Batsheva Dance Company: Deca Dance; Sadeh21 -
State Theatre Centre of WA, 9 February; 14 February -
In their first visit to Perth, Israel's Batsheva Dance Company presented two short programmes of abstract, contemporary dance, offering audiences the chance to experience the 'Gaga' movement language, for which the company is known, and to see first-hand the work of much-admired contemporary choreographer Ohad Naharin.
Deca Dance is a 75-minute staged montage of excerpts from twenty years of Batsheva's repertoire and celebrates and pays homage to Naharin, the company's artistic director since 1990. It premiered in 2000 in Tel Aviv and is, by its nature, constantly evolving.
As the audience took their seats for the performance of Deca Dance, a lone male dancer (Shamel Pitts) moved around the stage in a remarkable, apparently improvised pre-show solo to a varied mix of recorded musical styles. This section proved to be one of the evening's highlights as, with boundless energy, he expertly integrated pretty much every dance style in existence.
Great diversity in musical modes both Arabic and Western from Naharin's past works give Deca Dance an additional and stimulating element. Some sections lose momentum but the dancers' athleticism, flexibility and control are evident in random sculptural shapes and a range of movements with few definable 'steps', skilled and sustained overhead lifts, explosive elevation and percussive stamps and claps. Disparate sections are effectively melded, and individuals seamlessly become impersonal groups.
Within a simple, black stage-setting, with an intriguing eccentricity of movement, it is easy to appreciate the great physicality of a couple in black bondage-type costumes, the impressive intensity of a trio of two females and one male, untamed barrel rolls by seven males in flowing, white culottes, and some ritualistic formal patterns and small groupings in a long section of repetitive counting to ten. Knowledge of the original works from which the excerpts were taken is not essential.
An audience-participation segment to Mambo song 'Sway,' with lively and good-humoured co-operation from the ‘participants,’ was well received on the night viewed and an additional highlight of Deca Dance.
Sadeh21 was choreographed in collaboration with the Batsheva company dancers and premiered in May 2011 in Jerusalem. Inventive lighting and stage designs by Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi) see a half-height, light-coloured wall structure across the back of the stage serving as both a canvas for lighting and as a screen for projecting the titles for each sadeh section. It is connected to side structures, creating masking, exits and entrances. A mixed genre soundtrack by Maxim Warratt (no listings in the printed programme) offers auditory challenges as well as moments of great pleasure.
A disappointingly small audience attended Sadeh21's first performance in Perth, which started 15 minutes late. Sadeh21 begins with an ear-piercing noise like a gun blast, which recurs several times during the 75-minute performance. 'Sadeh1' (sadeh meaning field, as in 'field of study' in Hebrew) introduces each of the eighteen dancers, impressively improvising to their individual strengths in brief solos. Costumes are mostly tight T-shirts, tank tops and bike shorts of differing colours.
As the sadehs continue, multiple changes of lighting states and a girl in red create some memorable images. And challenging the imagination are seven men in black strapless evening dresses, a girl marching awkwardly, and later a formation of nine males with linked arms, who raise their knees as if in military mode. After six sadehs, the next title projected reads 'Sadeh7-18', which signals that the end is nigh after some longueurs.
Disconcerting aspects include a male dancer screeching unintelligible words as if cruelly mimicking a speech disorder, and that some of the movement teeters perilously towards mockery. And in works with little humour, a dancer mooning the audience in Deca Dance and a male dancer pulling down a female dancer's pants in Sadeh21 seem anomalous.
At the apparent conclusion of this work, a male dancer’s head suddenly appears above the back parapet wall and he ascends, stands, and then falls silently backwards into the darkness. The other dancers follow suit and their diving and leaping into the abyss is as surprising as it is entrancing. Film-like credits roll as projections on the wall and the audience applauds, in vain, as no dancers appear for calls.
- Margaret Mercer