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Korea Herald
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Ohad Naharin's 'Decadance' invites audience to break out of 'body jail'
Seoul Metropolitan Ballet kicks off season with ever-evolving masterpiece by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin has one rule: no mirrors in the rehearsal studio. 'The use of mirrors in the dance is a mistake. They spoil the soul of the dancer, (making them) look at himself instead of look at the world,' the 73-year-old Israeli choreographer said at a press conference Wednesday in Seoul, where he was overseeing final rehearsals for Seoul Metropolitan Ballet's 'Decadance.' So when the Seoul Metropolitan Ballet began preparing for its season opener running from Friday to March 23 at the Sejong Center's M Theater, every mirror in the studio was covered with curtains. 'We need to see the world. We need to sense the world when we move,' Naharin said. 'If you want to be exact and clear, you need to find it through the scope of sensation, not by correcting your movement by looking at it.' For nearly three decades, Naharin has shaped the landscape of contemporary dance, leading the renowned Batsheva Dance Company from 1990 to 2018. He is currently the company's house choreographer. His artistic journey has been chronicled in the documentary 'Mr. Gaga' and featured in Netflix's documentary series, 'Move.' He is best known for creating 'Gaga,' a unique language of movement that heightens physical awareness. Naharin likens it to strengthening one's "engine": Life is difficult, and if you have a weak engine, lifting the weight is hard. But with a stronger engine, what was heavy feels lighter. 'What I look in Gaga is not just the movement but the quality of movement,' he said. 'When you see two dancers doing the same movement -- one of them will make you cry and one of them will make you fall asleep. And you ask, 'Why is it? What is it?' I'm curious to find what it is that makes me cry.' Constantly evolving masterpiece 'Decadance' is a curated collage of Naharin's works, stitching excerpts from his past choreographies into a single performance. Originally created in 2000 to mark his 10th anniversary as Batsheva's artistic director, it has since been performed worldwide, including by the Paris Opera Ballet and the Gothenburg Opera Dance Company. No two productions are the same, as each is a unique version tailored to the company at that time. The Seoul Metropolitan Ballet's 2025 production of "Decadance' features eight pieces, spanning from 'Anaphaza' (1993) to 'Anafase' (2023), set to an eclectic soundscape ranging from Israeli folk music to Latin rhythms like cha-cha and mambo. One of its most iconic moments involves dancers in black suits using chairs as props, while other segments blend humor, improvisation and direct audience interaction. 'The work I'm doing here is a piece that is constantly evolving, changing and taking on many different versions.' Naharin described this reconstruction as a game on a playground and emphasized the ongoing sharing of his discoveries, both with dancers and audiences. ''Decadance' is an opportunity for me to share what I do now, but with a strong remembering of where I'm coming from. A lot about dancing is connected to being at the moment, but (it) also includes everything that has happened to me to this moment.' Beneath the work's dynamic evolution, Naharin's message remains simple: everyone should dance. 'Many of us know the feeling of being locked inside the body. The body becomes a jail. But actually, if you think of dancing, it becomes the means to get out of the jail. It's the dancing that gets us free,' he said. 'And 'Decadance' invites people not just to watch but also (embrace) the idea that we all need to dance.'
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Batsheva, and a Dance Divided
To attend the return of Batsheva Dance Company to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday was to have your attention split in several ways. First was the split between the acts of theater happening inside BAM and those happening outside it. Batsheva is the most prominent dance company in Israel. Because of that, and because the company receives state funding, the group Dancers for Palestine staged a peaceful protest on the sidewalk and stairs, blocking several doors as they chanted 'Free Palestine!' and other slogans. And the work being performed inside, Ohad Naharin's 'Momo,' from 2022, is also a study in split attention — one dance laid over another, a double exposure. In the first, four bare-chested men in cargo pants move as a unit, slowly marching like soldiers or stepping hand-in-hand, as in folk dance. In the second, seven dancers — four women and three men (one in a tutu) — move as individuals, each introduced with a solo, expressing themselves in extraordinary feats of flexibility and eccentricity, as in most works by Naharin. For much of 'Momo,' these two tribes remain distinct, even while occupying the same stage and field of vision, accompanied by the same soundtrack — selections from 'Landfall,' an elegiac Laurie Anderson composition for the Kronos Quartet. Trading the positions of foreground and background, the two groups nearly touch, yet do not acknowledge each other. In the middle of this 70-minute work, the four men climb up a wall (equipped with handholds and platforms) at the rear of the stage and remain statue-still while the seven others bring out ballet barres and degenerate from doing ballet exercises to hanging on the bars like anti-conformist cool kids. (The soundtrack is now Philip Glass.) Later, Yarden Bareket, one of the women, gets up close and personal with each of the four men: nuzzling, clinging, pressing one down to his knees and pulling his face into her belly. This has the tension of taboo breaking. The men stay unresponsive. All this is formally fascinating, continually inventive and superbly danced. Naharin keeps establishing rules and rhythms, then breaking them. The somber tone is pierced by surprise and Naharin's cheeky humor — as when, amid a complex stage picture, one man among the seven starts twerking. The choreography for the four men, especially, is shot through with sculptural beauty and brotherly tenderness. Watching 'Momo,' though, you can't focus exclusively on form. The world rushes in. Not the protesters — who remained outside and were gone by the time the audience left the theater — but consciousness of the events they were responding to: the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and the brutal war in Gaza, which started after 'Momo' was made. Batsheva performances have long been shadowed by its country's crises, but the shadow has never before been this overwhelming. In a recurring motif, the seven each raise one hand. Every time the hands are raised, we hear a deep boom, like the impact of a bomb nearby. As the time between gesture and sound decreases, it seems as if the hands might be anticipating or even triggering the boom. The frequency of the sound increases. The boom becomes a beat. Do those raised hands signify complicity? Contrition? Solidarity? Resistance? 'Make it stop?' 'I'm in?' The art of 'Momo' is not to say. The dominant tone is antiwar, but the beauty of the choreography for the soldier-like men amounts to empathy. Near the end, both groups line up at the lip of the stage. Alone and together, the dancers rotate. One by one, though, each of the seven breaks off for a little solo. Some are tonally appropriate. Londiwe Khoza (extraordinary throughout) crumples to the ground. Nathan Chipps cups his hands to his mouth and shouts, maybe to warn, maybe to find someone in the rubble. Yet many of the solos seem like tone-deaf bids for attention, a choreographic choice that can be read as Naharin judging the potential indulgence of his signature style. Style can be a straitjacket, like the invisible ones that the four men seem to wear at one point. So can an artist's association with his or her country. The ballet section of 'Momo' might resemble recent pieces by William Forsythe, just as the climbing wall might recall similar ones in work by Rachid Ouramdane. But with those choreographers, these gestures don't unavoidably speak to the disasters facing Israelis and Palestinians. In a program note, Naharin writes about the necessity of reconciliation and a life of dignity for both Jews and Palestinians, and he offers a standard defense of art. 'Momo' is a statement of much more power and disturbing resonance. It is a dance that directs attention to what we see and what we don't see, intentionally or not. It is about the seemingly impossible difficulty of coexistence and its inevitability. The piece shows the distinction of art from life, and also the inescapable connections. Like life, it is unbearably ambiguous.
