Seamless dance from Batsheva
The brilliance of Batsheva Dance Company’s long-serving artistic director, Ohad Naharin, is on show in Last Work, a new contemporary dance staged at the Melbourne Festival. Read our review.
Dance review by Zelda Cawthorne. Spanning the back of the stage is a narrow treadmill on which a dancer runs on the spot for the hour-long duration of Batsheva Dance Company’s Last Work, a seemingly effortless feat of endurance accomplished at an undeviating pace.
The performer is like a human metronome; those steadily pounding feet a frequent reminder that whatever else might be happening in this latest – and most assuredly not last – creation by Batsheva’s long-serving artistic director, Ohad Naharin, the beat goes on.
Its symbolism is open to interpretation and some have viewed it in the harshest political light. What cannot be disputed is Naharin’s choreographic brilliance and the stunning virtuosity of Israel’s pre-eminent contemporary dance company as it performed at the State Theatre on October 18 as part of the Melbourne Festival.
Zohar Shoef’s spare stage design, with its side borders of tall, slender poles – brutally dividing walls some would say, though I was reminded of greyhound racing – provides maximum space for the 18 dancers who, schooled in gaga, the instinctive movement language developed by Naharin, evoke the full gamut of human emotion and physicality.
They are a seamless ensemble, yet powerfully individualistic; disciplined, yet utterly uninhibited as singly, in pairs and groupings, they weave a drama of pleasure and pain, romance and sensuality, madness and vulgarity, balletic elegance and moments reminiscent of tai chi or a Noh drama.
Perfectly complementing the choreography is Grischa Lichtenberger’s original music, plus an eclectic selection drawn from other contemporary composers.
Raucous and explosive or plaintive and melodic, the sounds fuse magically with the supple bodies.
So do the costumes designed by Eri Nakamura, whose monochrome palette and featherlight fabrics are an aesthete’s delight allowing not just freedom of movement, but a deft onstage costume change.
The finale of Last Work – with its white flag, mock explosion and the full company of dancers bound by sticky tape – is calculated to create controversy, but the real message was heard loud and clear.
This was contemporary dance at its most thrilling and captivating, and the capacity audience responded with thunderous applause.
The Batsheva Dance Company made its Melbourne Festival debut to great acclaim in 2000 and returned this year with two diverse productions.
In addition to Last Work, which had its successful world premiere in Tel Aviv in June, Batsheva performed Decadence, which gave audiences a theatrical look at some of the most memorable highlights of the company’s dance history.
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