New York City-based dance writer and scholar Brian Schaefer explores one of his favorite dance companies - the Batsheva Dance Company, from Israel. Using archival audio of Ohad Naharin, captured at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Schaefer offers an inside view into Gaga, which is the name the company gives to its exploration of movement, the quality that makes Batsheva so captivating.
Related multimedia essay: The Israeli Delegation: Artists From The Holy Land
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to introduce Brian Schaefer, one of our Scholars-in-Residence, who will be your host for this exploration of Ohad Naharin and the movement language known as Gaga.
BRIAN SHAEFER: On this episode, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite dance companies – the Batsheva Dance Company, from Israel – and specifically about something called Gaga, which is the name the company gives to its exploration of movement, the quality that makes Batsheva so captivating.
[Music note: Gamelan music pops in, composed by Ellis Rovin, 2019]
Batsheva has been around for over 50 years, but Gaga is a relatively new development. Today, we’ll take a look at the company’s evolving style and how Gaga has changed it in the 21st century. It’s a story that takes us from the modern dance matriarch Martha Graham to Batsheva’s current house choreographer and former longtime director Ohad Naharin, who was the subject of a recent award-winning documentary called, appropriately, “Mr. Gaga.” We’ll discuss some of the insights and quirks of Gaga, its origins as a tool of healing from injury and its accessibility to dancers and non-dancers alike.
[music fades out]
To understand what Gaga means to Batsheva today, we have to go back to the early days of modern dance, when it was common for a choreographer to create not just an aesthetic style but also a physical style that was woven into their work. Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman introduced “fall and recovery” technique, which used breath to propel movement. Later, Lester Horton incorporated powerful leg swings and deep lunges in his technique while Merce Cunningham innovated a technique that disconnected the torso from the lower body and mixed classical and non-classical lines.
But perhaps the most famous modern dance technique was developed by Martha Graham, who used the contraction of the abdominal area to cultivate and then expel energy in thrilling ways. Graham’s technique was and remains one of the pillars of her own dance company, which was founded in 1926, and it was also – surprisingly – the basis of the early years of the Batsheva Dance Company as well.
So how did that happen?
[Music fades in, Ellis Rovin, 2019]
It begins in 1956, that year the Martha Graham Dance Company embarked on a world tour and, at the last minute, added a stop in Israel, thanks to the orchestrations of Bethsabee de Rothschild an important philanthropist and patron of the Graham company. At the time, Israel was less than a decade old but already it had a robust modern dance scene. Thanks to an influx of pre- and post-war European immigrants, German Expressionism was the dominant dance style. [music stops] But after the Graham company passed through, that all changed. It wasn’t just the compelling dramas that Graham put on stage – it was her powerful technique that appealed to the Israelis. Her dancers looked strong and in-control.
And this was exactly how the new Israelis wanted to see themselves. Many had recently escaped the traumas of Europe the Holocaust and founded a country against all odds. They wanted to shed their old identity and no longer be seen as a studious shtetl people but rather as vigorous workers of the land. They called themselves Sabras, which means “cactus” in Hebrew. As in: tough on the outside, sweet on the inside. In forging this new national identity, they attempted to reinvent themselves physically as well. Dance was a reflection of that, from the rampant folk dancing on the kibbutzim, or agricultural collectives, to the concert dance stage, which Martha Graham ultimately helped shape.
In the 1950s and 60s, several American dancers who had studied with Graham in New York moved to Israel and began teaching the Graham technique at makeshift studios in Tel Aviv. Around this time, Bethsabee de Rothschild, had settled in Israel as well and adopted the biblical name Batsheva. And she had an idea: to start a world class dance company. So in 1964, the Batsheva Dance Company was born, with Graham as artistic advisor. As a favor to Rothschild for her years of financial support, Graham even allowed the new company to perform her work, making it the first company in the world to do so outside Graham’s own.
For the first decade of its existence, Batsheva trained in both Graham technique and classical ballet while performing Graham’s work as well as that of other important American and European choreographers.
[Music fades in, Ellis Rovin, 2019]
Then in 1974, a dynamic young dancer joined the company after his army service and he caught Graham’s eye. He moved with a cat-like grace and intensity and had a mischievous smile. This was Ohad Naharin, and not long after he started dancing with Batsheva, Graham invited him to New York to join her company. He did, but soon left to find his own artistic voice.
In an interview at Jacob’s Pillow, here’s what Naharin had to say about Graham’s technique:
OHAD NAHARIN: Martha Graham was a great artist and she had a movement language. Not many choreographers have their own movement language and their own technique. It’s very rare. She’s one who did invest in this research and I was lucky to be with her company also at some point. And actually, I learned to appreciate her more and more later on when I began to start my own research. And I still appreciate it. At the same time, I don’t go back to her technique, to her exercise at all. But it doesn’t mean we don’t agree. I don’t do Pilates and I don’t do yoga, but it doesn’t mean we don’t agree. I don’t do tai chi anymore, but it doesn’t mean I don’t agree. But she was very important.
BRIAN SHAEFER: After he left Graham’s company, Naharin began creating his own work in New York with a small group of dancers, including his wife, the former Alvin Ailey star Mari Kajiwara. The work was witty and wild and Naharin was physically fearless, though his body would later pay the price for his recklessness.
Then in 1990, he was invited to return to Israel to take the helm of Batsheva which, at that point, had been lurching along without a clear artistic identity. Naharin changed that. With his dark humor, a bold theatrical vision and the savvy to treat contemporary dance shows like rock concerts, suddenly Batsheva found a following amongst the young, hip Tel Aviv crowd and soon reasserted itself as an Israeli cultural treasure.
Part of this new identity was a new way of moving that was unique to Naharin and Batsheva. It trafficked in extremes: one minute it could be smooth and sensual, then next it could be sharp and aggressive. Meanwhile, Naharin was trying to find ways to heal from his previous injuries. So as he helped his dancers explore their physical extremes, he also was developing a way to ensure they could do it while protecting and better understanding their bodies.
That exploration started as a personal journey for Naharin, but at the request of non-dancers affiliated with the company, he soon began sharing his ideas to help them get in touch with their own bodies. Here, Naharin describes the origins of Gaga:
OHAD NAHARIN: I started working with people more than 15 years ago, it came from a wardrobe lady that came to me and said, I want to dance too. And I told her OK, we meet tomorrow in the studio, 9:15. It was, I remember, a Monday morning. And she came and a few more people from the wardrobe and a couple of friends who had no ambition to dance, no experience in dancing. And it was before even I called my movement research Gaga. It was my movement research, actually then I called it movement language. And we started meeting twice a week for 45 minutes. And this was huge for me. Very, very meaningful moment. It was before the company was doing Gaga on a daily basis.
BRIAN SHAEFER: He named the research “Gaga,” which he liked because there’s a silliness to the word. It reminds you of the sound a baby makes and thus of a time when we had a more innocent and positive relationship with our bodies. Soon, Naharin began teaching Gaga to the dancers as well and, after a few years, Gaga became the primary daily training for the Batsheva Dance Company, which it remains today.
As a result, Batsheva developed a quality that is now easily recognizable – a mesmerizing mix of calm and chaos, of lighting captured in a bottle. There’s an urgency to their movements but also an unforced tranquility. There’s both strength and suppleness. Here, Naharin explains how Gaga encourages all of these competing qualities.
OHAD NAHARIN: Gaga is a lot about listening - listening to the scope of the sensations, listening to the body before you tell it what to do. And listening to the body is something we can do all the time. You know, if you now… listening to the body is not about introverting. Listening to the body is a lot about developing connection we have with the outside world, with the force of gravity, with the scope of sensation, with how for example you can feel your weight now on your seat or how you can feel the friction of the fabric of what you’re wearing against your skin. How you connect effort to pleasure, how you connect delicacy, yielding, the ability to laugh at yourself, speed, explosive power. Things that you constantly can apply in the research.
BRIAN SHAEFER: I myself moved to Israel in 2010, in part to dive further into the dance scene there. As part of a fellowship I was on, I volunteered at the Suzanne Dellal Center, which is the biggest dance center in the country. Suzanne Dellal is in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, the oldest neighborhood in Tel Aviv, comprising a labyrinth of alleys and winding streets lined with vine-covered walls, behind which are some of the most expensive homes in the city. You can get lost in these streets and then suddenly find yourself at Suzanne Dellal, a sprawling campus of wide stone plazas surrounded by date and palm trees, which include Batsheva’s studios and the theater where it regularly performs. From where I sat in the administrative offices, I looked across the courtyard and watched the Batsheva dancers rehearse. Sometimes, it was hard to concentrate on my work.
And while I was in Israel, I participated in a two-week Gaga intensive, which included taking daily Gaga class from company members and learning Batsheva repertory. It was challenging and invigorating. And for the ease that Gaga champions, as smooth as it looks, it’s an intensely physical practice and it left me sore. But it also helped me understand how to connect the dots from the principles of the movement to the actual choreography on stage.
[music fades in, Ellis Rovin, 2019]
A Gaga class is like an hourlong guided meditation through movement. Mirrors are covered so you can’t examine and critique yourself. No observers are allowed, so everyone in the room must participate. In the class, the facilitator offers images to interpret: she may ask you to trace a marble rolling from one arm to the other or slap yourself all over to bring the sting of awareness to your entire body, or wriggle on the ground like a noodle in boiling water.
[music ends]
Sometimes the class was held in the top-floor studio, and I could look out the round window at the minarets of Jaffa and the sparkling Mediterranean Sea not far away. And again, Gaga isn’t just for dancers. Gaga’s goal is not to be a better performer, its goal is to be better connected with your body. Naharin is as interested in sharing Gaga with senior citizens, people with neurodegenerative disorders and with children as he is with professional dancers, probably more so. Let’s listen to him share an anecdote about trying to bring Gaga into his daughter’s elementary school in Israel:
OHAD NAHARIN: When she was in first grade, I came to school. All the parents come together on the first day. And there’s this woman with flowers in her hair and dressed in a pink dress and she come to me and said, Oh! I’m going to be the teacher of your daughter, I’m going to teach her dance! And in my heart, I said, Never. And immediately, I came to the headmaster of the school and I said, how about we give you Gaga for the kids? And we started the Gaga in the school, so the kids had the option to go to the teacher with the pink dress or to do Gaga.
BRIAN SHAEFER: And as much as Gaga is a tool to get in touch with your body, it is also in its own way a kind of physical philosophy. Naharin uses his approach to movement as a way to penetrate our psyches, to help us embrace all the contradictions in our bodies and in our lives. We’ll conclude by hearing Naharin talk about what we can all learn from Gaga:
OHAD NAHARIN: We also learn that we don’t need audience to dance. And we don’t need music to dance. We just need time, space, and the act of dancing is something that everybody can do. We offer Gaga to people that have no ambition to dance and one of the most inspiring and teaching experience for me, and a very important moment in the discovery, was when I started working with people that had no ambition to dance, they were not trained to dance, but they wanted to share with me the space and find out about places of atrophy, about the connection of effort and pleasure, about dynamics, about texture, about delicacy, about letting go, about their explosive power, the connection of lightness, the virtue of lightness. So, when the dancers or non-dancers turn up the volume of this listening, they can go beyond their familiar limits on a daily basis. And that’s actually something we become addicted to. We need to feel that today, we find something new. Or the volume of something become… it’s about exaggeration but it’s also a lot about understatement. When we realize that it’s not about being perfect or thinking that we’re ever going to be perfect, but it’s about being magnificent while we connect to our faults and weaknesses. Then they can constantly grow.
BRIAN SHAEFER: Gaga is, in many ways, the best illustration of Batsheva coming into its own as a company. At the time of its founding, in 1964, the Batsheva Dance Company had to import the technique and the repertory of Martha Graham to build an identity. Half a century later, thanks to the innovation of Ohad Naharin, it has found its own way of moving, one that is Israeli-born, one that makes it look like no other company, anywhere. And now Batsheva is the one sharing its unique, movement with the world.
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob’s Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, and of course, through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon - either online or onsite.