Photo by Gadi DagonOhad Naharin, the choreographer of Batsheva Dance Company (of Israel) creates through exploration using his own technique or “movement language”, Gaga, which among other things aims at the discovery of new motion through mental and physical practices, as well as the pure pleasure in movement and sensation. I got to take a workshop last month with Batsheva dancer and artistic director, Yoshifumi Inao and among the suggestions he made to the group were “Separate your bones from your flesh,” “Have at least two ideas at all times. If you have only one, throw it out and get two more,” and perhaps most importantly, “Don’t become dead meat.” Watching “Max” last night, I was struck by the breadth of movement qualities and velocities on the dancers’ bodies.
In Max, Naharin consciously strips away embellishment; the dancers wear different dark-colored tank tops and shirts that allow the audience to see their flesh jump and their muscles shake and rebound with exertion, the stage is black except for the color of the lights that shift from red to gray to blue, always a mix of hues, scene changes are coordinated via blackouts and the dancers appear without biographical notes in the program. The soundscape alternates between silence, breath, heartbeat, and vocals in a mixed-up, made-up language, a cacophony of syllables that is vaguely familiar and yet totally strange. Freed of distraction we are made more away of light, sound, and movement that conveys a here but not-here, a known but slightly uncanny, a dance but not-dance.
The dancers’ movement, like the sound, was part of a language that was familiar – I recognized myself in the turned-in stretches of a leg, the twitch of a shoulder, the split-second convulsion followed by reasserted bodily control – yet as with the soundscape, the dance left me feeling isolated despite my almost-identification. I was an outsider, a watcher, brushing through movements of physical empathy and then pushed back into my place in the mezzanine. Singing along at the end, it was clear that the words (of which I could recognize only shattered syllables) held power and meaning to the dancers that shouted them, just as the movements, communicated a language and an affect separate from the one that was occurring for me.
Shifting between abstract dancerly movement and immediately recognizable quotidian movement, Naharin shows us pain, ugliness, awkwardness, severity and darkness but also weaves in moments of humor. Several times I would find myself taking the piece incredibly seriously, a somber spectator, and all of a sudden be looking at a row of male dancers jutting their pelvises out or women skittering coquettishly but laughably across the stage; later they matched up in vaguely sexual positions and then “nope, it’s not just your mind in the gutter” – they are slapping crotches together, thighs and hips rocking in a blatant “hump” dance.
For me, Max is a dance of the hyper-human. We watch the dancers bared onstage as they move but also as they are jerked, lifted, spun, and stretched by invisible forces – not the upward pull of the ballet dancer but perhaps by a tension pulling at the neck, a thread at the shoulder, a past experience yanking the hip out of place. But all the while, Naharin troubles this description of complete freedom in movement; the motion that appears so organic and lifelike is strung together in repeating combinations or executed in unison, a meaningful gibberish, like looking at familiar versions of ourselves through the expansive micro-distance of a microscope.
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Interview with Ohad Naharin
Anna Kisselgoff: When Dance and Politics Both Dig Their Heels In
NYTimes Dance Review: Conjuring Up a World Where Images Abound
Dancing Perfectly Free: Batsheva Performs "Max" at BAM