Knowledge can colour experience
Over the past decade or so, Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin has staged some wonderful works for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, most notably Minus One, a glory of the company’s repertory. With a powerful and surprising mix of symbolism, humour and ritual, Minus One has enthralled many audiences on tour. Last year in China, spectators jumped on stage during the audience participation number.
Next week at Place des Arts, Batsheva Dance Company performs Hora, a Naharin work of quite a different colour.
Radical changes of pace should not be unexpected from a dancemaker with a background as eclectic as Naharin’s. He began his dance career at Batsheva in 1970, performed for several years with Martha Graham’s company in New York and with Maurice Béjart’s in Brussels, toured for a decade with his own company, then in 1990 rejoined Batsheva, where he has served ever since as artistic director and principal choreographer. Clearly, at 59, his bucket has a lot of choreographic water to draw from the dance well.
So in which spring did he find Hora, a work in which six male and five female dancers in virtually identical black costumes move from one body position to another in front of a neon-glow green backdrop for the course of an hour? Sounds more like Merce Cunningham than Ohad Naharin.
Performed at the Montpellier Dance Festival in 2010, Hora was staged the following year in Tel Aviv, which is where I saw it. It caused me some dismay to see a Naharin work that seemingly abandoned his characteristic qualities of irreverence, bizarre comedy and tender recognition of human individuality.
Avi Yona Bueno’s relentlessly green design was irritating from the outset, and detracted from any admiration of the dance. Those with more tolerance of this Emerald City – there could be those who like it – might concentrate on the work to better advantage.
But as varied and vigorous as the well-trained ensemble’s movements were – poses for soloists and ensemble changed constantly, never repeating – the gestures seemed clever rather than emotionally compelling, and at the halfway point of the hour-long work, even the cleverness lost its appeal.
“I think if you see it again, you might see it differently,” Naharin said in a telephone interview two weeks ago as his company prepared to leave for San Francisco, the start of its North American tour. “Hora is suggesting a lot of points of reference on purpose ... but what is really demanded of any viewer is not to let the point of reference prevent you from a moment of fresh experience. That new experience is where the heart of this piece is, not what is reminded of.”
In other words: It’s fine if you recognize that some movement in Hora hearkens back to Nijinsky, and just as fine if you don’t.
“For someone to have references, you need a history and have some dance experience. For example, (Debussy’s) Afternoon of a Faun. Some people have heard it and immediately connect it with Nijinsky and a lot of things. Same with Hora. Most people would not know that hora is a short Israeli dance, or means “hour” in Spanish or “whore” in Swedish. It’s not important to know it. It’s not something that should manage your experience.”
The self-referential aspect of contemporary art of all kinds, not only dance, has become such a part of serious artistic endeavour over the past century that some estheticians consider it a defining element of modernism. Getting the references helps to get a modern work’s meaning.
Seeing a modern work more than once helps, too – sometimes.
Batsheva Dance Company performs Thursday to March 3 at 8 p.m. at Théâtre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts. Cost: $33.60 to $61.10. 514-842-2112; pda.qc.ca.