Venezuela an abstract, episodic piece
Israeli dance company visits the Sony Centre to present a bold concept
NEW YORK— When the Batsheva Dance Company takes the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week, it will look very much like the company that audiences have come to love: a bit mysterious, a bit cheeky — qualities associated with its longtime director and choreographer Ohad Naharin.
The company, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, will perform Naharin’s latest work, Venezuela, which contains familiar ingredients like ferocious solos, kaleidoscopic ensemble scenes and moments of theatrical audaciousness. Here, it’s all hung on a bold conceptual structure: it’s performed twice. After 40 minutes, the choreography repeats, although with different music, different lighting and different dancers.
And something else will be different on this visit: Naharin is no longer in charge of Batsheva. Last September, after nearly 30 years as the company’s artistic director, he handed the reins to Gili Navot, a former dancer with the company, while he assumed the position of house choreographer. In that role, Na- harin will continue to create new work, while Navot will be responsible for the daily decision-making and long-term direction of the company.
Is this the beginning of a new era or just an administrative reorganization? “Sometimes it feels like, wow, it’s a huge change,” Navot said in a phone interview from Tel Aviv. “And I feel that we’re different, very different, Ohad and I.” On the other hand, she said: “Ohad’s here. He’s creating. He’s very vital and continuing to invent himself every day. So it feels like both at the same time.”
The transition brings to a close a thrilling chapter in Batsheva’s history, one that has helped fuel a dance boom in Israel and raised the country’s profile as a hub of contemporary dance. The company, founded in 1964, gained fast acclaim for its vigorous interpretations of Martha Graham’s work, while a stream of visiting top-shelf international choreographers, including Jerome Robbins and Donald McKayle, provided it with a robust repertory. But after a decade, Graham pulled her dances and the company struggled to find its own artistic voice. By the late 1980s, Batsheva was having an identity crisis — and it was running through directors every couple of years.
Then, in 1990, Naharin arrived. Or, rather, he returned. A former Batsheva dancer whom Graham had wooed to New York to be in her company, Naharin became the company’s artistic director. Now a choreographer, he began to build a body of physically fearless, darkly comic work, which gave Batsheva an electric, identifiable style all its own.
Under Naharin’s direction, the company has ascended to the upper echelons of contemporary dance while a generation of former Batsheva dancers has helped populate an impressive independent choreographer scene in Israel, with some establishing themselves abroad.
Navot, 38, watched all of this unfold as an aspiring dancer in Haifa, Israel. She encountered the company as a high school student and remembered the strong impression Naharin’s work made on her, visually and emotionally. At 18, she joined Batsheva’s junior company, the Young Ensemble, before graduating to the main company, where she danced for seven years.
In the decade since she departed — she left to start a family and get a degree in dance education — she has regularly restaged Naharin’s work and teaches his popular movement method, known as Gaga. She understands the legacy she’s inheriting.
“I feel the weight of it,” she said. And she was surprised by the offer. “I had to do a doublecheck with myself to feel that I’m good enough to do it,” she said, “or capable to do it. I had to give myself the legitimacy to give it a try.”
“She was always turned on by research and discovery,” Naharin said of Navot in an email, adding, “She knows how to turn conflict into dialogue.”
Naharin was always a reluctant administrator, preferring to create work and explore movement than to manage departments and chase donors. He stepped down as director once before, in 2003 (Yoshifumi Inao took over), but returned a year later when the company decided it still needed him at the wheel. Now, he said, the company is in a better place financially and artistically, and this transition feels more organic. His happiness is palpable. “So much weight is off my shoulders,” Naharin said. “I feel calm knowing the work is being done as well, and probably even better, as when I was director.”
Navot’s appointment was announced more than a year before she took over. Beginning in January 2018, she started shad- owing Naharin and participating in the running of the company, getting “cooked into it gradually,” as she put it. Even now, the two are in constant communication. “We meet or talk almost every day,” she said. “Sometimes I make the decisions based on the big picture, but he adds his input into the picture since it’s his work.”
In recent years, that work has felt both more expansive and more probing. In the case of Venezuela, Naharin is testing his maxim that music isn’t necessary for dance and needn’t serve a determining role. Venezuela’s alternating scores — a Rage Against the Machine song in one half, Gregorian chants in the other — allowed him to explore “the groove that happens inside you,” he said.
Naharin remains coy about what the title of his abstract, episodic work refers to. One version has it that he spun a globe and planted his finger on Venezuela. Though that country’s political situation has been deteriorating for years, it was not front-page news when the work made its debut in Tel Aviv in 2016. The company says that Venezuela is in no way commenting on the real Venezuela.
Batsheva and Venezuela are at Toronto’s Sony Centre for the Performing Arts on April 9. See sonycentra.ca for information.