After more than 500 days of war, these dancers have been literally and figuratively climbing the walls
It is hard to avoid seeing our broken world in Batsheva Dance Company’s enigmatic ‘MOMO’
Adi Blumenreich with Batshava Dance Company in MOMO. Photo by Richard Termine
By Stav Ziv March 14, 2025
Watching Batsheva Dance Company perform Ohad Naharin’s MOMO is like seeing two worlds animated in the same space, one transposed over the other to create a singular work of art as beautiful as it is bizarre.
In one world, four men dressed only in gray cargo pants appear in a tight clump in an upstage corner while the house lights are still on. They embark on a slow walk across the back of the stage before the audience even realizes the show has begun. By the time they reach the other side and turn to walk directly toward the audience, their quiet motion has silenced the room.
These four move in sync. Sometimes they are literally connected, arms entwined, hand placed on the next guy’s shoulders, lifting one another, or pulling against each other in a delicate counterbalance. Even when they’re apart, they appear to be linked by an invisible force. They step together. They rotate together. They fall, rise, and climb together.
In the other world, seven dancers enter in turn until they populate the stage. Each one is dressed slightly differently, moves in their own peculiar way, and interprets the music with their own gestural lilt.
Both groups use the breadth, depth, and eventually the height of the stage. But it’s as though the four can’t see the seven and vice versa. There are near misses when one group’s movement pattern threatens to collide with the other’s. But for the better part of 70 minutes, the four and the seven inhabit the same space without ever appearing to notice each other.
To ascribe one intended meaning or narrative to MOMO is to misunderstand Naharin and his choreography. Formerly the artistic director of Batsheva from 1990 to 2018, Naharin elevated the company to its international stature, and is now its house choreographer. He is not one to provide neat plots or pat takeaways.
Did I see four boy men being sent off to fight in a war, trauma bonded into a tight-knit pack, because that’s what Naharin had in mind? Did I see two worlds’ worth of grief and despair because that’s what he wanted to convey?
Maybe that’s what I saw last week because we live in a post-Oct. 7 world. Or because the deafening protests that follow this renowned Israeli company wherever it goes — certainly now — made for a chaotic entry into the theater that put the months and years and decades of conflict front of mind. Sold-out crowds funneled and squeezed through two small doors as protesters banged instruments and chanted slogans: “They whitewash, we protest! Boycott, sanction, and divest!” and “Dance dance for liberation! Down down with occupation!” as well as frequent calls to “Free Palestine!”
The whole scene was corralled by police and patrons were greeted by two layers of security — peering into bags and scanning each ticket holder up and down with a wand. The anxiety in the air felt more reminiscent of stepping onto a bus in Tel Aviv in 2003 than walking into a theater in Brooklyn on a typical day in 2025.
It was probably 20 minutes past the scheduled start and we were barely in our seats, the room still buzzing with nervous energy, when the four appeared onstage. So it seems implausible for the events of the last year and a half not to color the experience. MOMO premiered in Tel Aviv in December 2022, though, nearly a year before Oct. 7. Not that that was the beginning of the wars or suffering.
But I can imagine reading MOMO — a title as enigmatic and open to interpretation as the dance itself — differently in another time and place. Or any viewer seeing their own story in it, like a meditation on incarceration and freedom, as my friend suggested after the opening night performance, which received a thunderous standing ovation. It’s about nothing and everything all at once.
If there is a new literalism plaguing today’s movies, as Namwali Serpell wrote in a New Yorker piece that happened to be published during Batsheva’s Brooklyn run, Naharin’s works are quintessential counterexamples. His anti-literal dances are challenging and confusing and deeply, profoundly weird — in the best possible way.
Naharin is a master of movement that makes you feel, of crafting an emotional arc that, in the case of MOMO, builds so slowly and unobtrusively you don’t quite realize it’s happening until it hits you in the face, the gut, the lungs, the tear ducts. You may not understand precisely what you feel or why you feel it, but you don’t have to.
These dancers more than rise to the occasion. They have both supreme freedom in and control of their bodies. There are no unintentional stutters in their steps. They extend and hold until the exact moment they’re ready to continue with perfectly smooth, articulated movements, just as easily as they toss their limbs or collapse on the ground or let a frenetic groove reverberate through their torso or hips. They’re saying precisely what they mean, and their vocabulary is immense.
At one point, a dancer places a barre on the diagonal at center stage. Another steps up to it like she might be getting ready for a ballet class. But then she breaks all the rules, hanging off it upside down or hooking a foot and an elbow and arching her body around it with the same control she has when upright. She looks like she’s floating serenely through space, unencumbered by gravity.
The rest of the seven join her at several more barres placed on diagonals around the stage. They execute a frenzy of steps, like a hallucination of a ballet class in an alternate reality, punctuated by long moments of stillness. One of the most stressful demands you could make of a dancer onstage is to walk. Just walk. Even more strenuous is to do nothing. Be still.
These superb artists do both on multiple occasions. Three, four, five seconds of standing and breathing. Minutes — what must have felt like hours to the performers — sitting on barely-there ledges jutting out of the wall at the back of the stage.
Throughout the piece, the seven periodically put one arm up high, palm facing out, like a child raising their hand in class or a repeated, unrelenting roll call. The gesture always anticipates a bass note, like a heartbeat. It becomes increasingly frequent, then insistent, until the dancers, scattered around the stage, can do nothing else but heed its call over and over and over, faster and faster and faster. If it’s a heartbeat, it’s racing. Arm up. Arm up. Arm up. Boom. Boom. Boom. Then all of a sudden it’s in their bodies. Every time it sounds, they jerk as though startled, jostled by a series of hits and aftershocks that might never subside. Until all at once they do, and the dancers are perfectly still again.
There are only a couple of moments when the membrane between the disparate worlds of the four and the seven seems permeable. Quite late in the piece, the four stand spread out along the front lip of the stage. The seven join, walking up to fill in the spaces between them. For the first and only time all night, 11 are moving together.
They stand in a line, rotating slowly in unison. A step out on one foot, a step closed with the other. Facing side and then back and then side and then front. Again and again and again. The revolutions become meditative, almost hypnotic. One by one, the seven stop to do their own movement or make a gesture or mouth something silent and incomprehensible, before returning to their rotations.
When it’s his turn, the dancer on one end faces out toward the audience, leans forward, cups his hands around his mouth, and yells what sounds like “Heyyyyy,” sending the syllable out into the cavernous theater. It echoed in my mind. Anyone out there? Can you hear me?! Hello???
They seem stuck. In roles and patterns and worlds they didn’t necessarily pick and can’t easily shed. Knowing that Naharin trusts his audiences enough not to be prescriptive or didactic, it would be a fool’s errand to assign an allegorical meaning to every movement, motif, and choreographic choice.
But it’s also impossible to imagine that the pain of Israelis and Palestinians hasn’t left its mark on these artists and their art. “All of us at Batsheva are currently in an abyss of sadness witnessing the ongoing conflict,” Naharin writes in a program note made available after the show. His message is a statement of faith in “the power of art and particularly dance in the face of cruelty, ignorance, and the abuse of power” — with a barely veiled dig at a government and army he hasn’t been shy to criticize — more than a comment on the topic of this particular work.
“The belief that inflicting ongoing, immense harm on others and fostering a constant sense of danger is a key to survival, or a sign of strength and power, is a false belief, as years upon years will testify,” he writes.
There’s an expression in Hebrew that translates literally to “climbing on the walls.” In MOMO, the dancers do just that. First it’s the four, revealing to the audience that the backdrop serves another purpose. Four torsos, slick with sweat, are illuminated like a memorial in the making, or a memorial come to life. At the end, the seven climb up and then traverse sideways across the width of the wall, disappearing around the back one by one as the men skip march offstage and the house goes black.
The expression means “going crazy,” feeling trapped in a space or situation with no way out and nothing to do except be driven up a wall in desperation. Experiencing MOMO after more than 500 days of war, in the wake of tens of thousands of deaths, with a ceasefire and hostage deal in limbo, and with protesters outside, it was hard not to conjure this expression and read something timely into it.
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