The Edinburgh International Fringe audience at the Playhouse were treated to a dizzying display of music and movement last night, courtesy of the works of choreographer Ohad Naharin, and they loved every minute of it.
Naharin plays with convention
s freely. For example, during rehearsals, the dancers are deprived of mirrors – forcing them to become even more aware of what's going on around them and their own part in any piece.
Even whole performances aren't immune from his approach. The programme listed seven works from which excerpts would be drawn to make up the evening's show. The seven included Anaphaza from 1993, Naharin's Virus from 2001 and a new work created this year, the oddly named B/olero. The actual order wouldn't be decided until just before curtain up, however.
Any story that the audience perceived would then be random, and every new audience might see an entirely different narrative unfold. One could see the show a great many times before the same order would be repeated. The freshness and excitement that this added to the performance was palpable.
Within the structures, the choreography itself was frequently unusual and challenging. Standing unmoving for uncomfortably extended periods, the dancers would then launch off in a multitude of directions at once. In another piece, all the performers would stand in a line, again still, until a single dancer would be let loose in frantic, jerky gyrations for 30 seconds, before becoming a statue again, allowing another dancer to take their place.
In what was unquestionably the piece of the evening, the ensemble leapt off the stage and wandered around the auditorium, each picking a member of the audience, then escorting them onstage. What followed could have been agonising, but the cheerful and obviously game audience members jumped into the spirit of things. Some were clearly more used to the foxtrot, while others might easily have been contemporary dancers themselves.
Leaving them to themselves, guiding their movements or actually dancing directly with them, with hysterical, sometimes awkward results, the whole piece buzzed with a mixture of delight, terror and surprise. This one piece risked putting all the rest deep in the shade.
Costuming was basic: suits, sporty underwear or brightly coloured loose rehearsal clothing. Likewise, the stage was kept almost entirely bare, apart from seats for performers and, at the very beginning of the evening, a cruciform balloon fed air randomly by a machine so that it looked as though it was dancing before the actual performers arrived onstage.
Several sections of the show appeared to be almost anarchic, but the reverse was clearly the case. There may have been moments of controlled chaos, but that was all. Almost imperceptible patterns and motifs appeared and disappeared under the invisible, but ever-present and gifted hand of the Israeli choreographer. This is a show to relish, more than once if at all possible.
The full article contains 505 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
