Ohad Naharin's class warming up in Tomer Heymann’s Out of Focus.
While the live dance scene in the Bay Area goes on a modest hiatus during the summer, you might slake your thirst with a good dance movie. As a matter of fact, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which runs July 24-Aug. 11 in several venues in Northern California, has made it possible for you to take in two of them on the same program and, in this case, emerge enriched by the experience.
Both movies are documentaries, each running a mite under an hour. Both are the work of the Heymann Brothers, who, judging from the exposure their films will receive in this year’s SFJFF, are probably Israel’s most productive and most curious documentarians. They’ve been at it for the past decade, and there’s virtually no area of or personality in Israeli cultural life who has not stirred their interest.
Tomar Heymann’s subject is Ohad Naharin, the controversial choreographer who has transformed Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company from its origins as a Martha Graham epigone to a distinctive, unclassifiable presence on the international dance scene; San Francisco Performances presented the troupe here a few years ago, but, alas, no return engagement in the Bay Area looms. In Out of Focus (U.S. premiere), Heymann’s camera tracks Naharin in a New York studio, as he rehearses the members of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet during a five-day period a month before a premiere. The director has divided the movie into "13 notes on dance," although it proves impossible to restrict Naharin’s questing spirit to discrete categories of discussion.
Heymann has produced a compelling portrait of a fascinating artist in thought and in action. Naharin seems to owe something to the modern ballet tradition while forging his own individualistic language of movement. This movie is as close as any observer, in print or elsewhere, has come to penetrating the Naharin enigma. What makes his choreography and style, which he calls Gaga, so special? For an answer, we watch Naharin rehearsing the Cedar Lake dancers individually and as a group. But what is the meaning behind those squiggling bodies and flailing arms? Naharin cajoles, threatens, flatters, pouts and smiles sardonically.
Fortunately, Heymann is a probing interviewer and Naharin a cagey respondent, articulate, philosophical and shamelessly narcissistic. The pair’s intellectual cat and mouse game leaves a buzz in the air long after the film has ended. From watching him rehearse these dancers, one gathers that Naharin has absorbed the lessons of the Actor’s Studio, demanding from his dancers that they transcend technique to reveal aspects of their own personalities and build on their own life experiences. Observing them repeat the same sequence several times over is a thrilling episode, partially because we are not sure what it is that Naharin is seeking to draw out of them, notably when he makes a performer lower her butt on the face of a supine colleague. No wonder, one of those dancers does tell us that Naharin “makes us feel vulnerable.”
There’s a paradox at work here. At the beginning, Naharin tell his interviewer that this is the first time he has allowed his dance to be filmed or his rehearsals documented. Yet, he plays shamelessly for the camera, and we are duly seduced. "I am not excited by my own choreography, which bores me," he tells his interlocutor, "but by the way people dance it." Heymann’s camera and the crisp editing capture that excitement. Meanwhile, we look on as a legend creates itself.
Brother Barak Heymann’s Dancing Alfonso (West Coast premiere) is about dance, not as art, but as social catalyst. This is a profile about Alfonso, an elderly émigré Spanish Jew, who, along with several of his contemporaries, takes up flamenco as a pastime in a Tel Aviv social center. In the course of the film, his wife dies and he pursues a new companion with bewildering results. At the end, Alfonso, rebuffed but resilient, is left with his art.
Nothing in Dancing Alfonso matches the opening sequence as the hero dresses for his lesson with all the meticulousness of a matador preparing to enter the corrida. Alfonso happens to be a delightful presence with a courtly bearing and unquenchable spirit. Watching all these golden-agers swirl around a room in the luxuriant skirts is a kick, and one only wishes there were more footage devoted to their dancing, and, maybe, a bit less about their personal lives. But Heymann is masterly in coaxing these folks to open up to the camera about the most intimate details. The message is clear and welcome: you’re never too old to embrace life in all its complexity.
The SFJFF will show this double bill at 2 p.m. July 27 at the Castro Theatre, San Francisco; at 11 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 3, at the Roda Theatre at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre; and at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 6, at the CineArts, Palo Alto. www.sfjff.org. Call 925.275.9490
