In Emanuel Gat’s modern pas de deux, Winter Variations, performed last night at Sadler’s Wells – the music is the puppeteer, pulling the strings of the dancers’ movement. The duet begins with Gat and his partner Roy Assaf standing still, side by side, the double-quoted punctuation to the opening. They are dressed simply in grey trousers and dark T-shirts – a non-statement, if you will, for we see their bodies in the ordinary clothes of someone standing on a platform, or walking down the street. Costumed this way, the body’s lumps and bumps and curves become camouflaged and instead our attention is taken by the movement the body makes, not the muscles that make the movement.
       At first, these movements mirror one another – fluidity in echo, sometimes ever so slightly, purposefully, delayed, and we are taken in by these pulses of double intensity. Gat and Assaf manipulate our emotions with the cause-and-effect actions and reactions of their contortions, which evolve from those mirrored images to the shape of independent creatures, evocative of birds nuzzling, preening and then suddenly in flight, buffeted by the winds, and playful. Then, as the music shifts and the light changes they metamorphose into something haunting and spectral – a projection of our dark human depths.
      Gat and Assaf are forever moving, in movement, with each stillness merely a pause full of the energy of its potential. As they move in and out from the lighted half of the stage to the dark, and sometimes into that twilight zone of shadow in between, they force us to concentrate, to witness every nuance of their performance as they fill the space before us. And, like an illusion and before we knew it so distracted were we by the dancers themselves, the puppeteer has let loose his strings to become a third player – more a dancer than a conductor. The stage has become spatial, three-dimensional and almost not large enough to contain the energy generated and which sneaks up on us sometimes as soft as a caress and at other times urgent, insistent, hard.
      Emmanuel Gat refers to himself not as a choreographer but as a ‘dance-maker’ but, indeed, such was the otherworldliness of his and Assaf’s dance that he could easily call himself a ‘rain-maker’, for the beauty of their movements must have stirred the gods.
Kelly Falconer