"Winter Variations", "Silent Ballet"
Emanuel Gat Dance
Rose Theater
New York, NY
July 14, 2009
By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2009 by Martha Sherman
Sans music, yes; silent, no. Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat makes dance that has deep musical sensibility with or without a soundtrack. The New York premiere of “Winter Variations” for the Lincoln Center Festival began with a score that was less music than sound wallpaper. In a long segment danced to an industrial hum segueing into the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”, two dancers, Gat and Roy Assaf, introduced themselves, individuals sharing a hauntingly lit space as if each were alone. Gat’s long powerful arms danced in a whiplike movement encircling and reversing around his body. The two dancers combined undulating movement with sharpness, and incorporated every part of their strikingly beautiful bodies. Heads, necks, backs, the low haunches of their squatting thighs and calves joined arms, legs, torsos, and feet in a corporeal celebration.
This piece, a second-generation duet for Gat and Roy Assaf, was also credited as created by both. It grew from the relationship they had forged over five years performing Gat’s shorter, Bessie-award winning duet “Winter Voyage”, his breakthrough piece from 2004. At this point, their partnership looks forged in steel. Each moves with an almost abrasive independence – until they turn and face one another, or move into perfect parallel moves, or one carries the other in a powerful squat, one body molded on top of the other.
The opening sounds were urban grit; later, the pounding tune and lyric of city energy in “A Day in the Life” drove the two dancers into partnered movement in which they became each other’s gravity. As they moved across the floor, arms intertwined like swing dancers, the momentum of one drew and dragged the motion of the other. Long sequences of movement across the stage on their knees changed the pace, as the score moved into a haunting Egyptian melody played on the oud and sung by Riad al Sunbati. By the final segment, set to Strauss lieder, the movement of the dancers was eerie in its parallels; their strides were identical; their hops, slitherings, and twirls occurred with striking exactness and precision. It was a relief when, in their final bows, their timing and the depth of each bend was finally slightly different between the two.
In “Silent Ballet”, which had its North American premiere, there was no musical soundtrack, but Gat had his dancers create their own with the clatter and squeak of pounding, pivoting feet and the sound of breathing in a dynamic, precise, and demanding work. Although Gat used silence to punctuate the rhythms, the sound of the dance became a powerful partner to the eight performers who took the stage. The piece was choreographed for nine performers; our programs alerted the audience that one dancer of the troupe would not be dancing. Throughout this tightly woven piece, it was hard not to wonder where that other body fit, who was dancing without a partner in parallel, which trio had morphed into a duet. No one seemed to be missing; the dance filled in that gap entirely. Instead of using music to help provide the boundaries and sequence the movement, the bodies in parade set the boundaries. The weaving pattern of the dancers was framed by a large white square that demarcated the performance space and shrunk the large Rose Theater stage.
The dance opened to a cacophony of movement. First, one of the two women in the group began to move, viewed by a chorus line of the remaining dancers who watched from the upstage white floor border. Soon, all the rest joined her in a wild mix of kicking legs, swirling arms, sharply angled elbows from positions on the floor and in the air. The chaos morphed into order, as first one pair began their mirrored movements, then others; groups danced together and around each other. Without a soundtrack or tune to mark the time, the synergy of the group created the rhythm, alternating explosion and connectedness. Pools of light and darkness followed the dancers instead of leading them. The audience, in some confusion without the musical cue and with an uncertain dance ending, paused in the darkness before, hesitantly and hopefully, applauding.
The lighting, also designed by Gat, created the overall sense of space and boundary in these works. In “Winter Variations”, the two dancers stood side by side, small on the broad deep stage, strapped into the space by a series of cross-hatched lines of light that created smaller dance platforms and shadows to weave among. Over the course of the 50 minute piece, the stage shrank and the dancers grew. In a clever visual trick of the final segment, the stage was horizontally cut into a half of darkness and a half of light, allowing each dancer to start a solo, just barely dancing alone, only to have his partner emerge from the blackness and reconnect. They were no longer just a pair of dancers on this enormous stage. They filled the stage with their movement, bodies in space and relationship, forming a multitude.
copyright © 2009 by Martha Sherman
Photo: Emanuel Gat and Roy Assaf by Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center Festival
