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Abstract and Evocative, MOMO Plays to an Eager and Packed Audience at Brooklyn’s BAM
Momo dance production is a collaboration developed in 2022 by Ohad Naharin, founder of the breakthrough Gaga movement and the ever-excellent Batsheva Dance Company, with innovator Ariel Cohen, a former company member, and excellent choreographer. MO means “Also” in Japanese. According to Ori J. Lenkinski in a 2022 article in the Jerusalem Post. MOMO is also an acronym for Magic of Missing Out. Just to be clear, this piece was not devised or revised after the infamous October 7th massacre in Israel and the subsequent war and decimation of Gaza, as some reviewers have liberally poured on their imagined notions about what they saw on stage. It is remarkable how that can happen and dilute the original intent. However, MOMO exemplifies chaos according to Ohad Naharin, and I guess that interpretation and the current political moment everywhere is reflected in the concept colliding into presumption. BAM was heavily policed for the production, and with good reason; though I did not see any protests, I later read that there had been a peaceful Pro-Palestine demonstration. Not alien to political views, Ohad Naharin and Batsheva certainly have theirs, but that has little to do with the dancers or this production. They are compassionate, peaceful artists and free thinkers. It is puzzling why anyone would protest them. That’s like protesting all Americans simply because of our current President’s actions toward all countries, even his own.
This production is more about humanity moving through time and space. MOMO is an abstract work, not the Sleeping Beauty Ballet by Balanchine. As the audience, we each get to interpret what we see, even seeing the unintended. One must be prepared to accept the commotion of several different worlds colliding. Everyone appears to be separate, off in their existence. That is the condition of the work, being sent into an improvisational world of exploding realities, worlds within worlds, and, thus, people in their private worlds, connecting now and then and passing through each other's existence.
While a group of four men moves in syncopation, they hardly acknowledge each other until suddenly they jut their faces forward and seemingly touch each other like a carousel of human aspects playing round robin. Yet they are an abstraction of a…
