” Oh ! but are we on the Corum stage? », exclaims an amazed spectator when she lands in the set of the show 2019, choreographed for 17 performers by Ohad Naharin. For the 12e Invitation of the Israeli artist and the Batsheva company since 1992, the Montpellier event directed by Jean-Paul Montanari puts the small dishes in the big ones. “He is the leading figure for me, with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, explicit Montanari. Holding and creating for more than thirty years with the strength that is his is just incredible. »
Arrived by truck from Italy, where it was built, the bifrontal device specially designed by Naharin for 2019 is a box within a box, hinged around a catwalk bordered by two tiers of 125 seats. Due to the number of spectators, two times are offered each day. And no sooner are we ejected from the performance, Friday, June 24, than we want to go back. The multiple endings that fit into each other are like a firework of ideas, as if Naharin, who dedicates this play to his father, who died in 2018, could not stop.
toast to life
By weaving 2019 on this restrictive corridor like a tongue of land, Ohad Naharin paints and repaints the stage with a thousand and one choreographic colors. On a soundtrack composed in particular of popular Israeli songs that we listen to in extenso, he raises a crazy wind of athletic, powerful gestures, with arms wide open. In groups, often in unison, solo or duo, the dancers draw edges, draw eights to infinity. The waves pass, the swell rises and sinks, abandoning bodies, then finding them to continue the march. The gestural effusion, signature of the Israeli artist, seems inexhaustible.
Naharin’s taste for evoking the passage, the human cycle with regular entrances and exits of the performers, identifiable in many shows including Last Work (2015) or Venezuela (2017), is amplified here by the smallness of the podium. This corridor also allows you to play with the front side of the choreography. From behind, from the front, the performers turn around and enjoy this double confrontation with the public who observes them from every angle. They also descend from the boat, cling to it as if not to drown and climb back up. 2019 has nothing to do with mourning but toasts to life.
The body of the dance according to Naharin scans a maximum scale of sensations and moods which are expressed at the same time. Welcome and farewell, light blows of the fan with the right hand, uppercut with the left, arabesque, fall on the knees and relaunch of the rocket, everything is urgent. But this relentless, biting writing sometimes calms down to give way to an oscillation, a rocking, barely perceptible. This slight inefficiency, unrepresentative of Naharin, reinflates the machine which attacks even more. With always, under the shield of technique, a radiant freedom.
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