Batsheva Dance Company: innovation on another plane
For five decades, the Batsheva Dance Company has been considered one of the foremost contemporary dance companies in the world.
And Ohad Naharin, the artistic director for the Tel Aviv-based company, while respectful of its accomplishments, is not one to rest on laurels. He envisions propelling the company into a new era with innovative movements that offer a bit of backward reflection plus forward thinking.
That’s the message in “Decadance 2017,” a theatrical presentation of Batsheva’s celebrated works that pulls pieces from Naharin’s prolific oeuvre to form a new cohesive kind of story. The program is making its Segerstrom Center for the Arts debut Feb. 8.
“I couldn’t be happier,” said Judy Morr, Segerstrom’s executive vice president and principal dance programmer. “I’ve always admired Ohad, and it’s an honor to welcome one of the greatest choreographers in the world to the center.”
Naharin, who has choreographed more than 30 works for Batsheva and its junior division, Batsheva - The Young Ensemble, for more than 35 years, was highly lauded for the 2015 development of Gaga — a dance vocabulary and pedagogy that he developed.
The New York Times has described Gaga as “a set of invented words and phrases designed to provoke movements — by turns ugly, exquisite and silly — which together constitute an anti-technique.”
It, in essence, breaks from modern and contemporary dance into a new range.
Its movement “language” helps define “Decadance 2017,” which also combines theater elements of tension, drama, texture, color and timing.
The show is about the organization of sections that originally belonged to different works. This quasi-retrospective will provide an opportunity for dancers to revisit works with new knowledge and maturity, said Luc Jacobs, Batsheva’s senior rehearsal director.
“To me, the vision is a mix of practicality and touching the source, which is: Why do we dance?” Jacobs said. “To me dance is happiness in motion. It is the embodiment of celebration and the practice of spontaneity. After that, we consider: How do we think about dance and how can we manifest that?”
It’s a question that Jacobs said he continues to try to answer while working on the show.
He wonders how a dancer’s body needs to be seen in relation to other dancing bodies, how that physicality relates to space and time and how these conceptualized movements relate to the work and to lives, the community and the universe.
That’s his broad, esoteric explanation. Here is another.
The moves are pure emotion intended to provoke feelings in the viewer rather than have him or her focus on and remember actual details, Jacobs said. He added that in the early stages of his dancing career he first recognized that power after seeing a Naharin work.
It’s what he would like to apply when working with the company’s roster of 34 dancers, who hail from Israel and elsewhere abroad.
“I think working with dancers is finding a balance between allowing them freedom and maintaining a sense of vision when things get too chaotic,” Jacobs said. “Chaos, play, emotional upheavals or anything, really, has the potential for creativity and energy, but when there is a lack of attention, then it can turn into carelessness, and carelessness over time begins to rot away our appreciation.”
Batsheva is considered one of the most appreciated international dance companies in the world, having revolutionized dance training.
The company was founded by American modern dancer Martha Graham and Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild in 1964, and since its conception, dancers have performed internationally in more than 250 shows before an estimated 100,000 spectators every year.
“You can be sitting there thinking it’s a dramatic performance and then humor will come out,” Morr said of Naharin’s choreographic voice. “He has an incredible mind in how he uses the body and explores the facets of human physiology, and we are thrilled to present this amazing work.”
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IF YOU GO
What: Batsheva Dance Company, “Decadance 2017”
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa
Cost: Tickets start at $29
Information: (714) 556-2787 or visit scfta.org
Twitter: @KathleenLuppi
