Review: WHAT WILL THEY DO NEXT? Batsheva Dance Company's 'Venezuela' at Royce Hall At UCLA

As Ohad put it, a "scope of sensations" came over the audience as the curtain rose on a pool of dancers slowly drifting upstage beginning the performance of Venezuela. With their backs to the audience at UCLA's Royce Hall on Friday, March 15, the sound of Gregorian chants, bare, black, and simple set an erie eternal vacancy and expansive tone. A collective presence had the audience zeroed in on this "what will they do next?" Batsheva Dance Company. With little program notes, highly regarded choreographer, Ohad Naharin, permitted us to choose our experience in a powerful use of repetition.

Dancer, Maayan Sheinfeld, struck a latin ballroom pose as the group continued to walk and rock upstage, shortly after another dancer joined her. Soon all of the dancers broke out into to poses embodying the cultural ballroom dances of Venezuela.

A profound skipping sequence ensued. As more dancers joined the stage momentum and awareness of one another increased like in life's hustle and bustle. The coming and going of relationships, the back and forth nature of monotony, a constant buzz. Soon enters a dancer from stage right carrying a corded microphone.

Two dancers rapped lyrics from "Dead Wrong" by The Notorious B.I.G., faces mashed up against one another to share the acoustics equally. A literal cultural mashup against the Gregorian score, we sat back in our seats one comfortable March evening at UCLA while Venezuela experiences social crisis.

The kind of vulgarity we "need to wake up" to. The kind that shocking Biggy lyrics will jolt in to our mirrored privilege. I am truly disgusted just writing this and sitting complacent at my desk. Not due to guilt, but lack of awareness of the severity of the social crisis in Venezuela. As corners of the world progress, others like Venezuela are resulting to survival mode. Devolving as a species and all at the expense of zero checks and balances.

Five female dancers walk downstage as five male dancers crawl behind. They merge as some other creature as to cover the parameter of the stage in codependence. As a dancemaker, Ohad creates some of the smartest transitions both geographically and in dancer's movement quality. It's felion in spinal articulation and flows like a wave through the reverberation past the physical bodies. Ohad is not just a choreographer, his GaGa technique is a way of moving. He has easily developed and lead one of the strongest dance ensembles on the planet. Under the direction of Ohad, these dancers understand movement at a cellular level.

The sensations they evoke in the audience speak to the depths of the human experience. To call it visceral would be an understatement as it is something metaphysical. I can spot dancer, Billy Barry, a mile away with his loud presence and even louder dancing. All dance lovers should know who he is. All of these dancers are soloists and all molecularly synchronized. Dancer, Yoni Simon, screams out but drowns in the noise.

What appeared to me as, white pillow cases began to stream across the stage as a line of dancers traveled from stage left to right, following the impulse of their peers. Not arbitrary but audible dancing with stomping, dropping, and screaming swirled together in a madness and suddenly a dancer was covered in the white sheets. Nothing arbitrary about the slimming struggle of dancers who dropped to the floor juxtapose the power poses of the dancers standing.

Transported into the mind of Ohad, taking shapes and shifting them into natural evolutions across the stage. To be a dancer in this company I imagine the audition notice reads something like "classically trained, ready to go deep into self exploration, no achilles tendons required," These dancers use levels and pliés like I've never seen. Chun Woong Kim, danced a pretty unforgettable solo. Erez Zohar screamed underneath a haunting soundscape. I found myself tortured and waiting for it to end. The use of blackouts functioned as phases into destruction and isolation.

And suddenly, lights up, we're back to the beginning. This go 'round had different dancers, "The Wait" by Olafur Arnalds, and same choreography. Same two latin ballroom poses that broke out of the ensemble. This time a boyish skip started off the skipping section. Is this a joke? For me, for someone to see dance as a deja vu, it makes me rethink how I review because I am literally seeing the work for a second time. I soon understand it's function: the polarity between national identity, global choices, and generational disturbances during a cultural backlash.

The skipping set to different music is now more fun and I want to join in. The seriousness of the work just became hilarious and ridiculous. During the rapping section with Notorious B.I.G.'s "Dead Wrong," we now experience a beat and the gestures danced now create a narrative. Suddenly, the dancers are characters emerging through the music.

The section of five women riding on the backs of five men suddenly transformed to music "Ae Ajnabi" by Mahalakshmi & Udit Narayan. The women became queens riding their elephants on an Indian runway. Hot, heavy, and even sexual, the subtle shifts in uplighting, music, dancers, and adding color to props. Faced with places and narrative vs. the first round. As soon as the flags came out which seemed to be empty pillow cases the first round, there is now national identification even if I personally couldn't place the flags to nations. Transition into Rage Against the Machine "Bullet in Your Head," we experience a combination of fine art vs. deconstructed pop culture. Now the lyrics and dance were married. The dancer covered in sheets or flags is a dead man and dancer with his hand on forehead is symbolizing the bullet in his head.

Salsa dancing of Venezuela intermingled with the common language of guttural impulses and the globalization of our world. Hip hop beats mingle with bhangra music. A huge shout out to Maxim Waratt for a stellar, soundtrack design and edit. The anxious bouts of solos were telling of the consciousness of Venezuelans. Astounding moving bodies with little to no tech required. Nothing extra. nothing extra.

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