Since its recent windfall and reinvention, the Gibney Company has been busy creating and showcasing mixed posters of new work. A critical view of these efforts is that the choreography has not served the talent and skill of the young, well-trained dancers. But in Gibney’s current program at New York Live Arts, the problem is rather the other way around.
There is only one work on the bill, an older work, ‘Yag’, which the highly influential choreographer Ohad Naharin created in 1996 for Batsheva Dance Company. While not exactly a staple of the repertoire, this 50-minute piece isn’t obscure either. LA Dance Project toured a version of it a few years ago, and Naharin turned it into an excellent movie herself in 2020.
It’s classic Naharin: bursts of uninhibited movement and eccentric gestures framed by various theatrical gambits. In the most recurring motif, one dancer after another tells us her name and the names of her relatives, some of whom are dead, and then remembers that her family once loved to dance very, very much.
Gibney calls his version “Yag 2022”, but the major update seems to be the standard version of using people’s real names in the cast. Since the dancers also say they are each other’s sisters, brothers, wives, husbands or grandfathers, this use of real names creates an interesting metafificial tension, suggesting how a dance company is and isn’t like a family. At the beginning and at the end, the dancers pose as if for a family photo.
The Gibney dancers — at least the cast of Tuesday’s opening night, which alternates with another — deliver these monologues flat out. Not anti-naturalistic, but stilted, boring. And this flatness extends through most of the performance. The specific, characterful choreography is all there, skillfully executed. But the effect is of an empty shell.
This shortcoming is an illuminating demonstration of how much stage presence matters in Naharin’s work. Batsheva dancers always have a presence: a confident directness that borders on arrogance. When they stand and stare at the audience or place fortune cookies in a row on the floor and slowly crush them in a procession – both happen in “Yag” – their manner challenges you not to find this activity enthralling, as they also communicate that if you don’t, it’s your loss.
The Gibney dancers lack this quality. Whenever the work gets moving, they jump at the chance to practice their abilities and swing their lithe bodies in multiple directions. The performers (Miriam Gittens in particular) find some of the beauty in quieter moments, such as a ballet section on Elizabethan lute. And sometimes they refer to the love of dancing in a pelvic-rocking bit or a little side step, combined with a techno track, that could be a TikTok move.
But even in their solos there isn’t much character. Jie-Hung Connie Shiau accesses some of the orneriness of her role as she pushes Jesse Obremski around, puts on and puts on all of his clothes (down to his glasses), then stands on a door that is on top his naked body is standing. But that doesn’t make up for the general blandness. And without the exciting charisma, “Yag” essentially falls apart and becomes just a grab bag of gimmicks, unconvincingly eccentric.
Before the lights go down, the dancers pose for their second family photo, this time with Obremski’s character in the buff. The idea is that something has been exposed, and it has. But in this version not what Naharin meant.
Gibney Company
Through Saturday at New York Live Arts; newyorklivearts.org.