Gauthier Dance / / Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart
The Joyce Theater
New York, New York
March 11, 2025
Point, ABC, Swan Cake, Minus 16
Jerry Hochman
For its first engagement at the Joyce Theater in eight years, Gauthier Dance, a highly-regarded contemporary dance company based in Stuttgart, Germany, presented an evening of four dances that was one of the more refreshing programs I’ve seen at the Joyce in a long time. Overall, the selection of dances was well-balanced, as well as intelligent and entertaining. I’m not familiar with the company, but at least based on this program and commentary about the company that I’ve reviewed post-performance, Gauthier Dance may be an antidote to the abundance of dances filled with negativity, nihilism, and/ or angst, that seem to cross the Atlantic on a regular basis. Gauthier Dance makes you smile.
Gauthier Dance in Hofesh Shechter’s “Swan Cake”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
The program here included three New York premieres – Point, ABC, and Swan Cake, choreographed respectively by Sharon Eyal, Eric Gauthier (the company’s Artistic Director), and Hofesh Shechter, and a fourth piece, Minus 16, by Ohad Naharin. I attended the opening night program in the week-long run.
Before forming his own company, Gauthier danced as an apprentice with the National Ballet of Canada, but when former Stuttgart Ballet principal Reid Anderson left NBC to become artistic director at the Stuttgart, Gauthier followed him there, eventually becoming a highly-regarded soloist.
Gauthier Dance
in Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
Gauthier Dance is a relative newcomer in the dance world, having been established in 2007. But thanks to what the program describes as his networking skills, Gauthier has collaborated with some of the brightest lights in the contemporary ballet world, and his company has frequently been invited to tour internationally; and it arrived here with a sterling reputation, which this program will only enhance.
Based on his introductory remarks to the Joyce audience, it’s easy to see why Gauthier Dance has been so successful so quickly. Born in Montreal, Canada, Gauthier is comfortable both with English and with addressing audiences – indeed, he comes across as a friendly neighbor rather than a highfalutin and/or high-minded artistic director.
Although all the dances on this program were high-caliber efforts, one dance – Point, the one that opened the evening – was more difficult to appreciate than the others, possibly because it attempted to visualize multiple themes.
Eyal, co-founder of her company L-E-V (which appeared at the Joyce several years ago), here demonstrates, according to the program note, “the hypnotic power of the synchronous, the incredible dynamics of an organism made of human-machine-bodies. Minimal changes or serial variations disrupt the order of [the] groups, individuals break free from the repetitive patterns of an apparently post-human society.”
Gauthier Dance in Sharon Eyal’s “Point”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
That’s a mouthful, as difficult to comprehend as I suppose it’s difficult to choreograph. It also seems contradictory, which would account for contradictory imagery, as I saw it, in the dance.
But there’s another wrinkle that complicates things still further. In his opening remarks to the audience, Gauthier explained that Point was Eyal’s contribution to a set of dances relating to the seven deadly sins. Eyal’s assignment was to create a dance that illustrates “jealousy.”
It’s difficult enough to create a dance (or evaluate one) when one’s own description is, or appears to be, contradictory. But to add another essential ingredient to it makes the result even less likely to be satisfying.
Contrary to Eyal’s program summary, I saw the human-machine bodies in Point as not being able to break free of repetitive patterns or look particularly machine-like. Rather, changes may briefly disrupt the order of things, like hiccups, but that order continues (or change is adopted by the group, and becomes the new order of things). As for jealousy – there may have been a fleeting moment when the order of things is interrupted that might be seen by some as inter-machine jealousy, but it wasn’t a continuing motif or even a recurring theme, and any sense of jealousy was quickly overwhelmed by repetitive patterns and synchronous execution by the ensemble of highly capable dancers (Bruna Andrade, Karlijn Dedroog, and Izabela Szylinska).
Gauthier Dance in Sharon Eyal’s “Point”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
The movement quality here is consistent with the admittedly few pieces by Eyal that I’ve seen: gelatinous minimalism and at times curious positioning, coupled with a general sense of angularity. Here the angularity is subsumed within the overall robotic theme, but it seemed to be suppressed rather than eliminated. The dancers in Point often maintain exaggerated positions (like crouching in deep, broad, second position), but for no apparent reason beyond establishing some human/machine characteristic that’s evident one moment and disappears the next.
Given the topic(s), I would have suspected something disturbing in the dance, but I saw none of that (unless one finds characters with no character, by itself, to be disturbing). There is an element of tension to the piece (as choreographed, and in Anne Muller’s score), but that sense of tension doesn’t go anywhere.
All this doesn’t mean that the dance is uninteresting. On the contrary, there are moments when machine-like choices made by the inhabitants of a “post-human” world are evident, exacerbated by considerable slow-motion movement, and emphasized by continuing movement on demi-point (not point – the dancers don’t wear pointe shoes), often in long strands of synchronized bourrees. But again, this doesn’t support a visualization of efforts to break free, or jealousy – it comes across as just normal human-machine behavior.
And Point doesn’t lack power. The absence of movement and appearance variety is striking, and the ensemble’s demonstration of synchronicity; when appropriate (which was most of the time), is dominant – although it didn’t appear in the least hypnotic. In any event, Point is a much better piece when considered by the visualized imagery it provides in the abstract, rather than being tethered to a suggested intent or to satisfy some thematic requirement.
Shori Yamamoto in Eric Gauthier’s “ABC”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
Much easier to follow was Gauthier’s ABC, which, as Gauthier explained, visually translates dance vocabulary, A through Z (though not quite all the way through), into corresponding movement by an on-stage dancer. However, ABC is far more interesting, and far (very far) more fun, than being a visual dance manual.
The alphabetical letters to be visualized here encompass more than one word, at times being steps or positions, and also at times being narrative attitudes, mime, or character characteristics (or none of the above), each provided verbally by some unknown pre-recorded off-stage narrator (probably Gauthier). These words often follow one another without any intervening space, so one “letter” description follows into another (and often another…) without a break. For example, the letter “A” includes the anticipated “arabesque” and “attitude,” but also includes “angular,” “available,” and “avant-garde”; “B” includes “Black Swan,” “Bournonville,” and “break dance”; J includes “jazz” as well as “jete”; K includes “knee” and “kabuki” – you get the idea. It’s very clever.
But what makes the piece work as well as it does is the extraordinary solo performance by Shori Yamamoto, whose putty face and rubber body assumes multiple expressions and positions seemingly at the same time. His renderings of what the disembodied narrator is commanding him to demonstrate (most only lasting a second or two before segueing into the next example or letter) – not just positioning, but dancing/acting as certain characters and changing expression and position at warp speed – is uncanny. A “tour de force” doesn’t begin to describe Yamamoto’s performance.
Gauthier Dance
in Hofesh Shechter’s “Swan Cake”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
Hofesh Shechter, who is one of the company’s Resident Choreographers, created a piece for a project that required certain choreographers to construct their renditions of Swan Lake. Shechter’s contribution is Swan Cake.
My only prior exposure to Shechter’s choreography was Cave, a piece that he choreographed in collaboration with Daniil Simkin for Martha Graham Dance Company (and which is reprised, again, in that company’s upcoming Joyce season). There are aspects of that piece that I appreciated, but overall I considered it too much of the same thing – until its curious ending. While I tired quickly of continuing to watch bodies staring up at a hole while shaking seemingly uncontrollably, it certainly illustrated Shechter’s skill, as Gauthier emphasized in his introduction, in moving masses of bodies.
Swan Cake is another example of Shechter’s facility with mass movement, but it’s a different kind of mass movement. Schechter doesn’t have the dancers all move like swans, although I suspect that, if asked, Shechter would say that they are supposed to be swans but swans that move and gather differently.
Gauthier Dance in Hofesh Shechter’s “Swan Cake”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
The thrust of the piece is the separation of the mass of swan surrogates into shifting sub-groups; that is, the mechanics of swan-massing. I must admit that watching the subdivisions and recalibrations Shechter makes among the dance’s nine “swans” (each in a different, seemingly subject matter irrelevant, costume) is very skillfully accomplished. The “swans” only come together in a recognizable triangular “swan mass” at the dance’s end – accompanied by hints of phrases from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and recognizable swan arms.
Although it may sound somewhat unimpressive, Swan Cake is thrilling to watch evolve, and has provided me, and I suspect others, with a different conception of Shechter’s unique choreographic facility.
Gauthier Dance in Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
Lastly, the evening featured Naharin’s Minus 16.
In those same opening remarks that I mentioned earlier, Gauthier recognized that Minus 16 is a collection of dances, or excerpts of dances, that Naharin has provided to several companies, each one being different from the others. One of the companies that Gauthier identified was Hubbard Street Dance, which, a few years ago, brought its version of the Naharin agglomeration to the Joyce under the title: Decadance / Chicago.
In Gauthier Dance’s presentation, Minus 16 seems to be a more limited aggregation of bits and pieces of Naharin creations than I’ve seen in other presentations. But that means little here – the main components are there, and, essentially, that’s all one needs to see.
Gauthier Dance in Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
The first major component is Naharin’s dance known around the world as the “Chair Dance.” There are many dances that utilize a chair as a significant component, but there’s only one instantly-recognizable “Chair Dance.”
Formally titled Echad mi Yodeah after the Jewish Passover song that Naharin uses as its score (which, translated, means “Who Knows One”), the dance is a cumulative dance, as the song is a cumulative song – that is, each repetition of the basic words/ movement adds an additional word/ movement.
Gauthier Dance in Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
The dance itself is far more significant than just being a gimmicky dance with chairs. It’s a compendium of ritual and passion and anger and loss. Whether it’s directed at Israeli society, life as an Israeli soldier (or civilian), a condemnation of orthodoxy (religious or otherwise) in Israel and beyond, a representation of or reaction to the Holocaust, or simply an exercise that examines the visual and aural impact of increasing incremental phrasing in a choreographic context … it’s unforgettable. I’ve seen Echod Mi Yodeah before – and its brilliance increases with each performance I see. This Gauthier Dance performance was no exception, and the sixteen participating dancers (the entire company) earned the thundering applause they received.
The other seemingly “standard” component of this combined dance is one in which the cast enters the orchestra seating area and selects members of the audience to partner with each of them on stage. It’s one that many audience-members anticipate and look forward to, and, for those selected as well as those watching, it’s built-in fun as well as an indelible memory.
Gauthier Dance in Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16”
Photo by Jeanette Bak
There was one more “dance,” one not identified as such, that should be mentioned. During the intermission prior to Minus 16, a sole member of the company, whose identity was not indicated in the program or, to my knowledge, elsewhere, performed something(s) that required considerable talent and abundant energy, all while the audience was moving around, entering or leaving the theater, standing or sitting. He did his thing without fanfare or expectation – or credit, but it deserves to be recognized.
Like the rest of this program, this unacknowledged dance was highly entertaining, a quality all too easily overlooked in many dance presentations. I hope that Gauthier Dance returns to New York with considerably more frequency than every eight years, and that it brings more skillfully choreographed and executed, and entertaining, dances with it.
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