ARTS Batsheva alumna builds work at Ballet BC

Asingle audition changed the trajectory of Adi Salant’s life, securing her a place in Israel’s Batsheva Dance— one of the most influential companies of the past 20 years.

Trained at the demanding Batdor Dance School, she tried out and made it into Batsheva’s junior company after high school. After two years, she joined the main company as a dancer, then in 2001 started working as an assistant to its legendary artistic director, Ohad Naharin, helping to teach and stage his work around the world. Then she returned home to Tel Aviv to codirect Batsheva with him from 2009 to 2017.

“It felt right to my body. And we connected; I felt the chemistry with Ohad. It made sense to work like that,” the warm dance artist tells the Straight with a shrug, sitting in an empty rehearsal hall at the Dance Centre in the week before her new work premieres at Ballet BC. “He gave me the trust to stage his works at other companies. You go away and you’re by yourself. I was a good babysitter, I guess, to his creations.”

At the same time, Salant had a front seat for the creation of gaga— the sensation-based movement language that Naharin invented, which has since swept the dance world.

“When I started there was no ‘gaga’,” Salant recalls with a smile. “We had those classes, but we called it ‘the movement language of Ohad’. I was there for the development of that. It was all the time refining itself, and making itself more coherent. I taught it to other companies, but I didn’t try to be Ohad—i was Adi, and I found out who Adi was doing that.”

Salant is all too aware that an audition set the course for her role in the seminal company. And down the hall in the rehearsal studio, she explores the idea. Cheesy music from an iconic dancer-tryout scene, the opening number from A Chorus Line, is blasting out of the speakers. But the Ballet BC dancers—all 17 of them—are not performing the Broadway-style high kicks and star jumps of the famous musical. Instead, to the sounds of the driving beats and rhythmic horns, the dancers are opening their mouths in silent screams, flapping their hands by their ears, flailing on the floor, and tiptoeing around each other like spinning tops. At one point, Kirsten Wicklund wraps her arms around Kiera Hill, bends her backward, and shakes her like a rag doll.

In her new work WHICH/ONE, Salant reveals, human beings are in the struggle of their lives.

Watching video of A Chorus Line’s opening number last year, Salant was struck by the larger metaphor of all the dancers vying for a spot in the show. “It’s how we’re always in the situation of auditions and have the need to prove ourselves,” Salant says. “It’s someone else’s decision; it’s in someone else’s hands. It can change the course of your life. And it’s about how much someone else can control your life, not just in dance, but a friend or a boss. So I was really playing with that—the image of the movie really fit for me with the story of life.”

Salant is also clearly having fun with the razzmatazz of the score. “I wanted this iconic piece of music,” she admits. “It’s show biz, but you realize that the dancers are really just fighting and struggling and fragile, with this need to keep it going.”

You can see Salant’s creation of a work here in Vancouver as a kind of audition in itself—in the best possible way. This is the first time the artist has ever choreographed for a North American company. She choreographed for years when she was based in Denmark, but having three children and helping to run Batsheva required a hiatus. But then she connected with Ballet BC’S Emily Molnar, who’s known for finding fresh, exciting voices from around the globe—and who has shown a taste for the work of other Batsheva alumni, including Naharin himself and Sharon Eyal (whose Bill is part of the company’s repertoire now, and whose Bedroom Folk is up next in Program 3).

“Emily was very generous to me, coming out again as a choreographer,” Salant says. “Emily was following her instincts.”

Ballet BC’S dancers have in turn shown a willingness to dive into Salant’s brutally honest and unleashed style. “They have so much on their plate; they’re a company that has to continue to fulfill so many different fantasies of different choreographers,” marvels Salant, whose work shares the roster of Program 2 with Jorma Elo’s flickering 1st Flash and Crystal Pite’s ethereal Solo Echo.

“I’m telling the dancers ‘I want you to act more like yourself.’ They really need to find the person that they are true to. And they are doing it with such openness.” The best part? It’s a full-company work; life may be one big audition, but she likes this crew so much, she hasn’t cut a single one from the roster. g

The Push International Performing Arts Festival has named Toronto-based Franco Boni as its new artistic and executive director.

Since 2003, Boni has been artistic director of the Theatre Centre in Toronto, helping turn the historic Carnegie Library at 1115 Queen Street West into a live arts hub. The centre has worked on several shows that came to Push, including premiering 2014’s Sea Sick and 2019’s This Is the Point.

Meeting with the Straight at Push’s downtown headquarters in the Post at 750, Boni said the Push fest has been a favourite destination for him. “I’ve been coming for quite a long time, and for me, what I love and what I continue to admire is what Norman [Armour] has created—placing local work in an international context,” he said. “That’s taken Vancouver companies to a level where they’re being presented internationally, and that’s really good. It’s built conversations we as artists need to be having.”

Former Push artistic director Norman Armour (who cofounded the interdisciplinary event with Katrina Dunn in 2003) left the fest last year to become a consultant for the Australia Council for the Arts. Push has since been guided by interim executive director Roxanne Duncan (who also worked at the Theatre Centre, and is leaving Push in March) and interim artistic director Joyce Rosario.

“I’m mostly going to be doing a lot of question-asking,” said Boni of starting his role formally in June. “I want to talk to people in the city: what are the concerns and questions that are running through the city? And then I want to try to respond to them through art, but also through programs and projects that will allow them to engage.”

He’s keen to encourage more community engagement, but also to look at ways of expanding the fest: “Push is already established as an extremely important stop for artists—and it would be great to give it enough support of infrastructure and funding to grow it.”

At the Theatre Centre, Boni led a $6-million fundraising capital campaign that saw the total redevelopment of the heritage space. “That took us 10 years because we didn’t have any money,” he says. “I didn’t know the impact it would have. I couldn’t have even imagined. It’s really transformed the city and the community.”

Among its many facets was the integration of a café that opens at 8 a.m. and runs until well after shows are done at the venue. “That consistency of us being open allows the audience to engage with us in a different way,” he explains. The centre also provides a home for other arts organizations such as Why Not Theatre, and has started outreach to surrounding condo residents.

Elsewhere in his long arts career in Toronto, Boni served as festival director of the Rhubarb Festival from 1998 to 2000 and as artistic producer of the Summerworks Festival from 1999 to 2004. g