Last Work

Batsheva Dance Company's Last Work balances endings and beginnings in its exploration of motion and emotion. Form and organisation replace time as a symbolic entity. Infancy cedes to infinitude and the individual to its double, mirror, or group.

The piece begins with a man in blue clothes running on a treadmill, facing our left at the back of the stage. He'll remain that way for the next hour and ten minutes. This visual metronome offsets the company's marionette-style mixed solos in the first section: all flexibility, circles, collapses, and trailing limbs.

Ohad Naharin's choreography focuses on the human body's facility. Limber isolations are essential to his language: a foot takes on its own life and hip-thrusting embarks on a narrative. His finesse reveals itself in his use of these myriad surprising threads to express complex emotional states. We witness expression's vivid construction.

A love story appears to play out in the second movement, starting by chance with our romantic subjects thrown from the troupe's clustered vibrations. It's a relief to find dribs of chaos seep into the almost scientific, though dextrous, biological display. Here, the individual meets resistance and collaboration.

Following an extended down-beat interlude in which emotions seem to eek out stiltingly to the ambient soundtrack, Naharin drives his piece to carnivalesque climax. Hard tech music and a flowing use of space leads to Last Work's powerful final symbol: each performer, including the runner (now holding a white flag), is package-taped into a network suggesting we're all, each part of us, connected.