Take This Waltz = Very Good Movie

Tino Sehgal, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London

I only vaguely knew Tino Sehgal's work before his commission appeared in the Turbine Hall as part of Tate Modern's Unilever series, so I went along with no real sense of what to expect. From that launching off point, I was pretty amazed to find myself standing in the Turbine Hall as random people - dressed the same as everyone else - ran up and down the hall. Played tag. Charged about as if looking for someone they'd lost in a crowd. Stood still chanting/ singing. Lay down on the floor. Walked in slow lines military style up and down the hall. Then, a man sat down and started talking to me and my family. He went straight into a childhood memory, talking to us as if he (a) knew us and (b) was responding to something intimate we'd asked him. When we started chatting to him as well, he went with it seamlessly. Then the rain - it was pouring outside - lashed hard on the roof and the lights in the Turbine hall cut out. Total darkness except for some safety lights. Silhouettes of visitors up above loomed down over us. The man disappeared and he joined the rest of those hired by Sehgal, in chanting a refrain about "Electricity". It was eerie like a cult gathering. Or a religious ceremony. Then there was  more running around. And someone else came and sat with us and also launched straight into a childhood memory. It seemed Sehgal was saying we bond most over childhood memories because they're more open, less clear and more universal: pets and moving school/ home formed the subject  matter several times. 

The strangest thing was that after one or two of these encounters, you felt somehow ignored and rejected if when they started another round of choosing people to go over to and talk to/ with, nobody chose you. And conversely, you felt "part of something" when one of Sehgal's storytellers did choose to talk to you. Why?, you wondered. Did they feel connected to you somehow and wanted to explore that? Was it your aura? Your facial expression? The way you were dressed? What made them choose you? 

It was unclear if the storytellers were telling genuine personal stories (i.e these things did happen to them) or if they were making them up. Or if Tino Sehgal had given them stories from other people to tell? Sometimes, it seemed that they were real stories and sometimes it didn't.

I found the work deceptively simple. And quite haunting. We ended up going back the following weekend for a second time and it was just as powerful, despite knowing what to expect this time. The second time didn't follow an identical 'staged' formula though. Some storytellers were the same, most were different. What they did overlapped at times with the first time we went, but was mostly different. 

My favourite conversation was with a storyteller who sat down and launched into a monologue about how her parents moved to Australia when she was thirteen and how when they got there and she started her new school, one of the classrooms when she walked into it, smelled exactly the way their family home back in the U.K used to smell at Christmas time. There was something otherworldly about both her and the conversation that followed and my family and I were sad we couldn't carry on talking to her. But she left us quickly, running suddenly up the Turbine Hall. 

The work really made me think about how nobody in London tends to talk much to anybody else. The cliche of the awkward silence on the Tube. And on the buses, too. The lack of reaching out and connecting. The lack of formal interaction, even, that you get in Paris, saying 'Hello' and 'Thank you', for instance, when you enter and leave a shop. Sehgal's work for the Turbine Hall is quietly touching - I can't think of the last time in London during an afternoon, three or four complete strangers came over and start talking intimately to me. And how surprising it was that of those three or four strangers who came over each time we went to experience the work, there was always one person who each of us connected with right away (my daughter would connect with one, me with another and so on). Which made me think how many personal connections we miss everyday in London. If you're intrigued, you can check out The Unilever Series: Tino Sehgal at Tate Modern, until October 28th 2012. 

Recently Watched Movies

Gojo Ethiopian Restaurant, Ladbroke Grove, London

After watching the serene Ethiopian runner, Tiki Gelana, win the Women's Marathon in the Olympics, (albeit on a TV screen in a restaurant in Paris), I was suddenly reminded of Gojo, an Ethiopian restaurant right next door to London's Ladbroke Grove tube station. My wife and I had been for dinner once at Gojo, a few years back and been intrigued by the Injera bread on which our vegetarian dishes were served and also by the lovely Ethiopian coffee ceremony with which we finished dinner. We also had a lot of fun when we realised the restaurant does not provide cutlery and expects you to eat with your fingers. You get really messy...and it's nice to interact with your food. 

Some while later, we went back for dinner, this time accompanied by our young daughter and my wife's parents and we had a great evening, all enjoying eating with our fingers, the soaring Ethiopian music that the restaurant pumps non-stop, the lovely, colourful weaved dish-warmers that every dish comes out hidden beneath and of course, everybody - except our daughter obviously - loved the Ethiopian coffee ceremony.
So anyway, after cheering Gelana to her victory (I'd recently seen and loved the film Town Of Runners), I made a mental note that once back in London, I'd take my daughter to Gojo for lunch since she had lots of questions about Ethiopia and didn't remember ever going there for dinner. And so, keeping to my word, off we went the other day.
This time, we had the restaurant to ourselves. You go down some steps and the restaurant's in a dimly lit basement. The staff on this occasion were two lovely women (one cooking, one serving). The woman serving recommended we ditch our initial plan to get two vegetarian dishes (£4 each) and instead get the five dish vegetarian sampler (£8: some dishes cold, some warm). This came out presented on a gigantic Injera bread (served cold). My daughter loved eating with her fingers and was far better at it than I am (altogether now: isn't it amazing how adaptable kids are). Although very good, we barely got halfway through before having to give up and request a doggy bag to take home. 

Sadly, on this occasion, there was a problem which meant no coffee was available, so our lunch stopped there. If you fancy trying out a lunch or dinner where you get to try amazing, very reasonably priced Ethiopian food (there's a meat/ fish menu and a vegetarian menu: most dishes are around £4; the coffee ceremony is £10) and don't mind eating with your fingers (if you're the clumsy sort as I am: don't wear a white shirt or your favourite dress, obviously) then here's the lowdown: Gojo, 171 Ladbroke Grove, London W10 6HJ. Tel: 0208. 964. 0431 

Lou Doillon Featured In The Windows Of Selfridges, London

New Toy Arrived This Week

Inspired by TOAST Marylebone High Street who were recently playing old records on a Dansette "suitcase style portable record player" in their shop, Urban Outfitters who have been selling a new format portable record player this summer in their stores and also Balade Sonores on Avenue Trudaine in Paris (who are big time revivalists for vinyl), I did some research and ended up buying this Steepletone record player through Amazon. It's got great sound. The set up took less than minute. And it's really nice to be able to enjoy records again. Music plays raw and muddy and it gets loud enough. The weird thing is how much more you actually pay attention to the music when it's vinyl. It makes the iPod seem so disposable and plastic and lazy and horribly non-interactive. With a record player, you have to actually work to get the music on: cueing the arm, dropping it in the right place, changing Side A to Side B and so on. Having grown up listening to records until CDs came along, it's really nice to re-connect with vinyl. 

Batsheva Dance Company

With Batsheva Dance Company due at the Edinburgh Festival any day and Batsheva Ensemble due at Sadlers Wells in November, I thought this was a great time to pull my 2008 interview with Ohad Naharin out of the Jewish Chronicle's archives:

OHAD NAHARIN: THE MAVERICK LORD OF ISRAELI DANCE

When Ohad Naharin was a child growing up on Kibbutz Mizra in the suburbs of Haifa, his dancer mother and psychologist father instilled a love of dance in him. "At home," he says, "we'd always dance."

They took him to the theatre, encouraged his interest in folk dancing. Later, he loved gymnastics and music. Regardless of what he was doing while growing up, there was always a fascination with movement at the forefront of his mind.

"It was always something that I was attracted to," he says. "The pleasure of movement and watching other things move. It wasn't even just people, but machines, buildings, something about structure, form, geometrics, dimensions - I was always in awe watching things that move or create a movement."

At first, Naharin, who at 56 is one of the world's leading choreographers, studied music. Then, in 1974, following military service in the Israeli army, he took a two-week dance course with the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, which was founded in 1964 by dance patroness/banking heiress Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild. Dazzling his teachers, Naharin was invited to join the company. Despite his age - he was 22; advanced for dance - he said yes without hesitation. "I started formally training very late," he says. "But in my soul I was always dancing. And I had a very easy body for a dancer."

Months later, his gamble paid off as he rehearsed a piece choreographed by dance legend Martha Graham (Batsheva's first artistic director, on account of a close friendship with Rothschild). While visiting the studio, Graham was struck by Naharin.

"We had a very special relationship," he recalls. "I reminded her of someone that she really loved, an amazing dancer. She saw him in me. That was what attracted her to me."

What did he learn from her? "She taught me the connection between effort and passion," he says.

Graham invited the young dancer to New York to perform in her work, Jacob's Dream. Once there, he studied at The Juilliard School in New York. In 1976, he left the Martha Graham Company and went to dance first for Maurice Bejart's ballet company in Brussels and then for the Bat-Dor dance company in Israel (also founded by Rothschild).

His stellar apprenticeship complete, he returned to New York and launched himself as a freelance choreographer in 1980. Four years later, he formed the Ohad Naharin Dance Company, in partnership with his wife Mari Kajiwara, also a renowned dancer.

In 1987, he became guest choreographer for the Nederlands Dans Theater, creating many seminal works, all of which pushed the boundaries of modern dance.

And then in 1990, his work having by then been performed worldwide, Naharin was appointed artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company. He has since led Batsheva to become one of the most revered and sought-after companies in the world. It is the dream of many an aspiring dancer to be accepted into the Junior Batsheva ensemble (which Naharin founded in 1992 to groom young dancers for the senior company) and then step up to dance with the senior group. So what kind of person makes it as a Batsheva dancer?

"People that are connected to their sensuality, to their demons," says Naharin. "People that love to dance without looking at themselves in the mirror - we have no mirrors in our studio, I don't allow them. People that look at dance not as something that is difficult, but something that is challenging because it is very intense work and demanding. People that are capable of laughing at themselves, a sense of humour is important. Musicality, groove - I'm attracted to people with groove. Generosity is very important for me in the people I work with. Sometimes, I feel that I'm attracted to rebellion, to rebels. A lot of my dancers have that."

For hopefuls, the odds of winning a place are slim, with the senior company employing only 22 dancers, of whom only 17 make the cut for the touring company.

The current lucky 17 arrive here next week (security team in tow - the company has long been a target for terrorist threats) to perform two of Naharin's latest works, Three (a trilogy set to music by Bach, Brian Eno and The Beach Boys) and Mamootot (his first work after an 18-month sabbatical following his wife's death from cancer in 2001). Both promise dazzling choreography, ever-eclectic musical soundtracks and impressively talented dancers improbably capable of realising Naharin's ever-wilder probings of the possibilities of dance.

In conceiving a piece such as Three, Naharins says he follows "many rules". "A vast number of rules. But every work starts when I lay out for myself some limitations. For Three, I said, I am going to make a work that will be composed of three works - an evening of full-length work made out of three separate works, each of which can be performed on its own. So this was one of the major limitations at the beginning."

From there, he begins to collect ideas, gathering music and improvising in the studio with his dancers (who draw heavily on his acclaimed "Gaga" strategies, a meditative dance practice he conceived while recovering from a serious back injury). Eventually, the various paths converge and a work begins to assume an identity.

"At the heart of it is a sense of what I call the soul of the work. Once I feel connected to the soul of a work, I feel like I'm some kind of a medium, channelling everything that happens in the studio, everything that happened to me, the suggestions of the dancers.

"A lot of it has to do with the moment I am at in terms of the movement research - what turns me on. It's a lot about the love of structure and organisation. It's a lot about what I find in movement that has to do with understatement and overstatement.

It's a lot about trying to use little means to express big feelings. And it's a lot about the sensations, how we the dancers, me, the audience, become our sensations. In an ideal state, we are only our sensations, which is almost impossible, but I'm aiming for it."

His wildcard artistic direction - intuitive, idiosyncratic and charismatic - is famed in dance circles. It is something that did not come naturally to him.

"It took me a long time to learn but directing and leading have to do with the power of convincing. If you can convince in what you do, then things are very easy."

Is it hard to control so many rebel spirited dancers? "I learned that you can turn almost any conflict into dialogue," he says, alluding also to the politics of his homeland, a subject he dislikes to talk about in interviews, preferring instead to discuss it through dance works such as Naharin's Virus.

"It's a choice - you can recognise people who are attracted to conflict and you can identify people who prefer a dialogue. If you show someone that whatever you think is a dialogue can actually become a dialogue, then it becomes interesting."

After 18 years of leading Batsheva, it must by now feel like a large family.

"I like to call it a tribe," he laughs. "It's more than a family."

- Nick Johnstone