Oh Baby

Hagit Yakira still regards herself as a new choreographer. Oh Baby is her third work, the first to feature a male dancer and, as she admits, part of a process for her to find a distinctive voice. Unlike many duets, Oh Baby avoids emotional fireworks, focussing on subtle shifts in mood and playing with the emotional connections between the two dancers.

Yakira describes the relationship within Oh Baby from the female's perspective: instead of spectacular feats of skill, there is a nuanced repetition of moves and a detached, cerebral atmosphere. It avoids the extremity of both performance and emotion, something Hagit determined early in the creative process.

"Three years ago, I couldn't see any more dark stuff!" she comments. "There is so much, especially in dance, that I decided to show the dark moments only a little." By getting away from pessimism, she places the technique at the service of atmosphere and emotion, allowing the audience to find their own feelings towards the duet.

"Some people only see the dark, others say it is sweet," she muses. Her reaction against melodrama expresses her own thoughts on violence. "It comes from within, the scream. Aggression is self-destruction - that is why we fall to the floor in the piece a lot!"

This introverted approach keeps the mood of the duet stable, with excursions into wilder emotions rare and discreet. And while the title clearly hints at an erotic connection between the couple, Hagit explains that the piece evolved through her working relationship with co-dancer Takeshi Matsumoto.

"I didn't have anything particular to say about relationships: the piece evolved. At one point, I decided - let's make this a love story. I wanted people to get confused as to whether we were a couple!"

Oh Baby is as likely about friendship, with dependancy and flights of freedom, personal rituals and mutual understanding forming the connection bewteen the duo. Indeed, it is only the title and the tradition of the pas de deux that suggests this is about a sexual relationship, lending the piece a more comprehensive resonance as it covers all manner of male-female relationships.

Most of all, the absence of intense or ferocious set-pieces allows a more emotional response from an audience. If, at times, it is tough to decode the duo's feelings, the overall experience is deeply personal for each audience member, as Yakira noticed.

Befitting Yakira's background as a dance therapist, there is a sense of the body in Oh Baby as the location of emotion: throughout the duet, the couple express emotion not through their faces but their movements. Challenging at times to interpret, it marks the early explorations of a choreographer who is heading out into the territory where emotions, intellect and physicality meet. Her aims are impressive. "It is easier to make an audience think than to feel," she concludes. "And I want them to have an emotion, not a thought."