Batsheva Dance Company / Ohad Naharin

With Venezuela, the Batsheva Dance Company and Ohad Naharin return to Chaillot’s stage for a genuine dance-fest. A company at the apex of their powers.

Venezuela explores context and interpretation. Based on duplication, it presents two executions of the same choreography. In each iteration, the cast, music, and lighting change, imbuing the same movements with different energies that challenge the audience to carry out a different reading. In a study of possibilities, of excess, Naharin demonstrates how diverse realms can be embodied in the same gesture, if we entrusted it to a different body. The piece is laced with cultural and political references: a Gregorian choir sings a hymn of deep sorrow, the dancers spit raunchy hip-hop bars by the late rapper Notorious B.I.G. at the audience, and white flags-cum-shrouds are drenched in paint and political tones. Venezuela explores reality and movement that overflow but also collapse under the downpour of meanings, running towards emptiness time after time, in vain. Repetitive and full of contradictions, they underscore the violence alongside beauty, the intensity in the absence of movement, and the elegance of chaotic movement.