AUDIENCE REVIEW: Ohad Naharin’s “MOMO” and the Unbearable Art of Coexistance
Company:
Bathsheva Dance Company
Performance Date:
March 8
Freeform Review:
“Momo has two souls,” declares the short paragraph introducing choreographer Ohad Naharin’s latest work for the Tel Aviv-based Batsheva Dance Company, aptly titled “Momo.” When four bare-chested men appear on the empty stage clad in gray cargo pants, I can’t help but giggle-whisper to my friend: “Which one is Momo?”
We have to work extra hard to stifle our laughter. The men walk in silence, save the coughing and scuffling of the audience, and the house lights are still on, rendering our every move as distinct as the four dancers’ steps. All too aware of my own body, I watch the square of men slowly trace the stage’s perimeter, each step fraught with meaning.
My attention is suspended between the show I’m about to watch and what just happened outside the theatre. Entering the Brooklyn Academy of Music that evening, we had all witnessed a protest. Shouting slogans like “Free Palestine” and clanging bells, several members of the group Dancers for Palestine marched in a circle and blocked some of the theatre’s entrances. Their protest was peaceful, their motivations straightforward: Batsheva is Israel’s most prominent dance company, and it receives state funding. Waiting in line, my friend and I justify our presence, reminding each other that the company had repeatedly called for peace, that art should not be a casualty of war. Still I exhale into anonymity when the house lights dim, eager to immerse myself in abstraction.
The four men hold hands in a circle and plank in a diagonal; they squat, bend, and stretch as one body, all while maintaining the same relaxed posture, the same somber expression. Turns out they are all Momo. But they are only one of Momo’s souls: the other consists of four women and three men who emerge individually, their acrobatic stunts and expressive flexibility signalling a sharp contrast to the stalwart men. That they belong to an entirely different tribe is marked: costume designer Eri Nakumura has dressed the dancers in a sea of beige—lingerie, a topless tutu, a leotard, short shorts.
First to emerge is Sean Howe, who strides across the stage with powerful leaps and exploding kicks. Then comes Londiwe Khoza, who bourrés and shimmies, seemingly experiencing shocks of electricity coursing through her body. Yarden Bareket slinks and crawls. Bo Matthews twitches and trembles. Each dancer stretches every movement to its technical extreme in quintessential Gaga style (a movement language devised by Naharin).
While watching them, you get the sense that they are not just executing choreography but exploring their physical sensations, prioritizing feeling and instinct over specific steps. After their solo, each dancer poses like a pedestrian—some with jutted hips, others with crossed arms—as another enters. Naharin and his dancers are as impressive in stillness as in motion: their silhouettes create a tableau vivant, a piece of visual art that coexists alongside the performance.
Unaffected by these interlopers, the four men climb slowly up a dark wall at the back of the stage. Meanwhile, the seven dancers lug out barres for a ballet interlude. They tendu and grand battement in unison before devolving into loose-limbed individualism—overturning and swinging on the barres in a riotous refusal of ballet’s rigidity. The beige crew is restless and unapologetically autonomous: they twerk and tumble, vying for attention. The four men hold hands and walk slowly in a circle, protected from their influence.
As the two groups dance to the same haunting, violin-heavy tonalities (selections from Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet’s “Landfall”) without intersecting, “Momo” becomes a study in the layering of joy and pain, conformity and individualism, searching and finding. Naharin collages these extremes not merely to juxtapose them but to consider how these sensations can live in the same space without contradicting each other. A tutu-clad beige dancer yells; the four men saunter on. The result is something like catharsis.
Yet the appeal and challenge of abstract art is that it invites association. Even though “Momo” was choreographed before October 7th, 2023, Israel’s brutal war in Gaza and the history of conflict in the region loom over it like a shadow, coloring its ambiguities and filling in its silences. At times, the two souls strike me as warring clans. The four men seem militaristic in their demeanor and complacent in their watching, while the seven dancers read as rebels fighting against the established order. Then, with an embrace or a leap, the image shatters, and I am plunged back into the non-narrative, sensorial world Naharin has constructed. “Momo,” after all, derives its title from the Japanese phrase “also, also.” Its logic is accretive, and watching it is bearing witness to the layering of your interpretations.
Momo has two souls: one inhabits a dreamlike realm of abstraction; the other is unbearably tethered to our own world. One is rooted in reality, the other constantly searches for new possibilities. Whether and how we move between these modes of being—in art and in life—is left to the viewer’s discretion.
Author:
Audrey Pettit
Website:
audreypettit123@gmail.com
Photo Credit:
Richard Termine for the New York Times
