Ballet BC’s energy, commitment inspires choreographer Emanuel Gat

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      Sometimes you don’t appreciate what you have until someone from outside comes in and gives you perspective.

      Such is the case—again—at Ballet BC, which has been working with Emanuel Gat, a choreographer whose unique gifts were forged out of Israel’s dance renaissance of the 1990s. He now heads his own company in France, and has created pieces for companies from the Paris Opera Ballet to Sydney Dance Company to the Royal Swedish Ballet.

      “I really loved working with them those first weeks,” he says enthusiastically about Ballet BC, speaking to the Straight. On-the-move global citizen that he is, he’s in the middle of driving the highway from Montpellier, France, back to the home base of his company Emanuel Gat Dance in the Provençal town of Istres. “It’s very rare to have a group of this type of company—a rep company—where they are all engaged and present. Usually, there’s one or two who are tired. But this is such a homogenous kind of group in terms of motivation and commitment and curiosity.

      “With some groups, you have to be there and push a lot. I told Ballet BC it’s been a really long time where there’s no one that is offbeat,” he continues, then adds of its artistic director: “It’s something Emily [Molnar] does—creating this energy where they have this personal commitment.”

      The energy and commitment of the dancers are, after all, integral to how Gat creates—and to the rigorously constructed and poetically sculpted pieces that have put him in such international demand. He works with the performers from the ground up, entering the studio, as he did last January with the troupe here, with a blank slate.

      “I don’t come in with anything,” he emphasizes. “I really start from zero. I don’t have any end vision. I really want to see what the interaction between me and the dancers will create. I’m constantly following the dancers; I’m not leading them.”

      And there’s more that sets his process apart. While Gat develops movement with the dancers, you can often see him simultaneously creating the piece’s soundtrack in the same studio, headphones on, computer in front of him. It’s here that you start to see his keen musical sensibility, no doubt honed when he spent years training to be a classical-music conductor as a young student. It wasn’t until he was 23, after his obligatory military service, that he tried dance—and was quickly accepted into the modern-dance troupe Liat Dror Nir Ben Gal Company.

      For Gat, the music is inseparable from the dance—and the lighting, which he is always picturing in his mind, he reveals. “The choreography, the sound, the lights—it’s those three entities together,” he says. “Light affects the work in a dramatic way; it can change the whole way it feels.”

      Emanuel Gat emerged from Israel's hothouse of innovative dance.
      Wendy D

      The resulting, as-yet-untitled piece here, Gat says, is a kaleidoscopic flow of intricately changing duets.

      “When I choreograph I figure out systems—I’m always editing and organizing it in a bigger structure,” he says. “And in the soundtrack, I take sounds and bits of music from hundreds of sources. I’m layering them, structuring it. It’s like playing with Lego, with different layers.”

      Intriguingly, Gat’s work will share Ballet BC’s Program 3 not just with Molnar’s own Keep Driving, I’m Dreaming, but with Minus 16 by his fellow Israeli Ohad Naharin. The Batsheva Dance icon featured in the recent documentary Mr. Gaga came out of the same choreographic hothouse that produced Gat, as well as an unbelievable number of other big contemporary-dance names—Hofesh Shechter, Barak Marshall, and many more.

      Gat remembers the era as an exciting time to be working in dance, but he’s reticent to credit it to any one reason. “In the ’90s it was a very bubbling scene—and all within a very small dance area that everybody was working in. It is a really small country and it is strange there were so many small, touring companies.

      “But why did so many choreographers come out? I’m not sure there is a clear answer.”

      The Ballet BC program will give a bit of perspective on how much talent emerged from Israel’s scene. For now, though, Gat is enjoying his career’s next chapter, in France, where he has lived since 2007.

      “There are way more possibilities to create and show and finance your work,” he explains. “You’re close to where things happen and you just have more access to resources and programming.

      “But we travel so much, we’re not bound to one area; we’re either in residencies or touring. It’s not a very geographically restricted form of art. There are no language barriers.”

      Ballet BC presents Program 3 from next Thursday to Saturday (May 11 to 13).

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