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7/6/2018 Batsheva: The Young Ensemble brings an embarrassment of riches to Jacob's Pillow | The Berkshire Eagle | Pittsfield Breaking News, Sports, Weather, T…
https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/batsheva-the-young-ensemble-brings-an-embarrassment-of-riches-to-jacobs-pillow,543988 2/12
Posted Thursday, July 5, 2018 12:18 pm
By Janine Parker, Eagle correspondent
BECKET — Looking at the dancers' backs alone, one would be hard-pressed to see the connection betweenthe Gaga-gooey vertebrae of members of the Tel Aviv-based Batsheva Dance Company and the austerelyerect spines of those in the Martha Graham Dance Company. Yet in 1964 Graham, the great, influentialmodern dance pioneer, did indeed help bring the genre to the then-young state of Israel; with herconsultation and under founder Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild's direction, Batsheva was born. Directedby Ohad Naharin since 1990, it has grown up to become a powerful force itself: in the same way that theGraham's technique and works have influenced movement and vocabulary for legions of dancers andchoreographers from the early 20th century on, so too have Naharin's aesthetics pushed at dance'sphysical and artistic possibilities. In the 2001 "Naharin's Virus," performed this week at Jacob's Pillow by junior members of Batsheva ("TheYoung Ensemble"), a bevy of Gaga- (and other genres, including ballet) trained dancers bend and curvetheir torsos with buttery pliancy; or flick their limbs out with a startling starkness; or shuffle-step with akind of meticulous earnestness; or shift their weight/lean/tilt/isolate with exacting subtlety. Naharin isn'tthe sole designer of this type of aesthetics. But he, like Graham in hers, is among the principal architectsof his era.
(/uploads/original/20180705-121823-BatshevaYoungEnsemb_53805.jpg)In the 2001 "Naharin's Virus," performed this week at Jacob's Pillow by junior members of Batsheva: The YoungEnsemble, a bevy of Gaga- (and other genres, including ballet) trained dancers - seen here Xanthe Van Opstal - bendand curve their torsos with buttery pliancy; or flick their limbs out with a startling starkness.CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN - PROVIDED BY JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE
7/6/2018 Batsheva: The Young Ensemble brings an embarrassment of riches to Jacob's Pillow | The Berkshire Eagle | Pittsfield Breaking News, Sports, Weather, T…
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Naharin stages the dancers in a series of abstract episodes, some of which overlap or melt into others,some of which are more bracketed. The stage too is framed, with black partitions along the wings, and along structure — part blackboard, part platform — that traverses the length of the upstage area. (This setdesign is uncredited.) At the beginning of the piece, a lone dancer works her way slowly across thestructure, drawing simple lines and curves and letters with chalk or perhaps with modeling clay — later,the board is filled with doodles of hearts and houses and illegible (from my view) phrases, while the word"plastelina," a kind of clay, dominates the majority of the surface. Other dancers, meanwhile, drift onto thestage and approach one another with tentative curiosity, like aliens who find themselves on an unknownplanet, or like dogs greeting a new animal in the park — or like humans warily attracted to one another. Rakefet Levy's neck-to-toe costumes are at once sleek and nerdy; black leggings extend all the way up tothe tops of the performers' thighs while pale long-sleeved leotards cover their upper bodies, arms, andhands. Although the individual performers retain uniqueness throughout, once that ritualistic sniff test isdone, the sixteen are linked. Eleven of them form a line downstage; each "randomly" bursts into a briefspasm of a solo while the others wait in near stillness before they all drop into a wide stance and flail theirfists to the side in a kind of hyper-organized silent protest. Later, during some of the more extended solos,the others often seem to serve as witnesses. Sometimes the stage teems with a riot of wild, simultaneoussolos, or is strewn with small groups dancing together; these absorbing, topsy-turvy scenes throb withenergy, and when, conversely, Naharin snaps the dancers together into a unison phrase, the effect ismarvelously bracing. The mixed score is punctuated by an assortment of rousing songs recorded by the Al Majad group, as wellas original music by Karni Postel, and ambient sound; tucked into that medley is Samuel Barber's well-known adagio for strings — in Naharin's hands the haunting quality of the melody is honored by the lack ofpretension in the movement. It's all undeniably strange, and — yet? therefore? — gorgeous. The richness of the movement and theuncanny construction of the choreography is inexplicably right, even if in many ways it makes no linearsense. So what's it all about? Well, to quote the `90s sitcom "Seinfeld," it's about nothing, sort of. "Virus" isbilled as an "adaptation" of "Offending the Audience," Peter Handke's 1966 "anti-play" in which the actorsinform the audience, via Handke's text, that there'll be no storyline, or characters, or non-linearity — onlythe now, the experience of sitting in the theater and contemplating, essentially, what kind of attention weshould bring to the experience. In "Virus," chunks of Handke's purposely laconic text — "your curiosity will not be satisfied" — are intonedinto a microphone by a dancer (on Wednesday night, the excellent Evyatar Omesy) standing atop theplatform, "wearing" a formal suit. The purposeful drollery of Handke's play is undercut by theunmistakable charisma of Naharin's dancers, for, no matter how oddly or coolly they plunge into theiranti-old-school choreography, their humanity spills out of every undulation, every precariously pitchedback attitude. Occasionally the dancers chant; in one particularly memorable moment, they back awayfrom us, repeatedly shouting "hey! ho!" with palpable truth; the effect is exhilarating. The irony is thatNaharin offers, rather than "nothing," an embarrassment of riches both in terms of possible scenarios butalso in the deeply luscious movement performed by his stable of sumptuous dancers. How can ourimaginations not be fired up, how can we not see the poems unfolding up there? Janine Parker can be reached at [email protected]
7/6/2018 Batsheva: The Young Ensemble brings an embarrassment of riches to Jacob's Pillow | The Berkshire Eagle | Pittsfield Breaking News, Sports, Weather, T…
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