclear.
The work ends with a noisy screaming gesture at oration from one of the dancers. The other dancers, a frenzied crowd, are sculpturally bound together in a web of shiny packing tape. Whether they are united or trapped is unclear but this moment is, like so many others in this work, a fabulous image.
In the end the quality of the movement and dance is what carried this production. The way Naharin has bodies move is astonishing. They bend like supple reeds or splinter like brittle twigs. In some of the sections the bodily articulations are so improbable that they look like cartoon animations. Surely real people can't perform these movements, in the slowest of slow motion or most furious of high speed!
This is a work that will divide audiences and furnish many an argument and conversation for a long time to come. We hope it is not Ohad Naharin's “last work”.
- SUSAN BENDALL
Top photo: Decadance. Click on thumbnails for captions.