Batsheva Dance Company presents Hora at BAM:
I know nothing about modern dance, a fact which I tried to keep in my mind as I watched, because I think it's important. The most depressing thing I hear, often, in the workshops we've been hosting, is "I don't know enough about poetry to try to understand it" — when that feeling of not knowing, at least in the beginning, is an important one, and if you relegate everything not-know-yet into the category of other people's problems, that's when you fall for charlatans and academics. Why not be in the not knowing, ask why one doesn't know and what one doesn't know and what, if you knew, would make a difference to you in the watching.
The first thing I thought was that anything in time is a narrative. And if there is no narrative then we make a narrative. And so narrative exists, but why, and where? The dancers, eleven, five male, six female, began in almost frightening unison (given how un-alike their bodies are: this is not a group chosen for uniformity, some are tall, some are small, they wear variations of black). But the unison quickly broke into a single dancer moving about the stage, utterly free, unnaturally free, not given to easily understood movements, intensely playful. More dancers joined him until everyone was moving with a sort of chaotic grace either entirely improvised or fantastically difficult. There was no differentiation in form or gender. It was just bodies, selves.
But as the hora progressed recognizable things began to emerge, cued by recognizable music — first a silly synth version of the star wars theme, which emerged in the dancers not quite as a joke but almost as a reaction to something that might be a joke. Many more recognizable songs followed, usually from movies, and what it felt like most was a reaction, not to the music itself, or to the movies alluded to ("Ride of the Valkyries," "Thus Spake Zarathustra," etc): but a reaction to the memories, in the audience, raised by this music and these movies. As these progressed the dances became more recognizable the dancers themselves became more recognizable, as male and female, then as pairs (one lone female sitting out). As the dance became easier to watch, the bodies themselves became less interesting. It ended with one dancer, almost lost, lingering as the others returned to their spots along the wall, unsure of where or who she was.
It was the jokes that were heartbreaking, I never thought to laugh.
The second thing I thought was dance is the body. There are two things to do with the body in performance (that is, as an object and a tool). One can infantilize it and one can sexualize it. On one side the circus, on the other the bordello. On one side, "Look what I can do," on the other "Look what I could" do. Both are promises without fulfillment — more obviously in the case of the sexualized body, but also in the infantile: the promise is that what is being performed is difficult, what is not fulfilled is seeing it fail.
The infantile and the sexual are both tied to play, they are both aspects of play, but what I'd say is the difference is the intention: the sexualized body is a doing. The infantilized body is a becoming. The sexualized body moves downward, toward the earth, onto the body of the watcher. It yearns to catch and fall. The infantilized body moves upwards, it yearns to evade. It cannot even be pursued. Its direction is at right angles to desire.
