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Naharin and Laurie’s worlds aren’t that different. Really. Both individuals are in the mid fifties. Both are products of a pop and war culture; and the 110-minute dance, which Naharin choreographed and Laurie commissioned, is an eye-popping brew of both, thanks to stealth grace of 12 Cedar Lake dancers. There is the lip-synching of dancer Ebony Williams, decked in black-boa feathers, red-hot stilts, a thong and corset. Williams’s facial chutzpah takes us straight to the capitol of pop culture, Las Vegas, where everything is blaringly overdone. Then there is the quintet for five men, who after slathering clay war paint on their faces and bare chests, ferociously torpedo through the air, becoming a squadron of martial might.

In fact Naharin’s Decadance is a kind of Wal-Mart of his experience as the artistic director's of Batsheva Dance Company. Rather than strolling through aisles of consumer products, in Decadance, we peer into 16 excerpted pieces, covering Naharin’s prodigious 22-year choreographic career. The effect is of abundance. It’s also at times overwhelming, like shopping at a mega store. And as with all of Naharin’s dances, it’s not just about the movement—frenzied, kinetic, bone crashing and luscious—it’s about politics where the human players don’t play nice. They thrash each other’s sculls against the black floor, one dancer farts on her partner’s face (thanks to a sound effect), and in one section all of them are shot through the heart in a domino effect, eerily resembling a collapsing house of cards. Occasionally, and thankfully, the dance sections approach mellow joyousness, as when individual audience members are plucked from their seats to slow dance with a Cedar Lake dancer. Despite the excessive harshness of most of the material, none of Narharin’s dances are ever ugly. They are beautiful, like gunmetal military machinery.
 

In the final moments of Decadance, the theme song of the 22-year hit television show Hawaii Five-O pronounces America’s enduring popular influence (much like Naharin’s 22-year successful career). The cast, outfitted in every man and woman modern attire (suits for men, pleated skirts and tops for the women) run in a circle like human sheep, heading for the slaughter of a conformist, ultra-conventional life. Not an individual strays from the pack. Naharin’s devotion to lacerating the normative life is an oft-used and effective device. When a quintet of women acquire movement like a person using a rosary bead for prayer, one shape forming after another, the voice over of a female voice repeats: “ignore everything” and “make it babe” (i.e. make babies, a house, a car). This mantra becomes a starkly succinct feminist treaty. Life shouldn’t be like a shopping bonanza, underlines Naharin, where the aim is to get as much as possible.

To the contrary, life in Naharin’s works strips people bare. In the final section, the dancers dress down to their skivvies. In gray men’s briefs and tank tops, six muscular male dancers line up at the edge of the stage like soldiers at attention. They gesture in unison. Soon after, the women join, equally clad, and the men bark in gut-delivered shouts to the accompaniment of Techno music. It’s all part of the cultural gestalt: Military and pop culture peeled back to reveal violence and sex, ballet-trained dancers slamming their bodies into the floor like Marines and extending their legs like Willis, a dance company funded by mega store Wal-Mart, which is interested in avant-garde art, and a choreographer shaped by the politics of Israel’s occupying and occupied history.

It all congeals marvelously in Decadance. I could take it in again, but for one caveat. I left the theater hoping for something sweet to digest. Call me decadent; I wanted a little more of the sublime. I guess I’m just another capitalist escapist. Naharin is definitely not.