Review: Batsheva, and a Dance Divided

To attend the return of Batsheva Dance Company to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday was to have your attention split in several ways.

First was the split between the acts of theater happening inside BAM and those happening outside it. Batsheva is the most prominent dance company in Israel. Because of that, and because the company receives state funding, the group Dancers for Palestine staged a peaceful protest on the sidewalk and stairs, blocking several doors as they chanted “Free Palestine!” and other slogans.

And the work being performed inside, Ohad Naharin’s “Momo,” from 2022, is also a study in split attention — one dance laid over another, a double exposure. In the first, four bare-chested men in cargo pants move as a unit, slowly marching like soldiers or stepping hand-in-hand, as in folk dance. In the second, seven dancers — four women and three men (one in a tutu) — move as individuals, each introduced with a solo, expressing themselves in extraordinary feats of flexibility and eccentricity, as in most works by Naharin.

For much of “Momo,” these two tribes remain distinct, even while occupying the same stage and field of vision, accompanied by the same soundtrack — selections from “Landfall,” an elegiac Laurie Anderson composition for the Kronos Quartet. Trading the positions of foreground and background, the two groups nearly touch, yet do not acknowledge each other.

In the middle of this 70-minute work, the four men climb up a wall (equipped with handholds and platforms) at the rear of the stage and remain statue-still while the seven others bring out ballet barres and degenerate from doing ballet exercises to hanging on the bars like anti-conformist cool kids. (The soundtrack is now Philip Glass.) Later, Yarden Bareket, one of the women, gets up close and personal with each of the four men: nuzzling, clinging, pressing one down to his knees and pulling his face into her belly. This has the tension of taboo breaking. The men stay unresponsive.

All this is formally fascinating, continually inventive and superbly danced. Naharin keeps establishing rules and rhythms, then breaking them. The somber tone is pierced by surprise and Naharin’s cheeky humor — as when, amid a complex stage picture, one man among the seven starts twerking. The choreography for the four men, especially, is shot through with sculptural beauty and brotherly tenderness.

Watching “Momo,” though, you can’t focus exclusively on form. The world rushes in. Not the protesters — who remained outside and were gone by the time the audience left the theater — but consciousness of the events they were responding to: the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and the brutal war in Gaza, which started after “Momo” was made. Batsheva performances have long been shadowed by its country’s crises, but the shadow has never before been this overwhelming.

In a recurring motif, the seven each raise one hand. Every time the hands are raised, we hear a deep boom, like the impact of a bomb nearby. As the time between gesture and sound decreases, it seems as if the hands might be anticipating or even triggering the boom. The frequency of the sound increases. The boom becomes a beat.

Do those raised hands signify complicity? Contrition? Solidarity? Resistance? “Make it stop?” “I’m in?” The art of “Momo” is not to say. The dominant tone is antiwar, but the beauty of the choreography for the soldier-like men amounts to empathy.

Near the end, both groups line up at the lip of the stage. Alone and together, the dancers rotate. One by one, though, each of the seven breaks off for a little solo. Some are tonally appropriate. Londiwe Khoza (extraordinary throughout) crumples to the ground. Nathan Chipps cups his hands to his mouth and shouts, maybe to warn, maybe to find someone in the rubble. Yet many of the solos seem like tone-deaf bids for attention, a choreographic choice that can be read as Naharin judging the potential indulgence of his signature style.

Style can be a straitjacket, like the invisible ones that the four men seem to wear at one point. So can an artist’s association with his or her country. The ballet section of “Momo” might resemble recent pieces by William Forsythe, just as the climbing wall might recall similar ones in work by Rachid Ouramdane. But with those choreographers, these gestures don’t unavoidably speak to the disasters facing Israelis and Palestinians.

In a program note, Naharin writes about the necessity of reconciliation and a life of dignity for both Jews and Palestinians, and he offers a standard defense of art. “Momo” is a statement of much more power and disturbing resonance. It is a dance that directs attention to what we see and what we don’t see, intentionally or not. It is about the seemingly impossible difficulty of coexistence and its inevitability. The piece shows the distinction of art from life, and also the inescapable connections. Like life, it is unbearably ambiguous.

Batsheva Dance Company

Through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org.