All Shook Up

Shaker

by Deni Kasrel

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The program for Shaker contains an entire page of notes providing details regarding its inspiration ("the glass globes that fill with snowflakes when shaken"), comments on the work's character ("there's both a satirically nightmarish quality as well as a helping of Dadaist absurdity"), plus remarks about how the show's creators, Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak, belong to a new generation of innovative Israeli choreographers. And while there is no mention of Israel's influence on the piece, one can certainly draw corollaries between true life in that country and the imagined world, however abstract, as seen in Shaker.

Israel is a place where daily routines occur in normal fashion, yet acts of terrorism and threats of war are an ongoing reality. Shaker initially portrays a scene that appears quaint and magical, but beneath the surface, menace and disquiet abound.

Props include three miniature houses with doors, which performers crawl into, pop out of and climb atop. The floor is covered with white flakes that swirl around the dancers. Sometimes the swooshing resembles little waves gliding upon the shoreline; other times the dust-up is rougher and more substantial, to appear as though the ground is billowing. The overall effect is one of constant unsettled motion.

Meanwhile the cast — an old man in a striped suit, a woman in a nightgown, a white-faced mime, women in slinky black cocktail dresses and faceless acrobats in colored bodysuits — perform in segments that range from straightforward theater to pure movement. The dance work is vigorous, gymnastic and supremely fluid. Pinto and Pollak have a real knack for weaving bodies into and then quickly out of intricate entanglements. Dancers dive, slide, jump, chase, drag, catch and torment one another — or even themselves. A scene of a woman propelling herself around by pulling on her own hair, later followed by a man manipulating a pair of women by tugging on their tresses, are disturbing episodes that play upon notions of control, or lack thereof.

Scenarios change quickly, and while certain characters recur, there is no storyline. Shaker is rightly described as Dadaist, yet entwined within the absurdity is stark humanism. You may not know what the heck it's all supposed to mean, but Shaker stirs up a host of deep-seated emotions.

(deni.kasrel@citypaper.net)

Inbal Pinto Dance Co. | Oct. 28, Annenberg Center