Judy Morr, who has brought many of the world’s greatest dance groups to Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts, was beaming broadly on Wednesday before the first Orange County performance of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company.
There was reason to smile. Morr has worked for more than 30 years to bring Batsheva here, and in that time it has become one of the world’s most talked-about and influential modern dance companies thanks to the remarkable tenure of its current artistic director, Ohad Naharin.
The company was founded in 1964; Martha Graham was its first artistic advisor. While Naharin has taken the group far from its American-style modern dance roots since he took the helm in 1990, certain Graham qualities remain, mainly her flair for creating high drama with abstract choreography and her exploration of ritual and repetition.
But in most respects, Naharin’s choreography is a vast island unto itself – the main reason he has become one of the world’s most celebrated choreographers. His dances can be simultaneously sacred and profane, poignant and hilarious, obvious and inscrutable. His unique movement style, Gaga, is instantly recognizable and viscerally theatrical, especially when performed by the exquisitely trained members of his company.
The intermission-free evening, called “Decadance 2017,” contains segments from nine Naharin works dating back to 1993. Because of the consistency of his stylistic traits, it can easily be thought of as a single choreography with a few wild and wooly tangents.
As an introduction to Naharin’s world, Decadance serves nicely.
He’s an in-your-face artist, which means his dances break the fourth wall constantly. He’s fond of downstage lines: dancers stare at us unnervingly, creating an almost unbearable tension before they break into an idiosyncratic dance phrase, create a clownish face or expose an unexpected patch of skin before walking away. Many of Naharin’s dances feature endless repetitions of a violent movement phrase, broken up unexpectedly by out-of-sync behavior.
The fourth-wall puncturing is carried to extremes. At one point during Wednesday’s performance the dancers left the stage, plucked audience members from their seats and led them back to the spotlight, where they were coaxed into performing along as partners to the company members (many were surprisingly game and not at all afraid of the challenge).
Some see European dance-theater roots in Naharin’s work, and among the cognoscenti everyone from Kurt Joss to Pina Bausch, Maurice Béjart to Jiří Kylián have been mentioned as possible influences. But Naharin is vehement in his declarations of independence, and he insists there’s no grand subtext or meaning to his choreography. “(My) work is about itself,” he said in a 2016 interview. “It is about structure, the power of repetition, laughing at ourselves, abandon, energy, dynamics, and groove.”
But with its violence and confusion, loud scores and unexpected tangents, sense of alienation and sudden bursts of humor, you can’t help thinking that Naharin’s choreography abstractly reflects the Israeli experience. He was born in 1952 on a kibbutz, which makes him only five years younger than his country. In a recently released biographical film, “Mr. Gaga,” Naharin talks openly for the first time about his experiences in the Israeli military and his recollections of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
This newfound knowledge reveals Naharin’s work in a new light, at least for American audiences. It also explains the underlying urgency that seems ever-present in his dances – a desire to let emotions fly, to be honest, to celebrate being alive and in the moment, to revel in the beauty of the human body and its endless capabilities.
Naharin is wise not to speak more explicitly about his dances. Once you know where they’re coming from, they speak for themselves – loud and clear.
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