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"Telophaza"

“Telophaza”
Batsheva Dance Company
Lincoln Center Festival
New York State Theater
New York, NY
July 20, 2006

by Susan Reiter
copyright ©2006 by Susan Reiter

Outside on the Lincoln Center Plaza, a crowd of people filled the space with palpable, vibrating energy as they danced to the salsa music being performed for Midsummer Night’s Swing. Inside the theater, a couple of thousand people intending to spend their evening dance rather than participating in it found themselves asked to become participants as well. A soothing disembodied voice, identifying herself as “Rachel,” took over midway through Ohad Naharin’s “Telophaza” to instruct those of us nestled in our comfy red seats to move — first just our heads, then arms and torsos, suggesting emotional associations tog go with the movements (“connect to pleasure”).

This blend of guided imagery and movement therapy seemed to come out of nowhere — although one realized there was an earlier hint, when “Rachel”: identified herself and made the obligatory cell-phone announcement just before the piece began. Until the stage emptied except for a solo women (Rachel, presumably) far upstage with her back to us, with a huge video image of her demonstrating the simple moves as she spoke, Naharin had been offering a rather random-looking but undeniably juicy and often entertaining array of larger and smaller group sequences, often seizing on the pulsating rhythms of the musical selections.

But suddenly the lights were partly up and we became, willingly or not, part of the show. A good portion of those seated in the orchestra section, followed along, while others could survey the spectacle of multiple rows of busy, gesturing arms. By the time “Rachel” called for bigger movements, involving the torsos and circling elbows, the issue of respecting one’s neighbor’s space came into play. Gentle laughter greeted some of her instructions and the resulting massed bobbing. Some of it was out of nervous embarrassment, no doubt, while some might have been a reaction to the silliness of it.

Perhaps Naharin intended for laughter to be the result. Indeed, the “Rachel” sequences seemed to be mocking their own pomposity. In a Festival-sponsored symposium, he explained that in these segments “I want to engage everyone. Those who don’t participate are engaged in a different experience of resistance.” Fair enough, but he seemed to imply that those who “resist” are bad, uptight, missing out on the complete experience. But why should a mass seated audience suddenly want to flutter their arms and direct their thoughts according to a disembodied voice, obeying on cue? Perhaps by that point in the piece, the vigorous, earthy group sequences performed by the waves of dancers were supposed to have inspired us to want to be up there with them, sharing in the experience.

The second time “Rachel” took over, near the end of the 70-minute work, we at least had 18 dancers seats in chairs downstage following her instructions as well, creating a sense of a communal experience between the stage and the audience. She spoke more about the ideas intended to accompany the gestures (e.g. “imagine you have plenty of time”) before closing with “let’s dance.” At that point, most audience members resumed their more passive approach, as the stage filled with Naharin’s bold, feisty movers, wearing a riveting array of loudly patterned unitards.

“Telophaza,” Naharin explained in his talk, is the last of four phases of cell division; he had used another of these phases, “Anaphaza,” as the title of his earlier work seen at the Festival in 2003. One might expect the title to allude to details, intricate effects within the large-scale choreography, but most of the time we saw either the full group, or contrasting groups, performing their own unison activity for an appointed time, then leaving so the next event — often cued by the shifting, often lively, sound collage — could commence. When a group of women dressed in white unitards and sleek white caps, resembling Busy Berkeley-esque bathing beauties, lined up at stage right, one anticipated some intriguing, evocative patterns. But the stage picture remained uninteresting, and their segment came to yet another abrupt end, giving way to “Rachel.”

Four large screens suspended across the stage dominated the action some of the itme. They projected, in intense close-up, live action from the stage — details of dancers faces and torsos, mostly, or in one case, a pair of legs form the knees down. This was most effectively, almost hypnotically used, during the second section of the piece. As a small group of dancers began an inflected pattern of bending, tilting and pausing, additional dancers joined in one by one, after first appearing through upstage panels and standing, four across, in front of the cameras that relayed their facial expressions. As each came forward and joined in the movement, the next took his/her place, so that we “met” each new arrival through their close-up before they became part of the larger, ongoing activity.

Naharin’s “Gaga” movement technique is mentioned — as “the key to this physical creative process” — but not explained, in his program note. In his talk, he elaborated a bit, telling us that Gaga involves being open to new solutions, “Getting in touch with our weaknesses,” and “experiencing our bodies n space in a very animalistic way.” He sounded genuinely enthusiastic about the classes he teaches regularly for non-dancers , and used the “connect with pleasure” phrase that was mentioned during “Telophaza.” One could certainly identify a sense of discovery and an invigorating exploration of creature-like movements in the piece. But what made it such a fragmentary, ultimately limited experience was the work's lack of a through-line that truly guided us along persuasively, rather than stringing together its sequences so casually that their impact was diminished.

Photos by Gadi Dagon.

Volume 4, No. 29
July 31, 2006

copyright ©2006 Susan Reiter
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