Inbal Pinto Dance Company in Inbal Pinto’s and Avshalom Pollak’s Shaker. Photo by Eyal Landesman.
Something is stirring in the dance studios of Israel. The Inbal Pinto Dance Company, which introduced its 2006 Shaker to San Francisco over the weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Novellus Theater, seems to be partaking of a significant attempt to forge a national movement style. True, there was nothing here to compare with the seismic waves generated a few years ago in the same venue by Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company (like Inbal, presented here by San Francisco Performances), but it added up a solid hour of intermittently imaginative dance theater. The work will be repeated Tuesday at the Mondavi Arts Center, University of California, Davis.
It’s hard to say whose influences Pinto and Pollak have most thoroughly absorbed. One detects the German expressionist Pina Bausch in the women’s cocktail dresses, the generous creation of a transformative stage environment, the anthology score and the occasional flashes of mordant humor, the proposing of a concept and the attempt to flesh it out. Pinto’s company bowed here a couple of years ago with an early piece, Oyster, which I did not see but caught in fragments on DVD. The idea behind Shaker, which seems a more integrated project, has nothing to do with the American religious sect of that name; rather, Pinto and Pollak are proposing to create the environment of the snow globe, from outside looking in. Shake it up and almost anything can happen. Unfortunately, this is not sufficient pretext for sustaining an extended piece of dance theater.
Not unless you consider the snow globe a metaphor for an enclosed world, which can undergo tumult, but essentially returns to the status quo. Shaker, which I saw at the family matinee Saturday (Oct. 11) starts and finishes well. Pinto and Pollak (who, apparently, share all creative duties) and their 13 dancers relish choice sight gags and they embrace theatrical artifice, while savoring the mechanics behind the illusion. At the start, Zvi Fishzon, in a pinstripe suit, churns up a small wind machine and disentangles a woman from a streamer encircling her torso. At the end, she is bound up again and the pinstripe suit, grown in size and without a head peeping out, traverses the space. A flaky white substance deputizes for snow and erupts in flurries whenever the dancers walk or crawl or roll through it, which is frequently.
Inbal Pinto Dance Company in Inbal Pinto’s and Avshalom Pollak’s Shaker.
Meanwhile upstage, three immense dog houses move across the stage and variously suck up and disgorge dancers. Some of the visual gags, like a tea-pouring routine, strike one as superior, exceptionally adroit physical comedy bordering on dada. But then, the tone gradually turns ominous, and we find ourselves plunged into “let’s make a statement” territory. Backs arch, sweeping extensions proliferate, the crawls multiply exponentially, and much of this feels like filler between the more successful imagistic episodes. What I presume was intended to induce a sensation of disorientation simply looks fussy. In the second part, a dancer in head-to-foot bodystocking tussles with a woman. Then another emerges in chic contrasting color sheath. Before the end of the piece, virtually the entire company slips from a doghouse in the same guise. Is there no more theatrically imaginative manner in which to suggest creeping anonymity?
Questions of taste rupture whatever spell Shaker was hoping to cast. The work uses a recorded score that draws on several musical sources. They include British minimalist Gavin Bryars, Chopin, Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt, whose Für Alina was treated so much more compellingly by Christopher Wheeldon in his After the Rain. None of this gives offense. That comes with an episode devoted to a masked figure dragging two women around the stage by their ponytails. The music is nothing less than Dido’s sublime lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and this may have been the most gratuitously brutish moment witnessed during a dance concert this year. Whatever did Purcell do to Pinto and Pollak that they should treat him thus?
The dancers, who hail both from Israel and Europe, are a sinewy lot, who could probably reveal more individual personalities, if afforded the opportunities. At least, Shaker wrestles with a few ideas. In context of today’s modern dance world, that alone makes the piece something of a welcome oddity. As for San Francisco Performances, enough of this discount dada; please bring back Batsheva.
Inbal Pinto Dance Company performs Shaker at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, at the Mondavi Center, Davis, CA www.mondaviarts.com
