(Video: The Batsheva Dance Company in Deca Dance)

Whenever possible, I try to publish my writings from last year in conjunction with a related event that’s happening now.  As the Batsheva Dance Company embarks on an extensive North American tour and takes Ohad Naharin’s Deca Dance on the road, it seems like the right moment to re-post my writing on the work.

I first published this article as “A Cycle Completed: Deca Dance in Israel” on The Winger on July 11, 2008.

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It’s fitting that I saw the Batsheva Ensemble perform the latest version of Ohad Naharin’s Deca Dance at the Suzanne Dellal Center last week.  You see, Deca Dance is the piece that drew me here to Israel.  I wrote my Fulbright grant proposal having only seen the Batsheva Dance Company perform an earlier incarnation of this work (albeit 3 times).   I hadn’t seen any of Naharin’s other dances, nor had I seen any other Israeli companies.   Now – 4 years after I last saw Deca Dance, 9 and 1/2 months after landing in Israel, 2 days after finishing the term of my Fulbright grant, and 90-some dance concerts later – I feel I have come to the end of a cycle.

I set out to learn about the wider field of Israeli contemporary dance, and although there is still more to explore, I have a much deeper understanding of dance’s history in Israel as well as the scope of the field today.  I devoted a considerable amount of time to independent choreographers and to companies other than Batsheva, but again and again, my attention returned to the origin of my interest, the center point of Israeli contemporary dance.

With many avenues of entry, my research on this company was extraordinarily rich.  To learn about the past, I sorted through files of newspaper clippings, viewed old repertoire on video at the Dance Library of Israel, and heard Batsheva’s history retold by former dancers and directors.  To learn about Batsheva’s more recent years, I traveled with the Batsheva Ensemble, spoke with company dancers and ensemble members, studied Gaga, and attended live performances: Ohad Naharin’s Kamuyot, Zachacha, Seder, MAX, Shalosh, and Furo; Sharon Eyal’s Bertolina and Makarova Kabisa; and several evenings featuring short creations by company dancers.

And then came Deca Dance.

Just as I have changed, so too has Deca Dance, an unfixed assemblage of excerpts from Ohad Naharin’s repertory. Sure, there were some old favorites which I recognized from past versions, most notably the accumulative “Echad Mi Yodea” segment and the perennial crowd pleaser, “Dancing with the Audience” (and at this show the audience members invited onstage were more than willing to participate, with one man hamming it up to great applause).

But much of this Deca Dance was built from segments of the more recent MAX, Shalosh, and Seder – none of which existed when I last saw Deca Dance in 2004 – and there was even a brand new female duet to an unusual rendering of Ravel’s “Bolero.”   Having seen these later works multiple times, I found myself engaged in an interplay with this new Deca Dance: expecting certain sequencing, guessing what would come next, cataloging where I had seen each segment.  The direct contrast of these excerpts next to older sections and the absence of other portions that I remembered from my previous Deca Dance viewings provided a chance to reflect on what I perceive as a shift in Ohad Naharin’s choreography towards sparer works which emphasize marvelously textured movement and finely tuned compositional forms over theatricality.

As I place Deca Dance within the context of Naharin’s repertory, Batsheva’s history, and the larger frame of Israeli contemporary dance, I realize how much I have gained from my research.  I love being able to look at a dance from different angles, and with the information I have gathered, I now have a tempting menu of choices for how to view each performance.

I also have had the pleasure of watching the same dancers develop over the course of the season and talking with them offstage.  As I’m sure many of you know, it’s a delight to watch dancers that you know, to seek them out during the sections at which you know they excel, and to find your attention captured unexpectedly by them when they perform something with added nuance or new skill.

A part of me wishes that my Fulbright could continue – after all, it’s been a dream to structure my own time and pursue independent research with few restraints! – but I am blessed with the gifts of this grant as I complete this cycle and start the next.

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You can see the Batsheva Dance Company’s production of Deca Dance in Houston (January 28), Philadelphia (February 3), Chicago (February 7), Ann Arbor (February 15), and Vancouver (February 20-21).  The company will perform Shalosh (Three) and MAX in other locations throughout North America.

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• “Getting to Know the Batsheva Ensemble”
• “Mamootot – Challenging the Performer-Spectator Divide”
• “MAX – Connecting to Ohad Naharin’s Choreography”
• “Going Gaga: My Intro to Gaga Dance Classes”
• “Gaga: Ohad Naharin’s Movement Language, in His Own Words”
• “Gaga: A Foreigner Explores Ohad Naharin’s Movement Language”
• “Ohad Naharin on Gaga (Video)”
• “A Glimpse into the Gaga Workshop”
• “Researching Dance in Israel: The Jumping-Off Point”
• “Ohad Naharin to Receive 2009 Scripps/ADF Award”
• “Ohad Naharin in America: Out of Focus Documentary”
• “Batsheva Dance Company Premieres Ohad Naharin’s Hora“
• “The Batsheva Ensemble on Tour at Home and Abroad”
• “Batsheva Dance Company: From Graham to Gaga”

Related Links

• Batsheva Dance Company’s website
• Dance In Israel’s Events page – with the company’s tour dates in North America

*This post was made possible thanks to a Fulbright student grant funded by the U.S.-Israel Educational Foundation and hosted by the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

Deborah Friedes stretching on the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel.

My very first post on my very first blog was titled, “Some context, or why I am traveling halfway around the world for a year.”  I was about to leave the U.S. for Israel, where I would be researching Israeli contemporary dance on a Fulbright grant.  Little did I know that I would travel halfway around the world and stay there.  After seeing the vibrancy of dance in Israel, I realized I could research the subject for years to come, and so in the fall of 2008, I undertook a major move to pursue my passion: I made aliyah and moved to Israel.

Every week, on DanceInIsrael.com, I will publish written posts, photo journals, and audio podcasts. My content will reflect the range and vitality of the concert dance scene in Israel.  Beside publishing fresh content, I will also re-publish material from my Fulbright year; some of this was initially posted on The Winger, Israel Seen, and my own blog.  For those of you who have followed my writing on other websites during the past year, you’ll be happy to know that I will preface my older posts with brief musings and my current perspective on the subject.

I invite you to subscribe for free e-mail updates from DanceInIsrael.com when new content goes online by clicking here and typing your e-mail address (please make sure to follow the link in the first e-mail you will receive to complete the subscription process!).

And now, on to the blog! Before we plunge into the heart of the subject, let us start together at a jumping-off point: the seeds of my research.  Below is my first post from my original blog, published on my professional website on September 18, 2007.

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Upon hearing of my upcoming journey, a new acquaintance wondered, “How did you decide to research dance in Israel?”  Here’s an answer, albeit a somewhat simplified, pared down version (despite the length!).

I first saw the Batsheva Dance Company during my sophomore year in college on a Birthright Israel trip in January 2001.   Thousands of young Jews packed an auditorium for an evening of speeches from high-profile politicians and performances from a variety of groups representing Israel’s cultural riches.  The mood in the hall was electric even before the event began, so we were primed when a lone woman, her already long limbs extended by stilts, languidly strutted onstage to begin Batsheva’s portion of the program.  A mélange of excerpts from Ohad Naharin’s repertory followed.  Lined up downstage in white tube-like costumes, each dancer slid fluidly through a brief solo and then joined the group in a series of explosive bursts, their fists pounding the air in front of them; seated in a semi-circle, the company rebelliously stripped down from suits to skivvies in a movement accumulation matching the form of the Passover song “Echad Mi Yodea?” (“Who Knows One?”).  When the performers prowled through the audience and pulled unsuspecting viewers to the proscenium as dance partners, the energy in the hall crackled.  We cheered on the amateurs who gamely bopped alongside their professional counterparts onstage.  As Dean Martin crooned the lyrics to “Sway” and the Batsheva dancers saucily shimmied and cha-cha-ed in unison, the seduction was complete.  I was smitten.  This was the start of my interest in the company and the larger Israeli modern dance scene.

I started studying dance history that summer, and my first research topic was the influence of Jewish culture in American modern dance.  References to Israeli modern dance and folk dance cropped up throughout the literature I devoured at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.  As I focused more closely on four American choreographers born to Eastern European Jewish immigrants for my undergraduate thesis – Helen Tamiris, Daniel Nagrin, Anna Sokolow, and Sophie Maslow – I found that the latter two had set dances on the Batsheva Dance Company; Sokolow also made yearly trips to Israel since the 1950s, working first with the Yemenite Inbal company and then with her own Lyric Theatre.  Both Sokolow and Maslow were affiliated with the New Dance Group, and when I began studying their colleagues from that organization, I discovered that Jane Dudley, Donald McKayle, and Talley Beatty also had artistic relationships with Israel’s premiere modern dance company.

The crossover of American artists to the Batsheva troupe fascinated me.  Funded by the Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, a patron of Martha Graham, the Batsheva company was a repertory troupe which showcased not only Graham’s work but that of her disciples and fellow Americans.  Besides the aforementioned choreographers, Norman Walker, William Louther, Paul Sanasardo, Robert Cohan, Ethel Winter, Pearl Lang, Linda Hodes, Jerome Robbins, José Limón,  John Butler, and Glen Tetley contributed to Batsheva’s repertory in its first few decades (some of them also served as artistic director).  In the 1980s and 1990s, David Parsons, Daniel Ezralow, Elisa Monte, Mark Morris, and Peter Pucci staged or created works for the Israeli company.  Batsheva did perform dances by European and Israeli choreographers, but a listing of the company’s repertory from its inception in 1964 until 1994 published in Israel Dance magazine (Oct. 1994) reveals that the company primarily featured works by American artists.

In 2004, Batsheva’s 40th anniversary year, I had the good fortune to see the company in both Columbus and New York City.  Now aware of the troupe’s artistic lineage, I was struck by the company’s aesthetic.  Reviews of dances by Israeli choreographers during Batsheva’s early decades commented on the structural and stylistic similarities to Graham’s work, but despite Naharin’s own history with the American pioneer – which included a season performing in her company in New York – he clearly had broken away from the path taken by his predecessors.  To me, his work seemed more closely related to some contemporary European choreography than to either Graham’s repertory or that of more recent Americans, but I would not simply categorize his style as “European” (an overly general, problematic distinction anyway).  My curiosity was piqued.  How did the Batsheva company and Israeli modern dance as a whole shake off such a strong American influence and evolve into a more innovative, Israeli-driven form?

I was also intrigued by Naharin’s usage of “Echad Mi Yodea?” and started to wonder how he and other Israeli choreographers incorporated references to Jewish culture in their dances.  The contexts in which Jewish-American and Jewish Israeli choreographers live – and the manifestations of Jewish identity and culture in each of these contexts – are quite different.  When and how do Israeli choreographers draw on specifically Jewish material?  And how does a primarily Jewish audience react to these dances?  I could probably write another paragraph on my experience watching the “Echad Mi Yodea?” excerpt first in a Jewish crowd in Israel and then in a primarily gentile, Midwestern audience; the conversations I had after each performance were, shall I say, worlds apart.  But now I must pack up my computer.  I’m off to the airport!

*This post was made possible thanks to a Fulbright student grant funded by the U.S.-Israel Educational Foundation and hosted by the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.