http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/arts/dance/batsheva-dance-company-in-sadeh21-at-bam.html 2014-11-14 01:15:57 Batsheva Dance Company in ‘Sadeh21’ at BAM With “Sadeh21,” the Batsheva Dance Company brings Ohad Naharin’s often-imitated choreography to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. === Batsheva Dance Company The 75-minute work begins and ends with solos, a structural device that establishes and re-establishes the amazingness of every single dancer. Part of the credit must go to Gaga, Mr. Naharin’s “listen to the body” training method, yet not many Gaga-trained dancers go this far. Absolutely in control and yet seemingly knocked about by explosive external forces, they stretch and twist in every direction, especially backward. For them to bend their heads back nearly to the floor in an instant and stay there for an eternity appears to be as easy as pie. Which is to say they look freakish, peculiar, sometimes stunted or misshapen. It is this aspect of Mr. Naharin’s aesthetic that many viewers find mannered, and it can make me uncomfortable, too. All that back bending can feel like a tic, even an abdication of intelligence. And the oddness combines in odd ways with Mr. Naharin’s humor. There’s slapstick — kicks to the rear, plain old slapping — but much of the absurdity is self-reflexive. “Sadeh” means “field,” as in “field of study.” Projected titles announce segments — “Sadeh1,” “Sadeh2”— but Mr. Naharin knows we are counting to 21, and as the work starts to grow long, he gets a laugh by bunching numbers together. At one point, a dancer speaks strings of numbers, yet these patterns aren’t any more serious than the high-pitched, giggle-inducing gibberish of another. The undercutting humor is an aspect of Mr. Naharin’s layering. As four or five dancers arrange themselves into handsome tableaus, another circumambulates with a weird little waddle. While women in a line do a bizarre boogie, men in dresses leap about behind them. As dancer after dancer joins hands in a communal, folk-dance circle, two outliers in the foreground engage in what looks to be a duet for frogs. Where the strangeness isn’t part of the beauty, it is the price that Mr. Naharin makes us pay. For much of “Sadeh21” is very beautiful. In one section, the stage fills with activity that seems unrelated but is all flowing slowly in the same direction. In another, dancers in a diagonal line seem organized by pairs, but as they shift and turn, the groupings keep changing. The unsettling indeterminacy of that image is among the rewards of Mr. Naharin’s paradoxes. The strangest paradox is how his choreography, drawn from and customized for particular performers, can make them all look the same, uniformly alien. That effect isn’t absent from “Sadeh21,” but through and despite Mr. Naharin’s direction, his dancers earn admiration. They may look weird, but, especially at the end, they also look like heroes.