No-one wants to read about dance.
A number of people like dancing, fewer like watching dancing, almost none want to try to grasp what it is for a contemporary dance troupe to address life today through the movement of highly trained bodies in space. Explaining dance in words is hard. It’s like trying to master the front crawl using only walking techniques – there’s nothing to hold onto. But that doesn’t mean one can’t try to swim.
Some editors were reluctant when I pitched them an account of the final tour performance of MOMO which is the latest “masterpiece” of a contemporary genius choreographer, performed by one of the world’s leading dance companies.
But I thought readers would be more curious than that. I’m no particular fan of dance either but seeing Ohad Naharin’s MOMO at BAM in Brooklyn, is like having a chance to see Picasso paint Guernica, watch Marianne Moore write “Poetry,” attend a Samuel Beckett premiere, or support FC Barcelona at the Vicente Calderón.
Even before the lights go down, the chorus starts moving across the back of the stage. Four men dressed in nothing but raggedy dark grey cargo pants walk slowly in sync around the stage. One has fluffy curly hair, the others are more closely cropped. They are individuals: lighter and darker, taller and shorter than each other. They are a unit: all put their hands on their left hip, sticking their elbows back, expressing their bellies. They are not just gifted dancers, they are stuck in the same absurd human bodies as we all are.
During the next 70 minutes, this chorus will keep moving in the foreground or the background: sometimes faster, sometimes slower, sometimes as an interacting, affectionate unit, occasionally separating from one another. Sometimes the unit provides the central action of the show, sometimes its counterpoint.
Not only is Naharin the long-time leader of the Batsheva company, he is also the inventor of the Gaga dance language and arguably today’s most important living choreographer. If, like me, you are someone who, mostly, moves their body rather clumsily and thoughtlessly through space, it’s an incredible idea that not only can someone move elegantly or intentionally themselves but also understand and express those principles across an entire stage.
Day-to-day our movement is transactional — I go there to do this; Naharin expresses movement as meaning — I move in this way to show this.
And, in moving to meaning, dance differs from the professional dancing we have seen on music shows or musicals in the way that Van Gogh differs from wallpaper. MOMO is constitutive not illustrative, it is not an accompaniment, it is the thing itself. As such, it is more similar to the dancing we do for joy, except its techniques are virtuosic and the emotions infinitely more subtle.
Seven individuals come out in turn to dance around the chorus. When they come out, one at a time, we are attracted into thinking of the narrative they provide, but that’s just us grasping for the familiar. These characters are different sizes, shapes and colours — we might say they represent different races — but how far does that matter?
Though, of course, the types of emotion the performance evokes are timeless, reading narrative or even headlines into the dance is a very human error. MOMO premiered in 2022 so, though the dancers feel October 7 and its aftermath, the show is no more a response to today’s news than Shakespeare's “Antony and Cleopatra.”
In “Mr. Gaga,” the Heymann brothers 2015 film about him, Naharin said of his later phase that his choreography is inextricably tied up in helping his dancers interpret the movement he is looking for. Gaga, which is more like Yoga than ballet, is a process of self-realization. In it, the body becomes an extension of the emotions, not just joy or rhythm as we often feel, but all the emotions, in a mindful way. Only at a performance level is Gaga stringent. Indeed, Naharin and his team host large public classes for people to come and learn how to dance the gamut of emotions.
Though I rarely write about dance, I did cover another BAM show when Emmanual Gat’s “Love Train” was danced to the music of Tears for Fears. Just as in that piece, throughout the course of the continuous performance of MOMO, the shapes and movements of the 11 dancers are mesmerizing. Not just as individuals developing their own styles through Gaga or as groups like the four-person chorus, but as an entire ensemble.
There Are No Words — And the Music Doesn’t Help
In that previous piece I was able to draw from my knowledge of the lyrics and music of the songs to shine a light on the dancing. In MOMO, however, Batsheva dance to music from the 2018 Laurie Anderson/Kronos Quartet album “Landfall,” as well as to music from Philip Glass, Arca, and Maxim Waratt (a pen name of Naharin himself). The music is abstract and occasionally rhythmic but, despite names of pieces like “CNN Predicts a Monster Storm” and “Wind Whistles Through the Darkness” the accompaniment is hard to peg, beyond calling it ominous.
There are no set scenes, just a continuous unfolding of action, but that action morphs as the music changes. The light changes too, highlighting dancers scaling the walls at the back of the stage. A whole new vertical dimension opens up: dancers climbing up the walls or along the walls in unison, reminding us among other things, that we are not bound to the floor.
Some of the sequences are a critique of dance itself. At one point all eleven dancers take a portable barre and do their exercises. First they are in elegant sync and then they move in accelerated syncopated sequence as if to say, “yes we know how traditional dance does it, but how daft to be limited to those stiff moves.”
And that escape from genre is parallel to Naharin’s escape from the strictures of gender. Naharin shows how dance has traditionally treated gender as a stiff binary, while engaging with it himself in a deeply physical, fluid, and expressive way. Most obviously in MOMO, a deeply muscled male-presenting dancer comes on stage in a small pink tutu without satire. He is, like his colleagues, just donning dance garb and sequences irrespective of gender.
Throughout the performance, the choreography rejects fixed gender roles, instead emphasizing the shared, organic vocabulary that comes from Gaga. Dancers of no-matter-what gender execute similar phrases with equal intensity, defying the traditional division between masculine strength and feminine grace. MOMO creates a space where gender is not a constraint but a human possibility. And, with gender one of the key intersections of contemporary society, where you advocate for a free open-ended, evolving aspect of movement, you advocate for a free inclusive humanity.
Despite the increasing proliferation of words being flung at us (everyone and their dog has an AI blog on Substack) there’s nothing more human than moving with emotion through the world. MOMO celebrates an inclusive humanity dancing onward through history, As with William Butler Yeats’ famous evocation of human learning in “Among School Children,” the matter of life is not simple, but the substance is found not only in “reading-books and history” but also in “body swayed to music.”