“Make the pose bigger!”, Ohad Naharin instructs his dancer. Whereupon the woman changes her posture. “No, don’t move. Make it bigger!” The Israeli choreographer’s conception of dance is so revolutionary that sometimes it is difficult to understand him. However, when one considers how he himself became a dancer, his ideas appear absolutely logical.
Since physical activity is synonymous with physical pleasure for him, Ohad Naharin danced constantly as a child. The fact that one could actually also do so professionally lay beyond the limits of his imagination. On his mother’s initiative, he finally did begin formal training in dance, although at 22-years-old he was actually already considered too old to do so. Alas, his special approach to dance made an impression and even managed to touch the hearts of experienced professionals. Ohad Naharin took up an engagement with the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv. It was here that American choreographer Martha Graham discovered Naharin and resolved to take him back to New York with her. However, Ohad Naharin soon became disenchanted with their work together, prompting him to switch to Maurice Béjart’s ensemble. For other dancers, the chance to work with these famous choreographers would have been the pinnacle of their careers, but for Ohad Naharin his tenure with Béjart turned into a fiasco. He was unable to dance, because he couldn’t relate emotionally to anything, and he felt deeply unfulfilled by the work.
These failed engagements were followed by his own first choreographies. Unlike the situation which he himself had had to experience so painfully first-hand, in Ohad Naharin’s mind, his dancers should be one with what they are doing. For Ohad Naharin, a reinforced pose doesn’t result from an external movement, but instead from a strong inner stance and awareness for impulses, for one’s own body and the story to be told. For dancers, this was an entirely new working method. Ohad Naharin, who had returned to Israel in the interim and become director of the Batsheva Dance Company, now developed a complex body and movement language, which he calls “Gaga”. He even incorporates the dancers’ injuries and impairments sustained on the job into this language.
Gravity is a core element in Gaga. As soon as tension leaves the body, as soon as it slumps over and sinks to the ground, a complex motoric interaction unfolds, which makes use of gravity on one hand, while seeking to overcome it at the same time. The movement language of Ohad Naharin’s choreographies is impressive for its great levity, which allows the dancers’ movements to appear so overwhelmingly natural.
With his Gaga style, Ohad Naharin has introduced totally new qualities of movement to the world of contemporary dance. The foundation of his philosophy is his early personal experience of how much fun movement can be. From this, he derives a primal joy in movement that all humans have in common and which can exert a healing power. His primary mission is to return this power to the realm of everyday life.
For, according to his conviction, dancing together alters one’s attitude towards one’s self, one’s fellow humans, life and the world. In his public workshops, he passes this experience on to young and old, healthy and ill, experienced dancers and absolute beginners alike. Whenever he dances together with hundreds of participants at these workshops, an energy becomes palpable. In the intervening years, Gaga has also spread beyond Tel Aviv as a form of physical and movement training and is now practiced in many parts of the world.