Dance Review: 'HORA'

Each work by our own maverick Ohad Naharin is a surprise - but you can count on it to stimulate you. And HORA does just that.

By ORA BRAFMAN
dance review 88 (photo credit: )
dance review 88
(photo credit: )
Batsheva Dance Company HORA (world premiere) Suzanne Dellal Tel Aviv June 9 Each work by our own maverick Ohad Naharin is a surprise - but you can count on it to stimulate you. And HORA does just that. The 11 Batsheva dancers who came onstage marked a changing of the guard for the company, as most of the old timers had gone. This troupe is as sharp as any previous cast, perhaps more so. The misleading name Naharin chose for his work - HORA - is after the folk dance our forefathers did in the fields after a long, hard day of building the old-new homeland. Things may have changed, but this name is yet another titillating choice in the line of enigmatic titles Naharin so delights in offering. His latest creation takes his own, unique dance language even further into a land of abstraction, where movement is an almost analytical process, and its interaction with the next phrase seems to derive its power from arbitrary sources. The kaleidoscopic effect of the quick changes often carry so much beauty that the interplay onstage causes one to sway between unruffled observation of the intellectual kind to sheer marvel at the diversity and beauty imbedded in the human body and the incredible emotional range a simple move can produce. The choreographic constructive process may seem clinical, sometimes indiscriminate, since most of the time each dancer is doing his string of moves concurrent to and independently of the others. The short sequences of moves bring turbulent and chaotic energies to the stage, but in a split magical second, all the pieces fall into some preordained grooves and harmonious calm fills the stage - soon to be deconstructed. Naharin orchestrated the dance with symphonic flair and reined his dancers' individualities into fully controlled artistic heights.