I give credit to Chutzpah! Artistic Managing Director Mary-Louise Albert for wanting to shake things up a bit, moving the opening of this year's festival from its traditional anchor venue at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre at Granville and 41st to the Red Room Bar, downtown on Richards Street. There Maria Kong's Backstage is receiving its North American premiere this weekend, with two more performances today.
Founded seven years ago by former Batsheva company members, the Tel Aviv based Maria Kong combines dance, music and visual effects to create what it calls "live movement experiences." As is the case with Backstage, these experiences are often immersive and, indeed, upon entering the bar last night we were told by one of the hostesses that we should feel free to wander around the space during the performance. What we weren't told was how strictly our movements would be controlled.
The show begins suddenly with a lone troubadour singing and playing his guitar on the edge of the stage, where a full band will later set up. As the crowds fill the dance floor in front of him and rush to attach a body to the voice, another man wearing tuxedo tails starts weaving through the masses waving his arms and directing traffic, encouraging people to sit down on the floor so that everyone can see. Fair enough--standing audience right, near one of the space's three bars, I didn't mind having my sightlines improved as I listened to ballads about pirates and life at sea. However, when the singer introduces three dancing sirens and points them out, shimmying behind and to the left of the audience, near the bar's entrance, the crowd's natural impulse to move towards them is forestalled by our gentlemanly traffic cop, whose constant pacing and silent but insistent gestural adjustment of spectating levels is so distracting that I hardly pay attention to the trio of dancers.
Next, our gaze returns to its opening proscenium orientation as the full rock band comes on stage, accompanied by our mistress of ceremonies, the "Shadow Lady." She purrs into the microphone about the journey we are about to take and then introduces the two other main players in the evening's proceedings, a pair of muscled male dancers clad in tight-fitting post-apocalyptic gladiator gear, as if they are escapees from one of the Mad Max movies. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, these two mostly strut about like rival cocks on the walk, at one point even engaging in a simulated boxing match overseen by the Shadow Lady as ringmaster.
The plot of the piece doesn't much matter. Mostly the work is composed of discreet episodes that are sited in different parts of the bar. Many of these are movement-based, but the choreography is not especially memorable, and I paid far more attention to the costumes than the dancers' footwork. There are also two video sequences, projected onto a screen opposite the stage. I gave up trying to follow the accompanying narration as, again, I became frustrated with being told where and how to stand. Indeed, for the last half of the piece I retreated to the table at the back of the room where Richard had remained stationed from the beginning. From there we only caught occasional glimpses of the movement. But we could hear the music just fine--which is the best part of the piece.
I get that if only for the safety of the dancers an element of control over the audience's proximity has to be exerted. I object, however, when that control comes to dominate one's experience of the performance. That's when immersion turns into coercion.
P.
Showing posts with label Batsheva Dance Company. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Batsheva Dance Company. Show all posts
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Sunday, November 16, 2014
L-E-V is in the (Dance)House
Local dance artist Vanessa Goodman lead the pre-show talk with sound designer Ori Lichtik before last night's performance of House, by the new Israeli company L-E-V. She mentioned that company co-founder (along with Gai Behar) and choreographer, Sharon Eyal, would be performing in the piece, improvising a series of three solos. This was an exciting surprise, as Eyal's name was not listed along with the other six dancers in the program; I was eager to catch a glimpse in the flesh of the choreographer, long renowned for her work with Ohad Naharin's Batsheva Dance Company, who was behind the stand-out performance of Corps de Walk by the Norwegian company Carte Blanche as part of last year's DanceHouse season.
House, the work presented by L-E-V, opens with Eyal, in a skin-tight black bodysuit, shimmying across the stage to Lichtik's music. We recognize grooves derived from Tel Aviv's legendary club scene, but also traces of Naharin's famous gaga method; however, Eyal combines these into a language all her own via her interest in holding a pose just a second or two past the music's beat, and in finding new patterns within deconstructed movement.
As Eyal exits upstage, the rest of the company emerges, all clad in flesh-coloured bodysuits reminiscent of the ones worn by the Carte Blanche dancers in Corps de Walk. As in that work, about which I blogged here, this first main section of House begins with the six L-E-V dancers in a circle, each bending into a deep plié and swaying side to side with mechanical precision. Eventually, however, one of the dancers breaks free from the circle, moving horizontally across the stage in a style reminiscent of voguing--which, along with the obvious musical associations, is to a certain extent signaled by the work's title. But unlike the house walkers in Harlem made famous by Jenny Livingston's Paris is Burning (and whose moves were then hijacked by Madonna), Eyal's dancers, in "leaving things on the floor," paradoxically remain resolutely vertical.
Following a second solo interlude by Eyal, she is joined by the rest of the dancers. Three of the four men are now dressed in black, like Eyal, and additionally the tallest of these men sports high heels (as does one of the other female dancers). I frankly couldn't take my eyes off of this dancer (which is saying something, given that his confrère stage right was impressively shirtless); with his beard and ball cap, imposing lithe frame, and hoof-like heels, he looked like a giant satyr. And, indeed, this section, in its mixing of images of sexual fetishism and animality, comes across very much as a dark and dreamlike exploration of various kinds of taboo.
Finally, after a third solo by Eyal, House concludes with an electrifying display of unison movement, in which Eyal takes the phrases explored by her dancers in the previous sections and builds them into a "singular sensation" of chorus line effects, complete with high kicks and jumps. It's a rousing, spectacular finish that's hard to resist, the rhythmic entrainment of the music and the movement designed to make audiences leap to their feet--which most did last night. I confess, however, that I was more compelled by the less easily assimilable (thematically and choreographically) bits from the previous sections.
P.
House, the work presented by L-E-V, opens with Eyal, in a skin-tight black bodysuit, shimmying across the stage to Lichtik's music. We recognize grooves derived from Tel Aviv's legendary club scene, but also traces of Naharin's famous gaga method; however, Eyal combines these into a language all her own via her interest in holding a pose just a second or two past the music's beat, and in finding new patterns within deconstructed movement.
As Eyal exits upstage, the rest of the company emerges, all clad in flesh-coloured bodysuits reminiscent of the ones worn by the Carte Blanche dancers in Corps de Walk. As in that work, about which I blogged here, this first main section of House begins with the six L-E-V dancers in a circle, each bending into a deep plié and swaying side to side with mechanical precision. Eventually, however, one of the dancers breaks free from the circle, moving horizontally across the stage in a style reminiscent of voguing--which, along with the obvious musical associations, is to a certain extent signaled by the work's title. But unlike the house walkers in Harlem made famous by Jenny Livingston's Paris is Burning (and whose moves were then hijacked by Madonna), Eyal's dancers, in "leaving things on the floor," paradoxically remain resolutely vertical.
Following a second solo interlude by Eyal, she is joined by the rest of the dancers. Three of the four men are now dressed in black, like Eyal, and additionally the tallest of these men sports high heels (as does one of the other female dancers). I frankly couldn't take my eyes off of this dancer (which is saying something, given that his confrère stage right was impressively shirtless); with his beard and ball cap, imposing lithe frame, and hoof-like heels, he looked like a giant satyr. And, indeed, this section, in its mixing of images of sexual fetishism and animality, comes across very much as a dark and dreamlike exploration of various kinds of taboo.
Finally, after a third solo by Eyal, House concludes with an electrifying display of unison movement, in which Eyal takes the phrases explored by her dancers in the previous sections and builds them into a "singular sensation" of chorus line effects, complete with high kicks and jumps. It's a rousing, spectacular finish that's hard to resist, the rhythmic entrainment of the music and the movement designed to make audiences leap to their feet--which most did last night. I confess, however, that I was more compelled by the less easily assimilable (thematically and choreographically) bits from the previous sections.
P.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Travels with David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane, and Ohad Naharin
At breakfast at our hotel in Tel Aviv two days ago, I read in the Jerusalem Post--following an item about Toronto mayor Rob Ford apparently being caught on video smoking crack (!)--that David Beckham was retiring from the football pitch at age 38. Funny how Becks has remained such a trusted traveling companion all these years (see chapter 3 of World Stages, Local Audiences for more about what I mean by this), his global brand iconicity punctuating the performance (and the politics) of some of my more significant trans-Atlantic voyages.
Appropriate, then, that at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which is currently featuring a retrospective of Scottish artist Douglas Gordon's work, I should have lingered longest over Zidane, the film he co-directed with Philippe Parreno (see my entry two posts ago on his conceptualization of the Duchamp show at the Barbican in London). Using 17 synchronized cameras, Gordon and Parreno follow the French footballer in real time throughout the course of a single match. It's mesmerizing, even at its most banal, when Zidane is just standing around with nothing to do (which happens to be a lot of the time). So recognizable with his bald pate, Zidane here gets a media memorialization befitting his athletic genius, unlike the famous head-butt that marked his exit from the 2006 World Cup and, as it turned out, from professional competition.
Zidane is one of the few visible Arabs I have so far seen in Tel Aviv, virtual or otherwise. Granted, our movements have mostly been confined to the more touristic enclaves of the city. However, I am surprised at the extent to which the Jewish and Arab populations remain segregated here, with the latter clearly the underclass (along with Africans and Fillipinas) that, together with foreign dollars, keeps this false economy afloat. Even the most casual and superficial of glances at the heartbreaking state of disrepair in which most of the Bauhaus-designed buildings of Tel Aviv's UNESCO-designated White City find themselves (although the bucolic photo below belies this statement), or at the numbers of young people who are clearly unemployed, indicates that, beyond money for the military, there is almost no infrastructural support in Israel.
Of course the cultural divide in the region was not always the norm. The old port of Jaffa stands as testament to a time when Arabs and Jews lived and worked and played side by side, a legacy whose traces remain in a shared architectural style, shared cuisine, shared gestures and shared warmth of human interaction. All that came to an end, however, with the Balfour Declaration (there's so much for which we can blame the British), one consequence of which was the founding of the first settlements of what would eventually become Tel Aviv by Jews fleeing the Arab uprisings in Jaffa. Today the Arab Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa works to repair some of the consequences of that history (see photo below) and, sitting a stone's throw from where Perseus is said to have rescued Andromeda from the rocks to which she had been tied by her father, speaks eloquently to the power and politics of performance.
Those first settlements of Tel Aviv in the 1920s were in the area known as Neve Tzedek, which today retains its turn-of-the-century charm (narrow winding streets, old low buildings opening onto hidden courtyards), only now supplemented by trendy boutiques and restaurants. Tucked away along Shabazi Street in this area is the Suzanne Dallal Centre, home to Batsheva Dance Company, whose current world premiere, The Hole, by Artsitic Director and choreographic genius Ohad Naharin, Richard and I took in last night.
The piece is site-specific, made in direct response to the unique and intimate Varda Hall, where Batsheva performs much of its work. To this end, the hall--which I imagine is a fairly standard square studio space, has in this instance been transformed into an octagonal, with an eight-sided elevated stage in the middle, and with the audience distributed evenly around it. The action, however, begins above and behind the audience, as, soon after the lights dim, eight male dancers emerge from hidden crawl spaces and begin a sequence of simple, spotlit unison movements on narrow platforms. During the course of our 360-degree survey of the men, the women emerge, stealthily crawling upon the stage, each taking an odalisque position at one of its eight lips, head in hand, knees bent and hanging over the edge. In sync, each woman lifts her upper leg, eventually letting herself fall onto her back in a kind of supine toe-to-toe plié, before lifting her right leg over her left, letting it fall with a thud to the floor, and twisting herself into a panther pose and crawling to the next side of the octagonal. This continues for a full turn or more around the stage, the eight women above eventually being joined by a ninth below, her initially unnoticed appearance just one indication of how much there is to take in with this piece.
The Hole is essentially a showcase for Batsheva's female dancers, and Naharin has composed some stunning sequences for the nine-member corps that in their simplicity, repetition and canny combining of kinespheric and scenic space give everyone in the audience an up-close view of what's so captivating about expertly executed unison movement. Of special note in this regard is the section in which the women lie down together on successive lips of he stage, their legs hanging over the edge. They then repeat a sequence of serial movements, raising their heads, lifting their torsos, bending an elbow, turning onto their sides, and finally lifting themselves up one by one to move, in a hunched position, to the next side of the stage, where they will repeat the same sequence all over again. That, at this point in the piece, harpsichord music by Couperin is playing on the soundtrack only adds to the hypnotic effect.
Elsewhere, each of the women is given a chance to shine in improvisational solos, as walking counterclockwise around the edge of the stage they one by one take their turn in the centre, angling their limbs asymmetrically not just to their individual bodily cores, but to the geographical nexus of the group as a whole. Bearing this out, after each woman has had her chance to develop a unique movement phrase, the group devolves en masse into a riot of competing physical stylings and poses, with several of the women actually interrupting, blocking, or otherwise seeking to thwart their fellow dancers' movements.
The men, stuck on their platforms, do their best to compete for our attention, at one point erupting into preening, vogue-like, look-at-me poses that end with them shirtless, tongues hanging out, shamelessly soliciting our voyeuristic gaze. I understand that at occasional performances Naharin switches things up, putting the men on stage and the women against the walls. I have no idea if the choreography remains the same; regardless, it would be interesting to compare the effect. Not least because the men and women, who do interact at certain points from the distance of their respective spatial positions in a literal call and response manner, eventually come together--or at least partly, and not altogether predictably.
I refer to the fact that the men, having dispappeared at a certain point into the walls from which they first emerged, later reappear above us, crawling out in turn from what looks like a giant sewer pipe and spidering out onto the maze of metal pipes that sits just below the ceiling of Varda Hall. While the women continue to dance below, the men lie in wait, eventually slipping their bodies through the pipes to hang by their arms above the women. However, only one of them drops down to the stage, thereafter enacting a tentative duet with one of the women, neither partner quite knowing what to make of the other, nor what to do with their limbs, their respective reaches always exceeding--and just missing--the other's grasp. When the men lower themselves from the rafters a second time, the one among them who releases himself is caught by the women, from whose embrace he then seeks to free himself, flinging himself off the stage, only to be caught by the women again and again. They do not wish to tear him apart, like crazed Bacchanites, nor lure him to his death like the vengeful Wilis from Giselle. Rather, they introduce him to one among them, and this time the two opposite-sex bodies come together in a quietly affecting duet that ends with the men remaining above dropping little crystals that pop and crack when they hit the stage floor. Wedding rice? Hail stones? The meaning isn't immediately clear. Still, the piece ends on a graceful note, as the men lower eight swings onto the stage, which the women promptly climb upon, progressively launching their bodies out over the audience as the lights slowly dim.
As this closing image suggests, The Hole is perhaps more visually memorable than choreographically coherent, Naharin clearly in thrall to the site for which he composed the work. But there can be no denying the power of seeing the Batsheva dancers on such an intimate scale in their home venue. A performance memory of worked-through situatedness to cherish, and to set alongside--if not entirely dispel--the starker images of ethnic and religious division and uprootedness I have accumulated since moving from Tel Aviv to Jeruslaem, from whence I write this blog entry.
P.
Appropriate, then, that at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which is currently featuring a retrospective of Scottish artist Douglas Gordon's work, I should have lingered longest over Zidane, the film he co-directed with Philippe Parreno (see my entry two posts ago on his conceptualization of the Duchamp show at the Barbican in London). Using 17 synchronized cameras, Gordon and Parreno follow the French footballer in real time throughout the course of a single match. It's mesmerizing, even at its most banal, when Zidane is just standing around with nothing to do (which happens to be a lot of the time). So recognizable with his bald pate, Zidane here gets a media memorialization befitting his athletic genius, unlike the famous head-butt that marked his exit from the 2006 World Cup and, as it turned out, from professional competition.
Zidane is one of the few visible Arabs I have so far seen in Tel Aviv, virtual or otherwise. Granted, our movements have mostly been confined to the more touristic enclaves of the city. However, I am surprised at the extent to which the Jewish and Arab populations remain segregated here, with the latter clearly the underclass (along with Africans and Fillipinas) that, together with foreign dollars, keeps this false economy afloat. Even the most casual and superficial of glances at the heartbreaking state of disrepair in which most of the Bauhaus-designed buildings of Tel Aviv's UNESCO-designated White City find themselves (although the bucolic photo below belies this statement), or at the numbers of young people who are clearly unemployed, indicates that, beyond money for the military, there is almost no infrastructural support in Israel.
Of course the cultural divide in the region was not always the norm. The old port of Jaffa stands as testament to a time when Arabs and Jews lived and worked and played side by side, a legacy whose traces remain in a shared architectural style, shared cuisine, shared gestures and shared warmth of human interaction. All that came to an end, however, with the Balfour Declaration (there's so much for which we can blame the British), one consequence of which was the founding of the first settlements of what would eventually become Tel Aviv by Jews fleeing the Arab uprisings in Jaffa. Today the Arab Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa works to repair some of the consequences of that history (see photo below) and, sitting a stone's throw from where Perseus is said to have rescued Andromeda from the rocks to which she had been tied by her father, speaks eloquently to the power and politics of performance.
Those first settlements of Tel Aviv in the 1920s were in the area known as Neve Tzedek, which today retains its turn-of-the-century charm (narrow winding streets, old low buildings opening onto hidden courtyards), only now supplemented by trendy boutiques and restaurants. Tucked away along Shabazi Street in this area is the Suzanne Dallal Centre, home to Batsheva Dance Company, whose current world premiere, The Hole, by Artsitic Director and choreographic genius Ohad Naharin, Richard and I took in last night.
The piece is site-specific, made in direct response to the unique and intimate Varda Hall, where Batsheva performs much of its work. To this end, the hall--which I imagine is a fairly standard square studio space, has in this instance been transformed into an octagonal, with an eight-sided elevated stage in the middle, and with the audience distributed evenly around it. The action, however, begins above and behind the audience, as, soon after the lights dim, eight male dancers emerge from hidden crawl spaces and begin a sequence of simple, spotlit unison movements on narrow platforms. During the course of our 360-degree survey of the men, the women emerge, stealthily crawling upon the stage, each taking an odalisque position at one of its eight lips, head in hand, knees bent and hanging over the edge. In sync, each woman lifts her upper leg, eventually letting herself fall onto her back in a kind of supine toe-to-toe plié, before lifting her right leg over her left, letting it fall with a thud to the floor, and twisting herself into a panther pose and crawling to the next side of the octagonal. This continues for a full turn or more around the stage, the eight women above eventually being joined by a ninth below, her initially unnoticed appearance just one indication of how much there is to take in with this piece.
The Hole is essentially a showcase for Batsheva's female dancers, and Naharin has composed some stunning sequences for the nine-member corps that in their simplicity, repetition and canny combining of kinespheric and scenic space give everyone in the audience an up-close view of what's so captivating about expertly executed unison movement. Of special note in this regard is the section in which the women lie down together on successive lips of he stage, their legs hanging over the edge. They then repeat a sequence of serial movements, raising their heads, lifting their torsos, bending an elbow, turning onto their sides, and finally lifting themselves up one by one to move, in a hunched position, to the next side of the stage, where they will repeat the same sequence all over again. That, at this point in the piece, harpsichord music by Couperin is playing on the soundtrack only adds to the hypnotic effect.
Elsewhere, each of the women is given a chance to shine in improvisational solos, as walking counterclockwise around the edge of the stage they one by one take their turn in the centre, angling their limbs asymmetrically not just to their individual bodily cores, but to the geographical nexus of the group as a whole. Bearing this out, after each woman has had her chance to develop a unique movement phrase, the group devolves en masse into a riot of competing physical stylings and poses, with several of the women actually interrupting, blocking, or otherwise seeking to thwart their fellow dancers' movements.
The men, stuck on their platforms, do their best to compete for our attention, at one point erupting into preening, vogue-like, look-at-me poses that end with them shirtless, tongues hanging out, shamelessly soliciting our voyeuristic gaze. I understand that at occasional performances Naharin switches things up, putting the men on stage and the women against the walls. I have no idea if the choreography remains the same; regardless, it would be interesting to compare the effect. Not least because the men and women, who do interact at certain points from the distance of their respective spatial positions in a literal call and response manner, eventually come together--or at least partly, and not altogether predictably.
I refer to the fact that the men, having dispappeared at a certain point into the walls from which they first emerged, later reappear above us, crawling out in turn from what looks like a giant sewer pipe and spidering out onto the maze of metal pipes that sits just below the ceiling of Varda Hall. While the women continue to dance below, the men lie in wait, eventually slipping their bodies through the pipes to hang by their arms above the women. However, only one of them drops down to the stage, thereafter enacting a tentative duet with one of the women, neither partner quite knowing what to make of the other, nor what to do with their limbs, their respective reaches always exceeding--and just missing--the other's grasp. When the men lower themselves from the rafters a second time, the one among them who releases himself is caught by the women, from whose embrace he then seeks to free himself, flinging himself off the stage, only to be caught by the women again and again. They do not wish to tear him apart, like crazed Bacchanites, nor lure him to his death like the vengeful Wilis from Giselle. Rather, they introduce him to one among them, and this time the two opposite-sex bodies come together in a quietly affecting duet that ends with the men remaining above dropping little crystals that pop and crack when they hit the stage floor. Wedding rice? Hail stones? The meaning isn't immediately clear. Still, the piece ends on a graceful note, as the men lower eight swings onto the stage, which the women promptly climb upon, progressively launching their bodies out over the audience as the lights slowly dim.
As this closing image suggests, The Hole is perhaps more visually memorable than choreographically coherent, Naharin clearly in thrall to the site for which he composed the work. But there can be no denying the power of seeing the Batsheva dancers on such an intimate scale in their home venue. A performance memory of worked-through situatedness to cherish, and to set alongside--if not entirely dispel--the starker images of ethnic and religious division and uprootedness I have accumulated since moving from Tel Aviv to Jeruslaem, from whence I write this blog entry.
P.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Ways of Walking
DanceHouse's fifth season ended last night with an energetic walk on the wild side of contemporary dance. Carte Blanche, the Bergen-based Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance, presented Corps de Walk, by red-hot Israeli duo Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar (she is resident choreographer for Batsheva Dance Company and he is an in-demand video, music, and performance artist). Set to a driving electronic score by DJ Ori Lichtik, this relentless 60-minute pushing of the limits of unison is as high on concept as it is on technique.
Using a "system of walks" as the architectural basis for her movement vocabulary, Eyal is clearly referencing in the title of the piece the traditional corps de ballet, the army of anonymous dancers who don't get to electrify with their virtuosic jumps and pirouettes and lifts, but without whose expert execution of the "simpler" steps a work would be unrecognizable as classical ballet. Those steps require a strong inner body core (a grounded pelvic floor combined with an elongated spine), and from the opening tableau of the Carte Blanche ensemble standing in a circle, arms stretched above their heads like tree branches, to the patterned use of deep pliés throughout the work, Eyal is drawing our attention--almost in a Labanesque, eukinetic way--to the very bodily mechanics of walking, on or off the stage. Finally, in terms of puns on the word "corps," there's the ghosted "e" we are wont to append to the end, not least as Eyal and Behar send the Carte Blanche dancers out on stage clad uniformly in flesh-toned, skin-hugging lyotards, their hair likewise painted white, and, most eerily, sporting white contact lenses. Combined with the deliberately robotic movement patterns--the precise head turns, foot pivots, hip thrusts, finger splays, elbow bends, pelvic tilts--that keep repeating at a steady pace as the dancers move into and out of different group formations (often initiated by shouted commands by one or another of them), at times it's almost as if we're watching an episode of The Walking Dead.
And yet as much as the costumes and choreography emphasize sameness over difference (the hallmark of any great ballet dancer being the ability to perform flawlessly the same steps over and over again), for me the absolute indexicality of these dancing bodies (and pointing with index fingers becomes an important recurrent motif throughout the piece) broke down the longer the piece went on. All thirteen Carte Blanche dancers are on stage for almost the entire duration of the piece, and the longer we look at them moving together the more we are able to see how they likewise move apart. And I'm not just referring to the fact that the dancers are different shapes and sizes, that, for example, one of the male dancers is black, another bald, and one has a mustache. Rather, I refer to the fact that one of the things that remains so entrancing about a corps de ballet, like the ballet performed every day by hundreds of pedestrians crossing a busy intersection, is that while we may all be moving with the same purpose and intention, even in something as habitual as walking one cannot help but distinguish personality in form.
P.
Using a "system of walks" as the architectural basis for her movement vocabulary, Eyal is clearly referencing in the title of the piece the traditional corps de ballet, the army of anonymous dancers who don't get to electrify with their virtuosic jumps and pirouettes and lifts, but without whose expert execution of the "simpler" steps a work would be unrecognizable as classical ballet. Those steps require a strong inner body core (a grounded pelvic floor combined with an elongated spine), and from the opening tableau of the Carte Blanche ensemble standing in a circle, arms stretched above their heads like tree branches, to the patterned use of deep pliés throughout the work, Eyal is drawing our attention--almost in a Labanesque, eukinetic way--to the very bodily mechanics of walking, on or off the stage. Finally, in terms of puns on the word "corps," there's the ghosted "e" we are wont to append to the end, not least as Eyal and Behar send the Carte Blanche dancers out on stage clad uniformly in flesh-toned, skin-hugging lyotards, their hair likewise painted white, and, most eerily, sporting white contact lenses. Combined with the deliberately robotic movement patterns--the precise head turns, foot pivots, hip thrusts, finger splays, elbow bends, pelvic tilts--that keep repeating at a steady pace as the dancers move into and out of different group formations (often initiated by shouted commands by one or another of them), at times it's almost as if we're watching an episode of The Walking Dead.
And yet as much as the costumes and choreography emphasize sameness over difference (the hallmark of any great ballet dancer being the ability to perform flawlessly the same steps over and over again), for me the absolute indexicality of these dancing bodies (and pointing with index fingers becomes an important recurrent motif throughout the piece) broke down the longer the piece went on. All thirteen Carte Blanche dancers are on stage for almost the entire duration of the piece, and the longer we look at them moving together the more we are able to see how they likewise move apart. And I'm not just referring to the fact that the dancers are different shapes and sizes, that, for example, one of the male dancers is black, another bald, and one has a mustache. Rather, I refer to the fact that one of the things that remains so entrancing about a corps de ballet, like the ballet performed every day by hundreds of pedestrians crossing a busy intersection, is that while we may all be moving with the same purpose and intention, even in something as habitual as walking one cannot help but distinguish personality in form.
P.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Chutzpah! 2013: Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company
The third and final of the dance offerings in this year's Chutzpah! Festival showcases the return of the acclaimed Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, in the North American premiere of If at All, the latest evening-length work by Artistic Director Rami Be'er.
Be'er favours dramatic openings, often solos by female dancers that begin in silence. Such is the case here as the curtains part to reveal a long-limbed, raven-haired beauty in a square of white light centre stage, and with a plié that just won't quit. Slowly, she makes her way upstage, pausing under an illuminated orb that resembles a full moon. She bends deeply at the knees once more, clasping her hands in front of her and circling her arms about her torso in ever-widening arcs, as if she is stirring a cauldron.
What is conjured from this opening is another of Be'er trademarks, and what for me makes his work so compelling kinesthetically and emotionally: the full company bursting onto the stage full throttle to anthemic music, closing ranks in a circle, before breaking off into separate (and often separately gendered) group formations that showcase Be'er's full body choreography in recurring patterns of unison and canon movement, often supplemented by his own lighting and costume designs.
In the case of It at All, the sequence that really grabbed hold of me at the beginning was the one featuring the seven male company members who, clad in full blooming grey skirts, one by one break out of the circle and fall to the ground at the lip of the stage in front of individual orange floor spots (except for the man furthest stage left, who had no floor spot in front of him, and who remained motionless on his side until the very end of this sequence). Eventually the men raise themselves onto their elbows and knees, their faces now square with the floor spots, and begin to repeat a few simple movements with their arms that involve variations of support and release at the joints, and that through successive serial additions become mesmerizing. Indeed, the patterns gradually become faster, more complicated, the men rolling stage right to the next floor spot as each takes a vertical solo turn upstage before returning to the line (maybe because I'm teaching it on Friday, I was reminded a little bit of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's famous Rosas Danst Rosas here).
It is Be'er's ability to combine this kind of highly structured group movement with more free-flowing solos and duets that makes his work so unique. Not that everything last night was perfect. I think the piece as a whole was too long, and there were some awkward transitions. But it's a credit to the folks at Chutzpah!--and a boon to local audiences--that Vancouver continues to remain a tour stop for what is perhaps the best known contemporary Israeli dance company after Batsheva.
If at All continues tonight through Saturday at 8 pm, with an additional 2 pm matinee on Sunday. It is preceded by Zion, a courtship duet by Barak Marshall (of BJM's Harry fame), and danced winningly by local talents James Gnam and Rebecca Margolick.
P.
Be'er favours dramatic openings, often solos by female dancers that begin in silence. Such is the case here as the curtains part to reveal a long-limbed, raven-haired beauty in a square of white light centre stage, and with a plié that just won't quit. Slowly, she makes her way upstage, pausing under an illuminated orb that resembles a full moon. She bends deeply at the knees once more, clasping her hands in front of her and circling her arms about her torso in ever-widening arcs, as if she is stirring a cauldron.
What is conjured from this opening is another of Be'er trademarks, and what for me makes his work so compelling kinesthetically and emotionally: the full company bursting onto the stage full throttle to anthemic music, closing ranks in a circle, before breaking off into separate (and often separately gendered) group formations that showcase Be'er's full body choreography in recurring patterns of unison and canon movement, often supplemented by his own lighting and costume designs.
In the case of It at All, the sequence that really grabbed hold of me at the beginning was the one featuring the seven male company members who, clad in full blooming grey skirts, one by one break out of the circle and fall to the ground at the lip of the stage in front of individual orange floor spots (except for the man furthest stage left, who had no floor spot in front of him, and who remained motionless on his side until the very end of this sequence). Eventually the men raise themselves onto their elbows and knees, their faces now square with the floor spots, and begin to repeat a few simple movements with their arms that involve variations of support and release at the joints, and that through successive serial additions become mesmerizing. Indeed, the patterns gradually become faster, more complicated, the men rolling stage right to the next floor spot as each takes a vertical solo turn upstage before returning to the line (maybe because I'm teaching it on Friday, I was reminded a little bit of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's famous Rosas Danst Rosas here).
It is Be'er's ability to combine this kind of highly structured group movement with more free-flowing solos and duets that makes his work so unique. Not that everything last night was perfect. I think the piece as a whole was too long, and there were some awkward transitions. But it's a credit to the folks at Chutzpah!--and a boon to local audiences--that Vancouver continues to remain a tour stop for what is perhaps the best known contemporary Israeli dance company after Batsheva.
If at All continues tonight through Saturday at 8 pm, with an additional 2 pm matinee on Sunday. It is preceded by Zion, a courtship duet by Barak Marshall (of BJM's Harry fame), and danced winningly by local talents James Gnam and Rebecca Margolick.
P.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
KCDC at Chutzpah!
Every year The Chutzpah! Festival, Vancouver's annual showcase of Jewish Performing Arts, programs a very strong dance series. Last year, for example, Azure Barton, the Canadian phenom who's taken New York and Broadway by storm, came to the Norman Rothstein Theatre with her company and wowed the crowd. This year, the international headliners are the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, overseen since 1996 by Artistic Director Rami Be'er, and on a par with Ohad Naharin's Batsheva Dance Company in terms of both national and international reputation.
Be'er refers to himself as a "total creator," responsible, in his mostly evening-length pieces, not just for the choreography, but also the design, the lighting, and the choice of music. If in Ekodoom, the piece KCDC brought to this year's Chutzpah! Festival, those elements didn't necessarily cohere into an intelligible whole, they nevertheless offered time and again expressive artistry of a technical sophistication and an emotional depth that was breathtaking. As with Batsheva's recent DanceHouse appearance at the playhouse, KCDC gave audience members something to look at even before the house lights went down: a female dancer, naked to the waist and with her skin covered in dark, muddy make-up, straining against the confines of a tiny square box--from which there appears to grow some sort of fruit tree. It was an arresting visual image, and one that went on for quite some time as the sold-out crowd slowly settled into their seats.
What followed after the house lights went down was a series of physically intense and imaginatively powerful scenes, often featuring the full company of 15 dancers, and each exploring not just the roots of violence and conflict, but also possible routes toward reconciliation and healing. Most striking in this regard were two mass movement motifs that grab our attention at the start of the piece: one featured four columns of upstage dancers moving in aggressive unison downstage and striking poses of supplication and apparent torture/distress, punctuated every now and then by individual bursts of violent, thrashing movement; the other took the form of an assembly line of the entire company moving jerkily and mechanistically to pulsating electropop, like army inductees going off to war, or prisoners to an internment camp. These two movement sequences recur at the end of the work. However, rather than the assembly line marching the dancers off the stage, and leaving us bleakly pondering their fate, at a certain point (and the piece did feel like it had more than one ending) the line itself starts to fragment. As the music soundtrack proclaims "Everybody gets a little lost sometimes," the dancers one by one break free and slowly drift apart physically--but expressly in order to come together emotionally and socially. Some of them kneel on the floor, others remain upright, and one stands on her head. All but the last begin, one by one, floating their hands up across their torsos and in front of their faces, a gesture at once of purification and of prayer--and one that repeats, most assuredly, what must never be lost in our global wandering and return.
The entire piece, to which I cannot do justice in this brief review, was a mash-up of styles (contemporary/jazz, ballet, Israeli folk dance), and frequently of tone. I don't think everything worked seamlessly, but there's no denying that all the KCDC dancers are phenomenally strong. For the first 15 minutes or so, I was struggling to get a grip on the piece generally, and the choreography specifically. But by the time of the second pas de deux, in which the male dancer (the one with the tattoo on his upper thigh) blew my mind with his technical proficiency and physical intensity, I was totally hooked.
Kudos to everyone at Chutzpah! for adding once again to the vibrancy of Vancouver's contemporary dance scene. I look forward to next year's offerings. In the meantime, it's on to the Vancouver International Dance Festival next week.
P.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
DanceHouse Launches Second Season
DanceHouse's second season got off to an explosive start at the Vancouver Playhouse this weekend, with two works from the red-hot choreographer and composer Hofesh Shechter.
Uprising begins with rock-star lighting flooding the stage. Seven men emerge from the shadows and adopt a static pose reminiscent of classical ballet: right foot bent to left knee and arms stretched in a port-de-bras. But with Schecter's furiously percussive score (he composes his own music) pounding away in the background, such passive gentility will not hold, and soon enough the dancers' legs slip, their backs and heads slouch forward, and their arms--still touching--now start to break from side to side in time to the beat.
A study in martial masculinities, Uprising, while an all-around kinesthetic marvel that makes excellent use of its dancers' physical virtuosity, focuses much movement and meaning into the men's arms. At times they are held aloft, fists clenched, pounding at the air (and presumably an invisible enemy--the piece ends, as per its title, with a witty visual allusion to Jean Valjean and his comrades at the barricades in one of the more iconic images from Les Miserables). At other times those arms are turned against each other in combat, or offered in embrace. And then there's the pose that's lingered with me most powerfully, an inverse of the opening port-de-bras: the men's arms, at separate times, stretched behind them like a bird's wings as they run, seemingly off-balance, and yet in full control, across the stage.
Several of the same arm gestures recur in the second piece on the program, In your rooms, which is performed by a mixed company of 11 dancers, and with live musicians on stage recreating Shechter and collaborator Nell Catchpole's combination chamber-hip hop score. The piece actually begins (and then begins again) in fits and starts, with a voice-over (Shechter's perhaps?) ruminating on order and chaos, and with spots fading quickly in and out on the entire company worrying their arms before them while sitting with legs outstretched on the floor, and then on break-out clusters of dancers improvising more frenzied whole body movements. A seeming rumination on both the pleasures and perils of group identity, the 40-minute piece is filled with amazing mass choreography and more intimate encounters.
Shechter danced under Ohad Naharin at the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel before relocating to London to pursue a solo music and choreographic career. One can definitely see the similarities in their styles, and DanceHouse organizers Barb Clausen and Jim Smith certainly knew what they were doing in programing each of these men's work in launching their first two seasons. Talk about high-energy dance!
Next up in the DanceHouse season is Vancouver's own Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot, with the new piece Dark Matters at the end of February. It's a bit of a wait, so for those craving a dance fix in the interim, consider the Surfacing event programmed by the still-struggling Ballet BC for next weekend. Featuring new work by Rob Kitsos, Joe Laughlin, Simone Orlando, and Donald Sales, it takes place at the Dance Centre from Nov 13-14.
Finally, the Vancouver International Dance Festival is on a critical fundraising drive this month, hoping to raise $10,000 in order to offset losses due to cuts in BC Gaming funds that have imperiled so many companies throughout the province. Please consider donating through the link they've set up at the Vancouver Foundation.
P.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Going Gaga for Batsheva
This past Saturday Richard and I were back at the Vancouver Playhouse, in the exact same row we sat for Relâche. This time, however, we were there to see Tel Aviv’s Batsheva Dance Company perform Deca Dance, a program of reconstructed excerpts from works created by Artistic Director Ohad Naharin between 1990 and 2008.
Batsheva, founded in 1964 by Martha Graham and the Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild (from whom the company takes its name), is routinely cited as one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary dance companies in the world. And Naharin, who combines a sensuous musicality with a desire, above all, to communicate through his art the pleasure and joy in movement, has become one of the world’s most sought-after choreographers. He is also famous for inventing, and making a staple of Batsheva’s daily training method, GAGA, a movement release technique aimed at maximizing effort and the experience of the moment, and minimizing the stakes in what that effort and experience looks like or results in (hence the lack of mirrors in Batsheva’s rehearsal studios). GAGA classes are now taught regularly to non-dancers in Tel Aviv, and have been similarly exported around the world. Although the word is apparently meaningless, a nonsense expression invented by members of the company to describe Naharin’s improvisational and associative movement language, I have discovered that it also refers to an Israeli folk version of dodge ball that is frequently played at Jewish summer camps around the world.
Certainly Naharin draws inspiration from Israeli folk dancing traditions (he grew up on a kibbutz, where group dancing was a regular and cherished activity), and one of the most amazing things for me on Saturday was to see how he corralled his large ensemble of 24 dancers into precisely executed chain reaction movements through music. This was particularly true in the opening piece, which began with the dancers, dressed in the black suits and wide-brimmed hats of Hassidim, slumped in chairs arranged in a semi-circle across the stage. As the anthemic folk song playing on the sound system gained in force, the dancers flung themselves up off their chairs one by one from stage left to stage right, crashing briefly to the floor before bouncing back up to do some amazing sitting choreography on their chairs, and finally leaping to their feat to join in the song’s chorus. Except to this accumulative group movement Naharin also included some telling variations: one dancer on the end who would or could not pull himself up off the floor; another who at a certain moment broke the chain by leaping up onto his chair. It was a rousing way to begin, and had me completely captivated and enthralled from the get-go. The following link contains a sample of this piece, along with other excerpts from the mixed program, not all of which were performed in Vancouver.
Actually, most of the audience was mesmerized even before the official performance had begun. This was because our performance of Deca Dance included a bonus curtain-raiser solo by one of the male members of the ensemble, who improvised various steps and interacted charmingly with various members of the audience as the house was filling up and people were finding their seats. For him it might have just been an exhibitionary version of his normal backstage warm-up, but for us it was a delightful introduction to Batsheva’s movement vocabulary.
And to their penchant for audience interaction! For midway through one of the dances on the program (I am unable to refer to the excerpts by name, for while their titles are provided in the program, an asterisk also tells us that they do not appear in the order in which they are listed), members of the company suddenly jump down from the stage and each pick out a partner from the audience. What follows is a ten-minute feast of dance abandon, in which the lucky audience members are seamlessly incorporated into the work on stage, at once improvising singly to the tango movements of their respective Batsheva partners and then coming together as a group in a chorus line of random steps and shimmies. All those chosen willingly and gamely participated—especially one brave and talented woman who was rewarded with an extra slow dance with her male partner after the others had left the stage—and the joy they expressed in moving on stage was completely unself-conscious and totally infectious.
Mixed in with the overt theatricality of the larger ensemble pieces, there were also sparer works—most created for the women in the company—that emphasized more textured movement and repeated compositional forms and sequencing. This was especially true in a duet choreographed to an unusual arrangement of Ravel’s Bolero, as well as in a longer excerpt danced to some interesting post-feminist spoken word poetry.
All in all a most enjoyable evening—although one not without its share of mild controversy. As a leading cultural export from Israel, Batsheva’s current tour of North America has been targeted by protesters angry over Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza and calling for a boycott of anything related to the country until there is an end to a further expansion of settlements and a lasting two-state solution with Palestinians is reached. Similar protests had been called for in Vancouver, an idea that divided many in the dance community, and prompting many to anticipate some angry exchanges at the entrance to the Playhouse during Batsheva’s dates here. In the end, no protesters were in sight on the Saturday.
Which I was glad to see. Boycotting arts and cultural groups, often the most financially vulnerable and the most critically political organizations in any country or regime, does little to advance a cause. At least not in the way, say, as targeting Shell for its investments in Apartheid South Africa. Were we to stop reading Nadine Gordimer or listening to Miriam Makeba during the same era? My life would be greatly impoverished, politically and culturally, if I couldn’t watch the films of Eytan Fox, who has made some of the most affecting cinema on the Israeli/Palestinian situation, often complicating questions of religion and ethnicity with added issues of sexuality.
In fact, as with the work of Fox, I would argue that the active promotion and dissemination of art can actually do more to engage people politically than any mass boycott of cultural products or industries. Certainly in the wake of the most recent Israeli elections, in which the hawkish Netanyahu may have formed a temporary—and tenuous—coalition of convenience with the ultra-right Lieberman but in which he likewise needs the active support of Livni to survive (especially given the new government in the US), Batsheva’s visit gave me much to think about in terms of the history of the embattled Middle East and what might be done to secure its more peaceful future.
Kudos, then, to Dance House, Vancouver’s newest contemporary dance production series, for bringing this amazing company to the city for the first time (and to the Chutzpah Festival and the 2010 Cultural Olympiad for partnering with them). And to making such splendid use of the Playhouse as a dance venue. I look forward to visiting again in April to see Hubbard Street Dance.
P.
Batsheva, founded in 1964 by Martha Graham and the Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild (from whom the company takes its name), is routinely cited as one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary dance companies in the world. And Naharin, who combines a sensuous musicality with a desire, above all, to communicate through his art the pleasure and joy in movement, has become one of the world’s most sought-after choreographers. He is also famous for inventing, and making a staple of Batsheva’s daily training method, GAGA, a movement release technique aimed at maximizing effort and the experience of the moment, and minimizing the stakes in what that effort and experience looks like or results in (hence the lack of mirrors in Batsheva’s rehearsal studios). GAGA classes are now taught regularly to non-dancers in Tel Aviv, and have been similarly exported around the world. Although the word is apparently meaningless, a nonsense expression invented by members of the company to describe Naharin’s improvisational and associative movement language, I have discovered that it also refers to an Israeli folk version of dodge ball that is frequently played at Jewish summer camps around the world.
Certainly Naharin draws inspiration from Israeli folk dancing traditions (he grew up on a kibbutz, where group dancing was a regular and cherished activity), and one of the most amazing things for me on Saturday was to see how he corralled his large ensemble of 24 dancers into precisely executed chain reaction movements through music. This was particularly true in the opening piece, which began with the dancers, dressed in the black suits and wide-brimmed hats of Hassidim, slumped in chairs arranged in a semi-circle across the stage. As the anthemic folk song playing on the sound system gained in force, the dancers flung themselves up off their chairs one by one from stage left to stage right, crashing briefly to the floor before bouncing back up to do some amazing sitting choreography on their chairs, and finally leaping to their feat to join in the song’s chorus. Except to this accumulative group movement Naharin also included some telling variations: one dancer on the end who would or could not pull himself up off the floor; another who at a certain moment broke the chain by leaping up onto his chair. It was a rousing way to begin, and had me completely captivated and enthralled from the get-go. The following link contains a sample of this piece, along with other excerpts from the mixed program, not all of which were performed in Vancouver.
Actually, most of the audience was mesmerized even before the official performance had begun. This was because our performance of Deca Dance included a bonus curtain-raiser solo by one of the male members of the ensemble, who improvised various steps and interacted charmingly with various members of the audience as the house was filling up and people were finding their seats. For him it might have just been an exhibitionary version of his normal backstage warm-up, but for us it was a delightful introduction to Batsheva’s movement vocabulary.
And to their penchant for audience interaction! For midway through one of the dances on the program (I am unable to refer to the excerpts by name, for while their titles are provided in the program, an asterisk also tells us that they do not appear in the order in which they are listed), members of the company suddenly jump down from the stage and each pick out a partner from the audience. What follows is a ten-minute feast of dance abandon, in which the lucky audience members are seamlessly incorporated into the work on stage, at once improvising singly to the tango movements of their respective Batsheva partners and then coming together as a group in a chorus line of random steps and shimmies. All those chosen willingly and gamely participated—especially one brave and talented woman who was rewarded with an extra slow dance with her male partner after the others had left the stage—and the joy they expressed in moving on stage was completely unself-conscious and totally infectious.
Mixed in with the overt theatricality of the larger ensemble pieces, there were also sparer works—most created for the women in the company—that emphasized more textured movement and repeated compositional forms and sequencing. This was especially true in a duet choreographed to an unusual arrangement of Ravel’s Bolero, as well as in a longer excerpt danced to some interesting post-feminist spoken word poetry.
All in all a most enjoyable evening—although one not without its share of mild controversy. As a leading cultural export from Israel, Batsheva’s current tour of North America has been targeted by protesters angry over Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza and calling for a boycott of anything related to the country until there is an end to a further expansion of settlements and a lasting two-state solution with Palestinians is reached. Similar protests had been called for in Vancouver, an idea that divided many in the dance community, and prompting many to anticipate some angry exchanges at the entrance to the Playhouse during Batsheva’s dates here. In the end, no protesters were in sight on the Saturday.
Which I was glad to see. Boycotting arts and cultural groups, often the most financially vulnerable and the most critically political organizations in any country or regime, does little to advance a cause. At least not in the way, say, as targeting Shell for its investments in Apartheid South Africa. Were we to stop reading Nadine Gordimer or listening to Miriam Makeba during the same era? My life would be greatly impoverished, politically and culturally, if I couldn’t watch the films of Eytan Fox, who has made some of the most affecting cinema on the Israeli/Palestinian situation, often complicating questions of religion and ethnicity with added issues of sexuality.
In fact, as with the work of Fox, I would argue that the active promotion and dissemination of art can actually do more to engage people politically than any mass boycott of cultural products or industries. Certainly in the wake of the most recent Israeli elections, in which the hawkish Netanyahu may have formed a temporary—and tenuous—coalition of convenience with the ultra-right Lieberman but in which he likewise needs the active support of Livni to survive (especially given the new government in the US), Batsheva’s visit gave me much to think about in terms of the history of the embattled Middle East and what might be done to secure its more peaceful future.
Kudos, then, to Dance House, Vancouver’s newest contemporary dance production series, for bringing this amazing company to the city for the first time (and to the Chutzpah Festival and the 2010 Cultural Olympiad for partnering with them). And to making such splendid use of the Playhouse as a dance venue. I look forward to visiting again in April to see Hubbard Street Dance.
P.
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