ZO is the Japanese word for elephant. It is the ambiguous title of Ohad Naharin’s most recent work. What do you mean, elephant? And does that actually matter, with a choreography that is incredibly fascinating from minute one to the last second? But in the last part he appears, the elephant in the room.
Naharin, now 73, former director of the famous Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, was one of the dance artists who developed into one of the pillars of contemporary academic dance in the 1980s. With his Gaga technique he gave dancers the tools to use extreme flexibility, dynamics and improvisation skills in translating inner sensations.
It is a wonderful challenge for the dancers of the Nederlands Dans Theater. They feed Like this ‘and round’ in Amare’s black box. This makes it the successor to the equally overwhelming one The Hole (best performance of 2018). At the start, the audience receives the familiar instructions: no photos, phone off, etc. In three languages. The performance features songs in many more languages and, in addition to looking, listening to others also seems to be the implicit appeal. Listening, even if you don’t understand each other, to the sound and the rhythm, but especially to the universal emotion.
Dancers from the Nederlands Dans Theater in ‘Zō’ by choreographer Ohad Naharin.
Photo Rahi Rezvani
A tangle of connected bodies
At the start, dancers walk around in a circle as an introduction, smiling and seductive. Then it starts with the characteristic energy, brutal elegance and controlled primal power of the Israeli choreographer. With staccato singing, the dancers accompany themselves in a synchronous group dance. It goes deep into the knees, flexible torsos bend forwards as easily as far back, arms shoot up in the air like exclamation marks. Like animals, the ten dancers crawl across the floor, looking directly at the audience, sometimes they gather in the middle where a tangle of connected bodies is created, sometimes they fan out in a folksy or martial group dance or a dancer breaks away to sing in a foreign language. All with great urgency, especially the despair of Surimu Fukushi, who sings “Wei Wei Wei”, a song about the powerless feeling of not being able to intervene in abuses, is inescapable.
Regardless of a call or message: the rhythm in the performance is truly fantastic. The second group of ten dancers regularly rushes onto the stage to mingle with the others or take over. The compelling energy and loud music dissolve into spatial sounds from the speakers that dancers carry, power empties into softness, sometimes the light goes out and the music is silent – making the ears prick up even more.
So listen. And don’t look away. The huge elephant in the room that gets blown up towards the end on the song ‘Gimme! Gimme!’ by ABBA, however, is decorated with deceptively lovely, colorful patterns. The dancers (previously they sang “We are showroom dummies”) pose coquettishly. It’s beautiful. It’s dark and cynical. It is now.