© Eyal Landesman Inbal Pinto 'Shaker' reviews recent Inbal Pinto reviews more Renee Renouf reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

This 2006 production with the company’s superb, expressive dancers, was created by the artistic directors, who also designed set, costumes, their music assembled to a sound score which included Japanese pop music, Swedish music, folk and composed, Chopin, Henry Purcell, Steve Reich and Arvo Part. The mixture proved evocative, haunting, eerie, occasionally intentionally banal with a resulting sporadic monotony. Uri Morag’s lighting design lent mystery and elegiac coherence to this stream of consciousness illuminating much of Israel’s collective unconscious.

Shaker begins and terminates with a woman wafting a ribbon, marking swirling spirals spinning from the end of a stick. The dancer for both sequences was different; in the beginning she became bound in the ribbon and is leaned, lifted, ultimately shoved into an upstage stage right, roofed smallish box of three, semi-obscured, allowing figures to merge with the shadows. The doors swung as she was shoved through; I immediately registered “the ovens of the Holocaust,” particularly because the man responsible for the action was dressed in a suit white with black stripes.

A small woman dressed in black tunic and tights emerged from the far left box; her small frame curved, crouched, legs extended, her torso bent from side to side at various times, a telling exposition of the mythic trickster figure. One became aware the dancers were moving across a white sandy surface, at times struck like a butterfly stroke.

Out of the upper right box the man in the striped suit fished another tall woman in a pale green gown bearing a cup and tea pot. She bore them on a tray which she rested on the vertically raised legs and feet of a young woman in black, who had just been lifted, dragged, jack-knifed,sagging, reaching, leaning, carried aloft by men whose faces were masked by fabric of the same hue as skin-tight tunics and tights. That chosen woman had emerged from an amorphous black hued ensemble undulating down stage left like seaweed, floating strands in the sea of memory snatches, the lighting suggesting twilight.

With her hair swept Gibson Girl fashion, the woman in green poured tea with due decorum; a pas de deux with prop ensues with tea poured in unlikely positions, gradually morphing into Mme Propriety pouring the tea at will into an obedient male mouth, body erect or prone on the floor. Marvelously conceived, executed with exact timing, it provided Shaker’s early high. The woman picked up the tray, placed teapot and cup on top, and wiggled through the swinging doors opening for her.

Other masked figures in tights, grey and black used the middle box for entrances and exits; at the end an orange colored figure joined the ensemble to the strains of the Purcell music indelibly associated with Jose Limon’s Moor’s Pavane. Theirs was an admirable unity, the execution clearly indicating extensive, varied training. The man in stripes came on from stage left, face obscured by strands of curling string, marching in halting fashion from left to right mid-stage. As he traversed the stage stiff legged, the woman in green, emerging from seeming nowhere, began to manipulate the ribbon at the end of a stick, the faceless figures prone on the floor. I found myself remembering Edna Saint-Vincent Millay’s poem Grass as the curtain fell.

The audience yelled its approval.

C.G. Jung posited a series of collective unconscious dominant in Western religions; the Protestant unconscious being Hebrew, the Catholic being pagan, while the Hebrew is prone to Mary-latri, i.e. the mother rules from underneath. Shaker reinforced the Jungian proposition.