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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Israel is a young country, in an emergency. One might therefore expect from its dance companies a certain straightforwardness, a willingness to put on shows about what life is like and how we should feel about it. But in the three Israeli troupes that appeared at the Lincoln Center Festival last month--Batsheva Dance Company, Emanuel Gat Dance, and Yasmeen Godder and the Bloody Bench Players--what we saw was the opposite. Collage form, reflexiveness (representations about representation), attacks on the fourth wall, invasions of the audience: name a post-Brechtian challenge to traditional theatre, and that's what these people brought us. Such strategies have not vanished from American dance, but, since their high tide in the nineteen-sixties, they have receded. In Europe, however, the quarrel with illusionism--"What do you mean, I should let the audience suspend disbelief?"--is still going on, and so it is, apparently, in Israel.
Batsheva, founded in 1964, is Israel's foremost dance company. In 1990, it was taken over by Ohad Naharin, who was born in Israel and raised on a kibbutz but got most of his dance training in New York. The fate of the Jews has never been distant from his work, but over the years that subject has melded with other concerns: comedy, pure dance, theatrical pizzazz. His 2003 "Anaphaza" opened with a stage-wide semicircle of dancers, in black hats, davening spasmodically on folding chairs--a coup de theatre, and very funny. Last year, in a studio in Brooklyn, he showed a piece, "Mamootot," also from 2003, that was sown with images of violence, but in an eerie, surrealist manner. The dancers' bodies were powdered white, and they wore costumes that looked like something out of Watteau. At one point, a dancer stripped naked and smiled at us conspiratorially. Then the whole company went around the studio, taking the...
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