Batsheva Makes a Visual Design Impact

Batsheva Dance Company, the Tel Aviv-based troupe that took the name of one of its 1964 founders (Baroness Batsheva de Rothchild) and once used the technique of the other (Martha Graham), now has a different guiding light that was seen Wednesday night at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Since 1990, artistic director and chief choreographer Ohad Naharin, a former Graham dancer himself, has brought his own sense of the austere and epic to Batsheva. His work is visually spectacular, thanks largely to a strong sense of dance design, taped scores that fall into the liturgical new age category, seriously stunning shafts of light sifting from above (by Bambi Avi Yona Bueno) and dancers who make sinuous free-flowing movement and occasional sharp gesture into a kind of beatific code.

The atmosphere of secret ceremonies was pervasive--in the rituals of smearing inky liquid on half-naked bodies that swooped, romped and rebounded a bit too long in “Black Milk” (1985); in processional walking and repeated rolling and unrolling of a strip of carpet to Arvo Part’s anthem-like music in “Arbos” (1989); and in dozens of moments full of far-away gazes and individuals who suddenly fall away from a formation.

For “Kyr,” excerpted from a 1990 work, the protocols were often military (to music by Naharin and Israeli rock group the Tractor’s Revenge) but seemed just as sacred: Naharin loves the visual impact of athletic and well-organized repetition that seems part marching maneuver and part prayer. In an arresting scene at the end of this piece, 15 dancers in chairs are arranged in a shallow semi-circle, rising and falling, chanting and gesturing like acolytes, to a Passover song.

Ensemble choreography featuring the same energy patterns gave all the pieces a certain beautifully arranged similarity so that it was hard to see the movement within the overall architecture of these pieces. Rarely did individual dancers command focus, except in “Queens” (an excerpt from a 1989 larger work), which was a series of brief soliloquies for women. Their sculpted bodies, bathed in cream-colored light against a black background (a favorite Naharin strategy), moved slowly like fawns or warriors, all angles and curves, jabs and gentle landings. But elsewhere, the fine sense of design left a small empty spot, a longing for more ideas within breathtaking frames.

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* Batsheva moves to Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Brentwood, with a different program, tonight and Saturday, 8 p.m., and Sunday, 2 p.m. $9-$35. (310) 825-2101.