MOMO, the 2022 work currently being performed by Batsheva Dance Company on its West Coast tour, is a haunting, revelatory, and hypnotic piece of art that dares the audience to look away. The Israeli group made its debut at Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Feb. 14–16 with MOMO and will next bring it to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall Feb. 22–23.
On Saturday in L.A., the contemporary-dance troupe, founded in 1964 by Batsheva de Rothschild with the assistance of modern-dance doyenne Martha Graham, showed why it’s one of the world’s greatest.
MOMO — choreographed by Ohad Naharin, who was artistic director of Batsheva from 1990 to 2018 and is now its resident dance maker — was co-created by the company’s members and former dancer Ariel Cohen. The work is set to a recorded score designed and edited by Naharin under an alter ego, Maxim Waratt. The music is culled from Landfall, Laurie Anderson’s 2018 album with the Kronos Quartet, as well as from Philip Glass and Venezuelan musician Arca. Ranging from elegiac to rhythmically minimalist, this accompaniment is a perfect fit for the dancers, who generate startling tableaux.
The meaning of MOMO’s title derives from the Japanese word “mo,” which translates as “also” and is quite apt because the 70-minute intermission-less work features two groups. One is a quartet of bare-chested, cargo pants-clad men who are in near-constant unison, whether in plié mode or assuming otherworldly postures and serving as a kind of corporeal ballast. The other group comprises seven dancers who traverse the stage with a variety of intricate steps, helium-infused leaps, and off-kilter balancing poses, all the while creating hives of heart-wrenching beauty.
The movement vocabulary is Gaga — the radical, exceedingly expressive, sensory-driven language developed by Naharin that accentuates carnal awareness, freedom, and a connection to the body. The technique is now practiced and taught worldwide.
MOMO has no tangible narrative. The program notes state that the dance has two souls: one that sends long roots into the earth and embodies archetypes and myths of raw masculinity and another that searches for an individual DNA, which can be felt throughout the work, especially when bodies are intertwined and resemble nothing less than human Rubik’s Cubes.
What to make of the male quartet beginning the work in silence, striding with intention, hands on hips, before morphing into crablike crouch-walking? Sculpturally, the four dancers rise, holding hands as if standing sentry. The mood is somber thanks to Eri Nakamura’s simple costumes — tutu-esque garb, blousy leotards, dance shorts — and Avi Yona Bueno’s coolly effective lighting design, the stage bare save for a large rectangular panel designed by Gadi Tzachor and situated at the rear. Scenes morph seamlessly from a Butoh-like calculated slowness to stylized walks.
When dancer Londiwe Khoza bursts from the wings, executing rapid-fire shoeless bourrées, she’s a chaotic breeze, her sleight-of-feet moves including a quasi-jig, an arabesque, and an erotic backbend. She represents a generosity of spirit pervading the work, as each dancer occupies her or his own space while keenly aware of the others’ journeys.
And what journeys they are. These bodies are beacons of bravery, accentuated by tiny hip shimmies, weaving arms, and neo-breakdance moves — handstands, anyone? — with several pas de deux thrown in for balletic measure. Adding to that neoclassical canon and reminiscent of the famous pas de quatre from Swan Lake, four guys join hands, their heads cocked and moving as one, a brief humorous respite from MOMO’s overarching heaviness.
But when the original male quartet moves to the back panel, individually ascending and situating themselves on some type of supporting device, it’s a whole new world, a kind of terpsichorean rappelling reaching for a Buddhist calm. This fantastic use of the Chandler’s vast stage heightened the already intense emotional drama. The men’s bare chests against the dark brown of the back wall evoke, in some strange way, a Mark Rothko painting, albeit one with flesh tones.
Then one cast member brings in a ballet barre, and Khoza moves on, around, and under it. Recalling, at least to this writer, Jerome Robbins’s classic duet to Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, this scene morphs into a classroom. More barres are brought out, and a series of fast-paced movements ensue, including sky-high extensions, splits, and shoulder stands.
There’s something disconcerting about the abstractness of MOMO, especially when dancers intermittently let out unearthly yowls. But then again, screaming and Gaga go hand in hand — or make that mouth. The wall-mounted men stand up, perhaps evoking the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a crucifixion scene, or insects pinned to a board, an elongated silence adding to the anguish of the moment. There is no dearth of imagery in MOMO.
As the music accelerates, there is a frenzied feeling on the floor, tantamount to a rave, and the need to escape becomes overwhelming. Soon, though, there is a welcome return to somberness, with performers offering outstretched arms as if beseeching unknown allies before moving in lockstep as one.
While MOMO was created before Oct. 7, 2023, and the unspeakable events of that day and the 16 months since, the work still speaks to this moment. A masterpiece of epic proportions, it may help provide solace, if not comfort, for our unstable existence.
