Dance Review : Batsheva of Israel Unveils a New Look

On previous American tours, the Batsheva Dance Company of Israel won respect for its diverse contemporary repertory and meticulous, nuanced dancing.

No longer. A new Batsheva appeared at Orange Coast College on Sunday, one remade in the image of choreographer Ohad Naharin, who became artistic director in July. Brutality chic is now Batsheva’s subject and style, defined primarily through gesture and gymnastics rather than dance.

This is the kind of choreography where women are hurled about, flung away--and then come running back for more. In “Tabula Rasa,” the most lyrical of Naharin’s creations on the five-part program, a woman gets hauled across a man’s back by her feet. (So much for modern romance.) In “Sixty a Minute,” the most intimate of his pieces, Naharin himself dances the role of a guitar-playing stud teased into sex-war who crushes his partner and dumps her body on a piano.

Improbably, his victim is Mari Kajiwara, the unforgettably serene former icon of the Alvin Ailey company. She now serves as a Batsheva rehearsal director but her most essential role seems to be rising above indignity in piece after piece.

In the excerpts from “KYR”--a two-part, 40-minute sampling from Naharin’s 70-minute rock epic--Kajiwara shelters the gender-oppressed and functions as soulful counterpoint to a grotesque domestic mime-play. But even when she’s not featured, she represents a standard of metaphysical fluidity and involvement at odds with the slash-and-burn efficiency of her new colleagues.

Obviously, Naharin’s emphasis on strife and anguish makes a telling statement about the mood of Israel--especially in the opening accumulation-structure from “KYR,” with 15 dancers wearing military khaki seated in a semicircle of chairs repeating a ever-growing litany of pain. His use of same-sex partnering, particularly in “Tabula Rasa,” must be provocative to home audiences and his frequent contrasts between raw feeling and rigid movement-structures compel attention.

However, Naharin depends so much upon cheap thrills and special effects, loads his dances with such an excess of pantomime and florid emoting that there are long stretches where the result looks less like choreography than something staged for actors. The integrity of dance is something Batsheva no longer embodies. Instead, we find crude, intimidating movement-theater sold with relentless chutzpah.

Completing the program: “Super Straight Is Coming Down,” in which choreographer Daniel Ezralow borrows William Forsythe’s composer (Tom Willems) plus some of his stagecraft to make his own statement about brutality chic. Compared to the sharper interpretation by the Hubbard St. company, Batsheva’s dancers look strong at the beginning, confused at the end, in the middle somewhat enervated.