The Israel Ballet, which reportedly receives around $1 million annually in funding from the Israeli government, gave a performance Saturday in suburban Washington DC that was panned by influential WaPo dance critic Sarah Kaufman.

She wrote,

    One could hear the dancers rejoicing from the stage Saturday after the curtain fell on the Israel Ballet… [A]s the audience filed out of Montgomery College’s Takoma Park/Silver Spring Performing Arts Center, the dancers’ commotion seemed tinged with relief that the three-hour-plus event was over.

    If so, they were not alone.

About the performance itself, she wrote,

    The performers danced with a firm correctness but no joy. Standing behind their partners, awaiting a cue for a lift or a turn, a few of the men looked bored. Throughout the evening, the men and women alike lacked a sense of presentation, which was odd given the intimate dimensions of the 500-seat theater. They shouldn’t have had a problem with projecting in that small space, yet they came across as unfocused and distant.

It is quite possible that the dancers’ ‘distraction’ came from the sheer weight of distinctly political expectations that have been laid upon their current US tour. It’s the company’s first US tour in 25 years, and it’s been aggressively marketed, e.g. here, by the Israeli Foreign Ministry as part of its “Rebrand Israel” campaign.

I’ve seen no reports that the performance at Montgomery College was greeted with any protests. But protesters were out in force during earlier appearances in Brooklyn, NY, and Burlington, Vermont. In Brooklyn, the always inventive protesters organized by Adalah-NY had a small troupe of women dancers in blue-and-white tutus, and people handing out mock ‘programs’ to ballet-goers as they went in. (Scroll down here.)

I guess the intention of the hosts at Montgomery College was to try to make sue the ballet company felt warmly welcomed at the college… by making the numerous lengthy speeches that, according to ballet critic Kaufman, took up a full hour before the first pointe shoe hit the stage. The speechifying seemed to rile a good portion of the ballet-lovers who had turned up– including, apparently, Kaufman herself.

She wrote,

    The evening’s languor wasn’t entirely the company’s fault. The dancers took the stage nearly an hour after the appointed start time, once the capacity crowd endured politician introductions, speechifying by campus officials and heaped-on praise for endless donors to the college. It made one wonder if the ballet wasn’t in some way a play for the pockets of culture-loving Jews. The least they could have done, one man near me grumbled, was to have a plate of hamentashen in the lobby.

    The greater lack of sugar was on the program…

Ouch. It really seems the lengthy ‘welcoming’ backfired, doesn’t it.