Decadance: A visual delight but lacking the sting of meaning

Batsheva Dance Company’s Decadance, at Melbourne Festival, pares complex, full-length works down to accessible showcase snippets.

Batsheva dancers perform a piece from Decadance. Picture: David Harris

Formed in 1964, Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company hit Australia’s festival circuit during Barrie Kosky’s 1996 Adelaide Festival, performing long-time artistic director Ohad Naharin’s acclaimed work Anaphase. Melbourne encountered the contemporary dance troupe at Jonathan Mills’s 2000 festival, while Sydney experienced a 2007 festival Naharin triple bill, and last year the ensemble featured at Perth Festival in an earlier version of this show. With 15 years between Melbourne Festival appearances and the distinctive hypermobility and meditative fluidity of Naharin’s “Gaga” movement language still relatively unfamiliar here, Decadance, an evolving showcase of the company’s back catalogue, provided an accessible opening program.

Sampling works from Naharin’s 25-year tenure, it traces Gaga’s evolution and shows its expressive elasticity. It pares complex, full-length works down to accessible showcase snippets, sampling memorable and distinctive choreographic traits without taxing audience concentration.

The dislocation of segments from choreographic and historical performance contexts (compounded by the absence of program notes), and their aggregation in gala format with minimal props and sets, amplifies abstract communication: asking of viewers a visceral, rather than intellectual, connection.

Relieved of political and religious undercurrents, several works lost the sting of meaning even as they continued to visually captivate. The rebellious fury of early works Anaphase and Z/na was subsumed by inherent explosive energy and playfulness — the improvisatory groove and virtuosic goofing of Shamel Pitts’s fourth-wall-smashing, pre-show solo and the ensuing, superbly timed, high-energy ensemble sequences, obscuring the confrontational appropriation of male Hasidic attire, and aggressive rock settings of Hava Nagila and Passover song Echad Mi Yodea, as male and female dancers strip to their underwear and throw discarded clothes into a central heap disturbingly suggestive of concentration camp sorting piles.

Similarly, Habib Alla Jamal’s Arabic folk-infused score for Naharin’s Virus (2001) provided the vaguest hint as to the work’s political and philosophical provocations — synchronised ensemble passages feeling like pure euphoria, absent the work’s provocative narrator, geopolitically suggestive walled set and sharp choreographic interactions.

Despite this decontextualisation and emphasis on levity and infectious energy — including Naharin’s ever-popular gimmick of drawing unsuspecting audience members on to the stage for a boogie — the program gradually incorporated moodier and more challenging material.

Naharin’s interest in split focus was displayed in extended samples from Sadeh21 (2011) and Three (2005), each a dense landscape of simultaneous movement across which the eye flits, meandering individuals and small groups working through exotic, often bizarre gaits, extensions, rotations and convulsions. In a final section drawn from Max (2007), 10-unit set and reset sequences provided rhythmically thrusting choreographic frameworks for motivic repeats, iterations and tangential developments, along with intriguing counterpoints between sharp mechanical timing and lithe, angular softness in placement and expression.

Decadance. Batsheva Dance Company. Melbourne Festival. State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, October 15.