Brian Schaefer

“Brazil is burning,” Beltrão said in a recent phone interview, “and we’re just performing a lot of abstract gestures.”

Politics and its relation to art were very much on Beltrão’s mind. A founder of the contemporary hip-hop troupe Grupo de Rua, his 2017 abstract work “Inoah” arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday. While the dance predates Brazil’s current crises, and Beltrão doesn’t view it as making an explicit political statement, he wondered if the work nevertheless reflects the country’s long-simmering tensions.

“As the piece stands today,” he said, “does it already present the social turmoil we live in?”

“Inoah” is named for the Rio-adjacent city where Beltrão, 40, found affordable rehearsal space and where he and Grupo de Rua spent months improvising choreography and sculpting it into a dance. While in residence there, the company worked in what Beltrão referred to as a large shed overlooking a distant mountain, a telephone pole and tangled wires — a landscape, he said, that seems “to ask us how our dance communicates with the world.”

That desire to be in dialogue with the world shows how far Grupo de Rua has evolved. What began as a standard hip-hop crew relying on spectacle has become a thoughtful challenger of hip-hop and street-dance conventions, as well as the gender expectations that accompany those forms.

Grupo de Rua’s journey began in the early 1990s in Niterói, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Beltrão was around 12 when his friends dragged him to a dance club where MC Hammer and Sir Mix-a-Lot were the rage. The dancing there inspired Beltrão and his friend Rodrigo Bernardi, who started taking, then teaching hip-hop classes; when they had founded Grupo de Rua, or Street Group, in 1996, Beltrão was only 16.

Grupo de Rua took a turn toward the unconventional when Beltrão attended university and was exposed to a broad spectrum of contemporary dance and artists like William Forsythe, who disassembled familiar forms and reassembled them in unfamiliar ways. Beltrão began to question his own work: If contemporary dance could be performed in silence, and wasn’t afraid to turn its back to the audience, why not hip-hop?

Beltrão began experimenting, and his group made inroads on the contemporary dance scene. “But suddenly we were kind of excluded from the hip-hop scene,” he said.

This version of Grupo de Rua made its New York debut in 2010 with “H3,” which introduced audiences to the company’s affecting brand of unadorned theatrics and virtuosity without swagger.

Those qualities remain in “Inoah.” David Binder, the artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy, said the dance was “incredibly intense one moment and incredibly joyous the next.” Binder was also impressed by Beltrão’s mix of styles and his vigorous deconstruction of masculinity. “Together, it’s really creating something singular.”

In a recent conversation Beltrão discussed the themes that have long informed his work, the effect of Bolsonaro’s administration on Brazilian culture, and whether politics should be more directly addressed in his future work. What follows are edited excerpts.

Q: What aspects of hip-hop dance are you examining in “Inoah”?

A: The movement [in hip-hop] is not inviting dancers to be together. It’s not a dance that asks the other person to be close. Actually, it looks like you’re doing the opposite, like the gestures are expelling, pushing away. In “Inoah,” in our improvisation, we’re always searching for a gesture [that connects] two people, a gesture that needs the other person. One work that influenced a lot of “Inoah” was “N.N.N.N.” by William Forsythe that I totally love and that I think is really one of the best works I have seen.

Q: What did you take from the Forsythe?

A: One of the things is the relationship to weight. When I met Forsythe, he did a gesture with me from “N.N.N.N.” I gave my arm to him, and then he threw my arm up, and he said: “You see? You’re totally blocked.” Then I relaxed, and he did it again.

This movement is very simple, but it was amazingly meaningful for what [Grupo de Rua] was doing because we are not very keen on this kind of giving weight or giving yourself to another body. People were not relying on each other. They were not trusting.

Q: But there is an intimacy, vulnerability and a kind of anti-machismo among your dancers that’s not typical of hip-hop.

A: One of the questions we are asking is: Is there any space for subtly, for softness — for being not tough and not hard the way hip-hop always is? Is there space to be another way?

We always feel that for the hip-hop audience, our work is not very easy because there is darkness, because there is silence, because there is movement that is not spectacular. But we don’t care because we know that if we wanted to, we could do something explosive all the time. But the way we impact how people receive our work is by being subtle, by being soft, by being slow.

Q: You have said you’re interested in how hip-hop interacts with the world. How do we see that in “Inoah”?

A: “Inoah” is a very abstract work, and it’s not easy to take concrete solutions or thoughts from it. It’s a dance piece full of gestures, and it’s totally not precise.

This is a question I’m asking all the time: Does what we do now already have all the signs of the turbulence that is happening around us? Or do we still have to refine what we are doing to be more engaged, to be more political? And at the same time, how can we do a dance that’s not influenced by our life? This is impossible.

Q: So how have politics in Brazil influenced your work?

A: We’re consciously discussing this inside the company because we would like the piece somehow to be more clear, so that we could touch these themes more precisely, instead of it being so abstract. But at the same time, I’m very afraid of being too clear or being very specific with an idea. It can diminish what we are doing. In university, we studied some letters of [the 18th-century choreographer Jean-Georges] Noverre, and one of the things that struck me was this phrase that he has, that if you want to say too many things with dance, just write a letter and don’t do dance.

Q: How has Grupo de Rua felt the effects of the new government?

A: If we were not having [much] support before, now it’s totally unthinkable to have any kind of financial support in Brazil. We don’t have one single performance in Brazil, not one single invitation [to perform] in our country. This is not normal. If we didn’t have this relationship with the international scene, I don’t know if the company would be alive. How would we have the power inside to continue? How do the artists who don’t have this relationship with the international scene, with all the resources, how are they surviving?

This article originally appeared in

'Brazil Is Burning, and We're Just Performing a Lot of Abstract Gestures'

This summer, as fires scorched portions of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, and the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, dismissed international outrage about it, the choreographer Bruno Beltrão wondered whether dance could make a meaningful contribution to his country.

The company, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, will perform Naharin’s latest work, “Venezuela,” which contains familiar ingredients like ferocious solos, kaleidoscopic ensemble scenes and moments of theatrical audaciousness. Here, it’s all hung on a bold conceptual structure: It’s performed twice. After 40 minutes, the choreography repeats, although with different music, different lighting and different dancers.

And something else will be different on this visit: Naharin is no longer in charge of Batsheva. Last September, after nearly 30 years as the company’s artistic director, he handed the reins to Gili Navot, a former dancer with the company, while he assumed the position of house choreographer. In that role, Naharin will continue to create new work, while Navot will be responsible for the daily decision-making and long-term direction of the company.

Is this the beginning of a new era or just an administrative reorganization? “Sometimes it feels like, wow, it’s a huge change,” Navot said in a phone interview from Tel Aviv. “And I feel that we’re different, very different, Ohad and I.” On the other hand, she said: “Ohad’s here. He’s creating. He’s very vital and continuing to invent himself every day. So, it feels like both at the same time.”

The transition brings to a close a thrilling chapter in Batsheva’s history, one that has helped fuel a dance boom in Israel and raised the country’s profile as a hub of contemporary dance.

The company, founded in 1964, gained fast acclaim for its vigorous interpretations of Martha Graham’s work, while a stream of visiting top-shelf international choreographers, including Jerome Robbins and Donald McKayle, provided it with a robust repertory. But after a decade, Graham pulled her dances and the company struggled to find its own artistic voice. By the late-1980s, Batsheva was having an identity crisis — and it was running through directors every couple years.

Then, in 1990, Naharin arrived. Or, rather, he returned. A former Batsheva dancer whom Graham had wooed to New York to be in her company, Naharin became the company’s artistic director. Now a choreographer, he began to build a body of physically fearless, darkly comic work, which gave Batsheva an electric, identifiable style all its own. Under Naharin’s direction, the company has ascended to the upper echelons of contemporary dance while a generation of former Batsheva dancers has helped populate an impressive independent choreographer scene in Israel, with some establishing themselves abroad.

Navot, 38, watched all of this unfold as an aspiring dancer in Haifa, Israel. She encountered the company as a high school student and remembered the strong impression Naharin’s work made on her, visually and emotionally. At 18, she joined Batsheva’s junior company, the Young Ensemble, before graduating to the main company, where she danced for seven years. In the decade since she departed — she left to start a family and get a degree in dance education — she has regularly restaged Naharin’s work and teaches his popular movement method, known as Gaga. She understands the legacy she’s inheriting.

“I feel the weight of it,” she said. And she was surprised by the offer. “I had to do a double-check with myself to feel that I’m good enough to do it,” she said, “or capable to do it. I had to give myself the legitimacy to give it a try.”

“She was always turned on by research and discovery,” Naharin said of Navot in an email, adding, “She knows how to turn conflict into dialogue.”

Naharin was always a reluctant administrator, preferring to create work and explore movement than to manage departments and chase donors. He stepped down as director once before, in 2003 (Yoshifumi Inao took over), but returned a year later when the company decided it still needed him at the wheel. Now, he said, the company is in a better place financially and artistically, and this transition feels more organic.

His happiness is palpable. “So much weight is off my shoulders,” Naharin said. “I feel calm knowing the work is being done as well, and probably even better, as when I was director.”

Navot’s appointment was announced more than a year before she took over. Beginning in January 2018, she started shadowing Naharin and participating in the running of the company, getting “cooked into it gradually,” as she put it. Even now, the two are in constant communication. “We meet or talk almost every day,” she said. “Sometimes I make the decisions based on the big picture, but he adds his input into the picture since it’s his work.”

In recent years, that work has felt both more expansive and more probing. In the case of “Venezuela,” Naharin is testing his maxim that music isn’t necessary for dance, and needn’t serve a determining role. “Venezuela’s” alternating scores — a Rage Against the Machine song in one half, Gregorian chants in the other — allowed him to explore “the groove that happens inside you,” he said.

Naharin remains coy about what the title of his abstract, episodic work refers to. One version has it that he spun a globe and planted his finger on Venezuela. Though that country’s political situation has been deteriorating for years, it was not front-page news when the work made its debut in Tel Aviv in 2016. The company says that “Venezuela” is in no way commenting on the real Venezuela.

For almost 30 years, American audiences have known Batsheva almost exclusively through Naharin’s work. With Naharin as house choreographer, that won’t change anytime soon but Navot is open to the possibility. “If we have a meaningful process here,” she said, referring to a guest choreographer, “I’d love it to go on tour as well.”

In the meantime, Navot is settling into her role overseeing both the main and junior companies. For his part, Naharin said he is “trying to make what I have to do and what I want to do as similar as possible.” This includes family duties (he has a young daughter), sharing Gaga technique and creating new works.

Both are also focused on the company’s new home, a multi-arts campus that Batsheva is building in partnership with the Tel Aviv municipality, designed by renowned British architect David Adjaye. The site, once the city’s old bus station, is in the low-income neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan, home to many refugees and foreign workers. Some residents have voiced concern that the project will gentrify the area. Batsheva is taking that into account, said Dina Aldor, the company’s executive director.

“That’s why we chose to work with David Adjaye, because he does projects which are social in nature,” Aldor said. “We’re developing with the city various ways in which to include the community, both in the planning and in the usage of the place afterward.” The $52 million project is on track to break ground next year and be completed in 2022.

The campus, anchored by Batsheva, will host shows and exhibitions across the spectrum of the visual and performing arts. In creating a space for artists, Batsheva is not just building a new home, but also stepping up to become a steward of Tel Aviv cultural life.

That’s quite a portfolio for Navot, who only a decade ago was just another member of the company. But being a Batsheva dancer has always been about exploring limits, and, she said, “I enjoy putting myself outside my comfort zone.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="1e6d8ce2-31c5-414b-b155-14b9c6d1b24e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/arts/dance/batsheva-ohad-naharin-gili-navot.html">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — When the Batsheva Dance Company takes the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week, it will look very much like the company that audiences have come to love: a bit mysterious, a bit cheeky — qualities associated with its longtime director and choreographer Ohad Naharin.

Will it be the same old song and dance?

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Brian Schaefer

Articles written by the author

'Brazil Is Burning, and We're Just Performing a Lot of Abstract Gestures'

Will it be the same old song and dance?