Batsheva Dance Company

Cal Performances presents
Batsheva Dance Company
MOMO
Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley
Feb 23rd, 2025

A frequent comment I make at monthly book club is that a novel is ‘overwritten.’ I’ve said it on countless occasions, whether I love the story or if it’s just not for me. I feel like twenty percent of material could often be edited out and the larger whole would still work and work well. Still convey the same message. I had a similar sense as I watched Sunday’s matinee of Batsheva Dance Company’s MOMO, presented by Cal Performances. I found MOMO captivating, haunting, eerie and impeccably danced by its eleven cast members. But at seventy minutes, it was too long with similar physical syntax and extended sequences of repetition. And yet, from beginning to end, I was completely taken with the dance’s compositional structure.

Choreographed in 2022 by Ohad Naharin (with collaboration from the company and Ariel Cohen), MOMO reads like a physical fugue, a formal space where different movement lines emerge as concurrently interdependent and independent. There was the central male quartet who mapped the stage’s perimeter, first entering from stage right. With palms on sacrums, they immediately established that their every movement phrase would be deliberate, unhurried, measured. Next a serpentine body arrived, cycling through lay-outs, old-school jazz extensions, vogueing and runway choreography. Other figures entered the scene – a woman frantically boureé-ing on demi-pointe, a sprightly pixie skipping through the space, and more. All these different movement lines were in dialog with each other throughout, and yet, they could have easily stood on their own as solo experiences. That is textbook fugue – a form that allows an exchange between entities as well as celebrating singularity of each specific moment.

Batsheva Dance Company in MOMO
Photo Ascaf

Mid-way through MOMO, the back wall transformed into a climbing/bouldering surface. The original quartet were the first to scale the topography, methodically ascending until they were seated high in space, ready to survey the action that was to come. And what a sequence it was! Perhaps the standout of the entire piece. The boureé-ing dancer from early on began a variation at a portable ballet barre, complete with contemporary and traditional vocabulary. Pencheé and petit battement infused the phrase as did brilliantly suspended lifts, where the barre acted as her partner. The rest of the cast joined, each with their own individual barres, and the movement continued to toggle and oscillate. Calm and frenzied; angry and soothing; upright and upside down; classical and Gaga languages. Such stunning design, choreography and performances, and the scene was another example of MOMO’s beautiful fugal state. Commentary and conversations between unique tones, qualities and techniques. It just could have been twenty percent shorter.