With a rumbling throb of electronic noise, a dim light illuminates a blank, featureless stage save for one lone figure in a far corner: a woman in a simple, long blue dress. She is running. But why do we run? To escape something, or perhaps to confront it? This is the thread of ambiguous tension that penetrates, like an unassertive yet persistent hum, throughout Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin’s most recent creation for his Batsheva Dance Company, Last Work. This solitary running figure, impassively stone-faced, unerring in her pace and focus, is present throughout the hour-long melee of this ferociously charged work; a still point in the eye of a storm.

For this Israeli company politics and art are inextricable. At their presentations around the world, despite Naharin’s outspoken stance against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, protestors have picketed and disrupted performances, perhaps attempting to invoke a similar effect that the cultural boycott of South Africa had on the eventual dissolution of Apartheid in the mid-1990s. However, while he has spoken freely about his political position, Naharin has largely steered clear of overtly politicising his dance. Until now.

Devotees of Naharin’s revolutionary approach to the art of choreography – his so called...