A shimmering 60th-birthday tribute to Israel
As part of Israel's 60th birthday celebration, Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak brought their 2006 Shaker to Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts Wednesday night. The Israeli choreographers, who have worked together since 1992 with a company of 12 dancer/performers, ushered us into a shimmering world that gave the impression it came from early in the last century.
As part of Israel's 60th birthday celebration, Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak brought their 2006
Shaker
to Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts Wednesday night. The Israeli choreographers, who have worked together since 1992 with a company of 12 dancer/performers, ushered us into a shimmering world that gave the impression it came from early in the last century.
A recorded vocalist sang midcentury-sounding big-band tunes in Japanese. Performer Zvi Fishzon wore a black-and-white-striped suit that might have come from a concentration camp - were it not for the black bow tie that made it look snappy, almost zoot-suity.
At times, blatantly Dadaistic symbols such as black-and-white patterned umbrellas and an absurdist tea set added to the 20th-century feeling, evoking holocaust, power, surreality, tenderness, fear, but even childhood, not to mention a light laugh or two. The tensions between these impressions built to an emotional and magically disquieting pitch.
The transcendent lighting design by Uri Murag helped make it all look as if it took place inside a snow globe, with lightweight foam beads passing nicely for snow, flying and clinging to dancers' costumes and hair like soft, wet crystals.
A woman in an Alice blue gown twirls a white ribbon like a child. Fishzon leaves off winding his wind machine to wrap her in the ribbon and stow her away in one of three toylike houses that company members ooze and crawl out of or into. Six other dancers in black dresses or slacks roll under a seventh like ball bearings, propelling her across the stage.
Pinto and Pollak, with Diza Avidan, also designed the many costumes. In the first of a series of changes, a man dances in a blue bodysuit from head to toe, anonymous, his face concealed. Later, a man in a black bodysuit dances with two women without ever losing his grip on their long hair - like some sadistic puppet-master, he pulls them around as if by marionette strings. To Purcell's "Dido's Lament" ("When I am laid in earth") the women eventually refuse attempts to ground them and turn the tables on him, dragging him off, face down, by his heels. This motif throughout could be interpreted as a Holocaust image - one perhaps ingrained in the Israeli psyche?
By the end of the hour-long piece, most of the dancers appear in rainbow-hued bodysuits, taking on the look of aliens on a moonscape in this beguiling work that mysteriously left me with a catch in my throat.
