Tel Aviv Dance comes full circle with Ohad Naharin’s Hora. Once a festival of dance from Europe, this year’s impressive program extends not only to other parts of the globe, but celebrates Israeli contemporary dance with a performance by the Batsheva Dance Company at the Suzanne Dellal Centre, where Naharin and company make their home.
The movement bears no resemblance to the folk dance many associate with the work’s title, yet there is something in the ensemble performance that reverberates with a wider network of images and emotions evoked by the word “hora”. Performed by 11 dancers who are onstage throughout the work, the allusive piece references other dance images through a soundtrack based on the works of Japanese musician Isao Tomita. Tomita works with a synthesizer, his transformations of classical pieces give the soundtrack a sense of what Freud called “the uncanny” — the encounter with something that is familiar and at the same time, strange. As with “hora” the distance between the visual onstage presence and images evoked by the familiar music of “L’Apres midi d’un faune” imbues the dance with a playful, perhaps slightly mischievous feeling.
Naharin said of this piece: “During the creation process of Hora, I emphasized the importance of nonsense and of our ability not to take ourselves too seriously and, more than anything, of the winning combination of the dancers’ skills with their passion in dancing.”
Passionate, playful and immensely pleasing to the eye and spirit, “Hora” will be performed on October 27th at 21:00 at the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Tel Aviv. Tickets are available through Batsheva 03-510437 and the Suzanne Dellal box office: 03-5105656.
