Yvan Gastaut

 

The Batsheva Dance Company is an Israeli modern and contemporary dance company. Based in Tel Aviv, it was founded in 1964 by the American dancer Martha Graham (1894-1991), famous worldwide as one of the greatest dance innovators of the 20^th century. Since the 1930’s she had given audiences new choreography with her New York-based company, emphasizing feelings and using new techniques based on breathing, contraction and relaxation of the body with works such as Lamentation (1930) or Cave of the heart (1946).

She was financed by the French Baroness Bethsabée (Batsheva) de Rothschild (1914-1999), granddaughter of Jewish banker Alphonse de Rothschild, based in Paris. Philanthropist and passionate about dance, which she practised after the Second World War as an amateur in Martha Graham’s  New York school of dance, the Baroness decided to fund and produce Graham’s shows all over the world. In the early 1960’s Batsheva de Rothschild settled permanently in Israel and, among other sponsorships such as the creation of the Israel Chamber Orchestra or the setting up of the Foundation for Scientific and Technical Progress in the United States and Israel, she helped create the company which took her name and became the most important in the country.

In 1967, Batsheva de Rothschild asked the classical dancer Jeannette Ordman, born in South Africa and settled in Israel, to become the company’s rehearsal director. But very quickly, because her working methods were so different from those of Martha Graham and her relationship with both male and female dancers bad, Jeannette Ordman gave up the job and created her own, competing company, with the support of her patron: the Bat-Dor Dance Company, which she ran until 1984 and which closed in 2006. In 1975, a merger attempt failed, causing the Baroness Rothschild to withdraw her support for the Batsheva Company, which had shown its preference in 1971 by building the Bat-Dor Dance Centre in Tel Aviv.

However, thanks to its reputation, the Batsheva company managed to find new sponsors and was able to continue. Within a decade, the company had performed across the world, in particular in the United States. As from 1970, the Batsheva Company dancers toured and performed before audiences captivated by Martha Graham’s innovative and energetic approach to dance: the choreographer herself worked both in New York and Tel Aviv. During that decade, thanks to her bold work, full of verve and sensuality, the company of dancers from Israel and elsewhere became one of the most famous in the world.

During the 80’s the company’s fortunes varied, partly because Martha Graham became more distant, partly through a certain lack of energy in the techniques and choreography which had made its reputation, but in the 1990’s the Batsheva Company grew again, this time under the leadership of a new resident choreographer, Ohad Naharin. Born in 1952 in Mazra, a kibbutz in northern Israel, a dancer with the Batsheva Company since 1974, Ohad Naharin became one of the most well-known contemporary choreographers, guiding the company with a bold and innovative artistic vision. His work is based on enormous energy and captivating aesthetics. He created a new way of moving using a body language called “Gaga”, which allows him to establish, in his own words, “a flow which penetrates the whole body and triggers total fluidity” in a mixture of refinement and violence. We see disjointed bodies swaying in search of a spatial-temporal orientation, perplexing changes onstage, alternating sudden jerky musical rhythms with deep silences stopping dead a wealth of gestural momentum to leave the figures immobile, in a sort of personal suspension of time.

With his rebellious, whimsical character, Ohad Naharin has choreographed several dozen works, propelling the company into a new dimension that its worldwide reputation completes. The company, consisting of some 40 dancers and divided into two groups (the Batsheva Company and the Batsheva Ensemble which includes “junior” dancers 18 to 24 years old) has performed in Australia, North America, Japan, Europe in the most famous theatres and festivals with a huge success. In Israel, the company has an enthusiastic, devoted and faithful following.

Despite the Company’s the defiant attitude towards the policy of the Israeli government, (Ohad Naharin lives much of the year abroad and in 1991 obtained American citizenship) the Batsheva Company has sometimes been a target because its home is in the Jewish state. In August 2012, for example, at the opening of the Edinburgh International Festival, the show was disrupted by hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists jeering the dancers and chanting at the spectators “your tickets are covered with Palestinian blood.”

Despite its humanist message, the global success of this cosmopolitan company does not always protect it from the conflicts in the Middle East in which it is inextricably mixed.

 

Reference:

The Batcheva Company web-site: www.batsheva.co.il