Wandering-Bat Dor Dance Co.
"Domy Reiter Soffer's "Wandering" was a world premiere for Bat Dor Dance Company, set to music by Vaughan Williams. It is elemental music frightening in its power and Reiter Soffer has matched it with elemental choreography. While the music suggested nature's indifference even hostility, the dancers conveyed human feelings and urges within the elements. The choreographer has divided the work into three movements and has dressed the dancers in strange and effective costumes. The male figures, therefore, were more easily regarded as symbols, except for their all-too-human reactions to their womenfolk. The ballet portrayed the quest for the unattainable and the sense of adventure, an evocation of nature's hostility to man's efforts and the tragedy of defeated hope in the face of nature's indifference and might. As with good music, good choreography can carry wealth of meaning and interpretations, and here movement was always strong, always open to varying views. Through it all, the dramatic flow was constant, conjuring up images, stressing emotions of love and loss, longing and lament. The lighting included panoramic views of towering snow and wisps of cold cloud against which five couples, embracing and parting, coming close and yet held apart, told their story. The choreographer introduced novelties of movement in his patterns. He drew on the immense vocabulary of modern dance, giving it his own idiom, but he did not rely on surprise for his effects. So the upwards anguish of stretching arms, the running, the clinging, the lifts and scattering were recognizable, though never imitative. Wandering is a weighty work, philosophically and emotionally charged.
Dora Sowdon- (The Jerusalem Post).
