Telling a Dream Story, In Primal, Mysterious Ways

    Barak Marshall has one foot in the United States where he was born, and one foot in Israel, where he lives and where he created the evening-length theater-dance piece, “Monger,â€� which had its U.S. debut at Jacob’s Pillow last week.

   “Mongerâ€� draws on Robert Altman’s film, “Gosford Park,â€� and Jean Genet’s play, “The Maids,â€� both upstairs-downstairs tales of murder. Here, a group of downstairs servants live in fear of Mrs. Margaret, whose shoes click alarmingly across the ceiling, while her demands for coffee keep accelerating. Her vengeance when displeased is severe indeed.  

   Over the course of the hour-long piece, ten dancers, almost all Israelis in their 20s, illuminate the story of these servants, but there is much more going on in this downstairs world than it might seem. Along with the maids and butlers scurrying about, a couple ends up dead, a sextet of identically black-clad grandmas, silently emote on a bench to the sounds of “La Traviata,â€� and two mothers hold sleeping babies with adult-sized heads. Later, the babies are “bornâ€� as full-grown women in bikinis, one of whom later appears to be a doll to be dressed by others, and, later still,  as a slave to be auctioned off. Surreal, it certainly is. Also very funny, and often mysterious and compelling.

   Marshall’s movement is defiantly un-virtuosic. Israel has no tradition of ballet, nor much dance tradition at all — even its folk dance was invented as a response to the land, without roots in any particular ethnic or cultural style. So there are no high extensions, kicks nor complex intertwining bodies in “Monger,â€� just powerful attack springing from earthbound pliés. Athletic dance movements, such as  low jumps, twists and thumping falls, are blended with mime-like gestures: hands covering a face in grief or thrust upward in anger or supplication, sometimes  with apparently literal narrative meaning, sometimes perhaps not.

   The music is a mishmash, too.

   Along with the Verdi, there is Tommy Dorsey, Handel, amusing excerpts from the Yiddish Radio Project (mostly old commercials for Hebrew National Meats and Manischewitz Gefilte Fish) Balkan Beat Box and Taraf de Haidouk (a Romanian ensemble), among many others.

   Clothing is important in “Monger.â€� Bundles of garments are thrown onto the stage for the dancers to dress each other, and heavy black coats are sometimes worn, sometimes hung on a rack upstage.

    Most of the time, the characters are dressed in browns — the women in knee length dresses, the men with aprons over shirt and pants. But when one of the servants dies, she ends up in a many-layered white dress, as an angelic chorus gathers around with sparkly white fans.

   Marshall wasn’t trained as a dancer, (though his mother was a well-known dancer in Israel and the U.S.) and “Mongerâ€� is the first piece he’s choreographed in 8 years. He’s been busy with other pursuits, including singing with a rock band.

   But he has a gift for creating a captivating dream world made from real people and real stories, elevated to something both primal and mysterious.