Running time: 65 minutes

If people were to ask me about the dance performance of “Last Work”, I would have to say, it is hard to pin down and retell what I saw. Rather, I would start by trying to put into words the state of confusion and at the same time amazement the show left me in.

Indeed, Batsheva Dance Company’s intense performance of “Last Work” by the Israeli choreographer and the dance company’s Artistic Director Ohad Naharin at the Grand Théâtre in Luxembourg leaves the audience with an abundance of impressions to process. One of them was, undoubtedly, the sheer dance force and physical movement capabilities of the dancers, and the other, what felt like a political statement.

As it happens, with “Last Work,” “running time” just got another meaning. 65 minutes was not only the duration of the performance, but it also meant 65 minutes of uninterrupted running for the dancer in the background. Dressed in a long royal blue dress and sneakers, the dancer ran on a treadmill, unswervingly, steadily, without ever turning her gaze from the left stage wall, for the entire duration of the performance.

And in between, the bustle of the dancers’ performance, the electronic music (the original score for “Last Work” was written by a German composer, Grischa​ Lichtenberger), noise and quiet (except for the sound of the runner on the treadmill), the dimmed lighting (lighting design: Avi Yona Bueno, stage design: Zohar Shoef). Aside from the running woman in the blue dress, the dancers were mostly in simple white or black undergarments, in one scene a female dancer was wearing a tutu, you saw men in black caftans, and in another scene dancers would come on stage masked with mesh over their heads (costume design: Eri Nakamura).

The dancers’ movements were packed: ranging from intense, vulgar, erotic, absurd, sensitive, emotional, exaggerated, violent, humoristic, quirky, robotic, mechanical, isolated, vague, fluid, organic, meditative, explosive – in short, one could also say, Gaga.

In fact, “Gaga” is the movement language developed by Naharin; it is a dance language in which body movements are isolated to be felt individually, heightening awareness of the body’s senses and capabilities: “We become more aware of our form. We connect to the sense of the endlessness of possibilities. We explore multi-dimensional movement…” (Ohad Naharin)

The performance of “Last Work” does not seem to follow a consistent narrative, except for a palpable tension that builds up in a huge crescendo towards the end – in fact, 65 minutes kept the audience in suspense and anticipation almost like the French action thriller “96 Hours.”

One could perhaps say, the dancers told stories within stories. Stories of the ambiguous and potentially cruel nature of humankind.

Overshadowed by darkness, the dancers’ movements were oftentimes confusing, sometimes amusing, yet at any rate, replete with (mental) images. Some movements were reminiscent of Yoga, others were animal-like, such as one dancer moving like a snake man, one dancer jumping like a frog but backwards (!); another dancer turning a somersault like a circus artist, or yet another doing the splits while moving up and down almost like a jumping jack, seemingly effortlessly. Yet other movements were sheer breathtaking, such as one of the dancers’ trance-like backbend, executed in slow-motion just like the famous movie scene from “The Matrix.”

There were erotic and explicit movements, grotesquely exaggerated, even mechanical imitations of sexual actions. Male dancers holding a struggling female dancer, suggesting sexual violence. A love drama between two dancers, illustrating a budding romance and which ends in a love triangle, all amidst a melee of dancers. It was at times simply impossible to capture everything that went on onstage at once.

And there were military-imbued scenes, with the dancers marching in lock-step in a group, arms shooting up, determined, joining forces, no longer individuals, akin to machines. This militaristic stance is then kept until the end of the performance, its political message open to interpretation: In the last scene – the noisiest and most tumultuous scene of all – you see one dancer holding a white flag, another turning a ratchet, almost drowning the rest of the sounds and music with its earsplitting noise, while a third dancer, sitting on a chair with his back turned to the audience, appears to be frantically masturbating, until he turns around after minutes to reveal he is cleaning a rifle. Meanwhile, the fourth dancer walks around with packaging tape, surprisingly systematically wrapping it around all the other dancers that have come onto the stage until ultimately all the dancers, standing frozen still, are tied together into what now looks like a huge web of tape. At the very end of this scene, the last person to be wrapped with the tape is the runner – while the dancer with the white flag presses the flag into the runner’s hand – and thus the music ends abruptly in a crashing climax and with it the performance.

The Luxembourgish audience was thrilled and gave standing ovations.

At the end of the day (in both senses), everyone goes home with his or her own associations. Some of the associations and impressions I took home from this performance were, I remember myself thinking of the detached, self-involved nature of humankind today – as mirrored especially in the dancers’ bizarre, pornographic movements evoking a cool, non-committal, self-centered nature of human relationships, lacking emotions or tenderness, of emptiness and meaninglessness – all of which felt to me like a reminder to wake up and live with the entire soul and body, to embrace the good that life has to offer – and at the same time like a reminder of the devastating political and social state the world is in right now, a subliminal call for action.

At the end, a few interesting facts:

Said to be one of the foremost contemporary dance companies in the world, Batsheva Dance Company, based in Tel Aviv, was founded in Israel in 1964 by the Baroness Batsheva de Rothshild, and famous dancer and choreographer Martha Graham was the company’s first artistic adviser. The Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin has been the company’s Artistic Director since 1990. “Last Work” premiered in Tel Aviv in June 2015 and was coproduced by Montpellier Dance 2015 and European Center for the Arts Hellerau, Dresden.

Johanna Wolter