Image: Luminato
After 17 years, Tel Aviv’s internationally acclaimed Batsheva Dance Company returns to perform Sadeh21 at Toronto’s Luminato Festival. Co-commissioned by the festival, Sadeh21 features an 18-member cast of international dancers under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin. The performance showcases “Gaga,” a movement language invented by Naharin to unearth the intimate body impulses of the unconscious. At times frenetic and at others highly focused, Sadeh21 is contemporary dance at its most bare, raw and intimate.
With Sadeh21 Naharin has created something unusual: an atmospheric movement experience. To begin, each dancer walks onstage to introduce themselves, not with words, but instead breaking out one by one into mini-explosions of Naharin’s signature ‘Gaga’ movement. Gaga is made up of organic impulses coming from deep within the dancer’s body, and the result is highly impressive. With small fidgets, tremors, fluid lunges, and sudden low squats, the dancers are almost insect-like in their precise yet stilted bursts of motion. There is a feeling of randomness and chaos mixed with a careful dose of precision.
The first 20 minutes go by in absolute silence before Naharin’s moody soundscore fills the stage. All the dancing occurs within the stark beige walls of the set. Dressed in dancer-like tanks and shorts in a mix of neutral and vibrant colour tones and bare legs, the dancers bodies alone are left to animate the space.
Twitching like body static, then shifting into slow collapse, the dancers are superb their body control and hyper-physicality. Though they are all speaking the same “Gaga” language, the movement is so personal and specific to each dancer’s body what they “say” with their bodies is always a unique expression.
Naharin’s choreography is full of shifting sculptural tableaus complete with much clustering and re-clustering of bodies. There is often so much happening all at once, the audience is forced to choose between focusing on a single pair of dancers or attempting to take in greater whole. These chaotic elements provide constant tension throughout the performance.
Often, Sadeh21 is like watching a choreographic experiment. Sadeh, meaning ‘field’ in Hebrew, refers to a field of study, as Naharin takes us through 1-21 studies of movement. At one point a dancer calls out sequences of numbers: two, two, one and the dancers immediately separate into two pairs and a solo dancer. This is a common exercise, a tool used by choreographers to make dynamic movement changes in space. Naharin makes this choreographic game explicit, revealing how he creates his seemingly random endless patterns of moving bodies.
Often Naharin relies too heavily on the intense and melancholic soundscore to shape the emotional impact of the show. The music is somewhat overpowering, and often emotionally manipulative.
The show ends with the dancers climbing over the back wall of the set, standing and then hurling their bodies backwards into the abyss. There is no curtain call, the audience simply watches the dancers plunge into the nada as a small white light projects “The End” before the credits roll.
At times the intimacy and awkwardness in the dancers’ movements create a vulnerability that is riveting to watch. In other moments, however, the choreography is repetitive and the non-linear structure becomes vague and opaque.
Even with compelling moments and stunning individual performances by the dancers, Sadeh21 doesn’t always hold together. The dancers seem to exist in a vacuum with only tenuous relationships with the audience and each other. At times highly satisfying on a physical level, Sadeh21 is emotionally ambivalent, leaving its audience craving sense of connection.
Sadeh21
Batsheva Dance Company
June 14-16
MacMillan Theatre
80 Queen’s Park
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