"Did you feel guilty, crossing the picket line to get in?"

We were settling into the audience at the Benedum center when I saw E. a few rows down.

I went down to say hi. "Did you feel guilty, crossing the picket line to get in?" I asked her.

"A little," she said, "but this is art. What does art have to do with war?"

I smiled. We were here for Batsheva Dance Company, an Israeli dance troupe founded by Martha Graham and Baroness Batsheva De Rothschild in 1964. Ohad Naharin, the current artistic director, began working with Martha Graham in 1980, at her invitation, after he began his study with Batsheva in the late 1970's.

Israeli dance troupe is all that some people heard. Hence, "Would you dance on my grave?" on one protester's placard. They marched in a steady loop in front of the Benedum's big glass doors. There were cops on every corner of the block.

Inside we were met with a spare stage, grey walls with multiple exits and entrances cut into them. White floors. A steady soft glow from upstage lights. Back of house inner architecture revealed - who'd have thought the Benedum had so many silver ventilation ducts?

Lights up. Dancers dressed in clothes one could order from J. Crew's summer catalogue, polo-necked tees and capri length shorts. Dancing barefoot on white marley, lit from above with 200 lights that shifted very subtly, highlighting the dancers' precise technique.

Bellus opens with a large group of dancers standing, in silence, facing the audience. With no audible cues, they move as one, most of them leaving the stage to that moment's primary dancers as the music starts.

An evenly balanced group of men and women, with bodies many shapes and sizes. They would be an ordinary crowd anywhere (though none of them are overweight).

Late in Bellus I was struck by how gesture was passed from dancer to dancer. Each dancer danced alone, yet expressed the same stories with their bodies.

How like us, in our illusion of aloneness, moving through our heartbreaks, sorrows, and joys isolated, yet just like every person's necessary journies ... The gestures of contemporary life, translated to dance, made into art.

Hilarious, true, small gestures - the male dancer sniffs the female dancer's ass in their duet of seduction (or its lack). Humor popped up elsewhere as the troupe surprised us. It took a few times for the audience to get comfortable laughing. You can laugh at a contemporary dance performance?

Humus : the power of female gestures. Only the female dancers worked together for this piece. They danced as a single organ, a single gender muscle. Stereotypes of walks - the tiptoes of high heels, the swing of jutting hips. Sexual postures placed next to everyday gestures. The rejection presented by this group of women on their knees, hips to the audience, their knees crossing their legs behind them. They look back at the audience, cold. They hold pose, then shift, stand up, flock into movements as birds.

Humus perfectly coordinated against a Brian Eno soundtrack containing no punctual rhythm. The soundtrack was so soft it pulled all of one's sensory perception into one's eyes.

By the time we reached Secus I was totally rapt. I trusted this choreographer, these dancers, completely. When they came to the moments of nudity, gestures exposing gendered difference (or its lack), gestures exposing the rump ... it made perfect sense in this context.

Yes, I cried when the mano-a-mano duet played out. Such emotional intimacy shared forthrightly by two men on stage. Yes the audience was palpably uncomfortable with it. I want so badly for us to get over that.

This is art, what does art have to do with war? What do we expect two men to do in a dance with each other on stage?

A language developed by a person with Pittsburgh roots circled the globe. It returned to us tonight in an extraordinary performance ...

* * * * * * * * * *

Batsheva dance company at the Benedum center 5 February 2009

Three
by Ohad Naharin

70 minute program of three pieces : Bellus, Humus, and Secus. No intermission.

http://www.batsheva.org

"Tikkun" means "to mend" : Suzanne Slavic at the PCA

Star lilies often decorate viewings of bodies before funerals, as their heavy sweet scent covers that of the body. I didn't notice the bouquet of star lilies gracing Suzanne Slavic (PCA's Artist of the Year) opening Friday night until I was making my second tour of the work.



It is a mixed symbol, a gorgeous flower that hides the smell of death. How appropriate to artwork in which Slavic applies a screen of beauty to photographs of human-wrought destruction.

I may be able to describe the physicality of the work with that single sentence, but the complexity and depth of experience provided by viewing it shows the artist's genius in her exploration of that single decision's possibility.

She has appropriated the visual language of disaster photography (the illusion of a represented reality) and applied another language, that of Islamic painting techniques to both the physical and illusive surface of the image.

Each still image contains competing narratives, the photographed 'reality' of destruction underneath the painted image. At times the photograph was printed in a way that points to it having been manipulated in some way, a manipulation that further indicates the illusion-atop-illusion parameters set up by Slavic.

Her painting technique echoes Islamic miniaturist tradition, and speaks to a vocabulary of inner reality referenced in Sufi poetry. I walked room to room recognizing scenes and passages from a variety of Arabic story-sources and comparing them to the contents in the photography. I considered the tension between 'real' and 'imagined' - photo referencing our belief in 'reality', and painting speaking to our 'imagined' re-creation of reality ...

And in the images wherein she overlays imagined repairs to a 'reality' destroyed by war or natural disaster? While in this room, the phrase "tikkun" means "to mend" insistantly ran through my mind. It made sense to me, looking at images of the middle east reconstructed with a Western hand in an Islamic gesture, that I would think of a phrase that comes from Kabbalah (another Middle-Eastern practice, although Jewish) - that the highest calling of a spiritual practitioner is to work to repair reality and the connections we have to, in, and with reality.

Slavic's work may not pull at those strings of those viewers who are not interested in those ideas, but instead it will challenge those who have a hard time looking at the consequences of human misbehavior. Its one of our oldest problems: Humans destroy things, nature destroys things, how do we look at the brokenness we make? How do we respond? Do we numb ourselves in order to tend to life's mundane necesseties? How can we maintain awareness of our ruined world?

My favorite response from a viewer was, "I feel guilty liking this work, because it gives me that silly childlike hope that we can deal with things." Perhaps it invokes the child's wish to bandage the world's wounds so the sounds of those wounds festering do not intrude on the child's experience of the world.

Suzanne Slavic has provided us with complex art for a complex time, the best food for thought. Check out the second floor of the PCA until the show comes down.