Hubbard Street Dance present Ohad Naharin Choreography DECADENCE

Play is absolutely the operative word. It starts with the usual admonition to silence cellphones, but this one from a black suit clad man with a robotic voice that incites audience giggles. For nearly two blissful hours we are then in Naharin’s sandbox pulsating with the energy of full throttle joy.

How interesting to note that in a prior showcase of Naharin’s choreography by Batsheva Dance, the program notes emphasized how Naharin trains the dancers to feel the moves from within, rather than focus on how it looks. From the audience perspective, it feels quite the converse. This is a choreographer who never seems to lose track of entertaining us.

(Read Picture this Post’s report -- Harris Theater presents BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY Review – Smash the Mirrors!)

In rapid order, we also come to take the remarkable physical prowess and technical skill of Hubbard’s dancers for granted.

Naharin becomes our most fun friend,ever playing with rhythm, repetitions, finding the creatures in his dancers, and more. We are perhaps reminded subconsciously of that exciting cusp on the brink of language when we felt the beat in saying “Dada”. Hey! life is rhythmic and FUN!

Picture one of the pieces in this 9-part meld--- A Jimi Hendrix-styled electronic Hava Nagilah fills the hall. Clones of our black suited emcee appear and grab seats on the chairs. We are mesmerized by their erupting lava flows of energy. They ripple round their half circle barely containing their dance to the chairs, and one dancer is systematically felled to belly flop floor sprawl at the end of each ensemble movement. Clothes fly off layer by layer, and then shoes, as the joy rheostat notches up and up. For this writer it evoked an Xray of Hasidic religious rapture, a sect of Judaism that was originally banned to the fringes because of its rebellious embrace of music and dance.

That repeating refrain of a dancer falling to floor seems to be a Naharin trademark of sorts--to play with repetition in ways that make it new. A woman walks back and forth with exaggerated hip moves suggesting she was a victim of palsy carrying deadweight. Yet, her awkward moves became so natural with time that she opens a window on the previously invisible line between disfigurement and elegance. A funny poem of sorts repeats and extends with the choreography making these repetitions visceral. As the dance/poem moves from its recurring central motif it is not unlike new expressions in a master performance of the Goldberg Variations. A carnival-like calliope sound launches Bolero for two women dancers who make the slow intensity buildup of Ravel’s score newly visual. This play with the tension between repetition and variation is like a spring bubbling through Naharin’s fun playground.

And more than anything, know this is FUN!

RUN to catch one of these last performances! Entertainment doesn’t get much better than this.