Bitef

INTERVIEW OHAD NAHARIN

AimeeTs'ao: You seem to resist being called an Israeli choreographer. Ohad Naharm: It's trivial Information in terms of what I really do. Because (then) you put all the Israeli choreographers in one box. I think the community of choreographers shouldn't have national, ethnic or religious connotations. i'm also an American Citizen, by the way. So you can call me an American-Israeli choreographer. My grandparents were from Russia and Roland, so maybe you can call me a Russian-Polish-IsraeliAmerican choreographer. Being Israeli is not even a race; being Israeli describes geographically where I'm from, It doesn't teil anything about who I am or what I am. AI: What made you start to dance? ON; 1 don't know exactly what you mean, but when I think of starting to dance, it's starting to live. As long as I can remember I'm dancing. Not dancing in a classroom, but being very aware of my body, my weight, being aware of thè pleasure and joy I got out of movement, of the extreme physicality and effort. I think a lot of how we dance today has to do not with just our training, it has a lotto do with how we grew up, our genes, and what we did since we were born, with our body development. Our weaknesses, our strengths, our sexuality, our intelligence, our awareness of the universe has a lotto do with how we dance, AT: How did you arrive at developing Gaga (as Nahahn calis the movement language he uses in daily company training)? ON: In order to be able to talk about it, I have to decide to make it more systematic than it really is. I've decided to talk about two important points, or maybe three. The first point will be my back injury. More than 20 years ago I had a very serious back injury, where I shattered a disc and I was paralyzed in my left leg and I didn't think l'd be able to dance. I had a serious Operation, but I was already choreographing, so coming back from the injury 1 needed two things: to get my body to move a little bit and also to be able to give other people the keys to the way to move ¡n my work.This process of finding keys for me and for my dancers brought meto deal with my weaknesses and efficiency of movement I needed to be so efficient because I was so limited. I developed an awareness that had to do with finding where in my body I'm not hurting and where in my body I have unused muscles, unused movement. I discovered my explosive power, the efficiency of movement. I started to really be able to connect between pleasure and pain, and between effort and joy, At the same time 1 needed to articúlate it because I needed to give itto myself and others. So it became a language and a method.That was one, then about ten years ago, almostas ajoke I started meeting [with] a group of поп-dancers, workers of Batsheva company who are not dancers [but] who wanted to dance. So I started meeting [with] a group of five people twice a week in thè morning. Very quickly I realized in these meetings with non-dancers, 1 learned a lot about movement, movement habits, all the things 1 described before but in a new light because none ofthem had the ambition to be on stage. Theyjust wanted to feel better, and to move better and to get stronger. So then Gaga became something that had nothing to do with performing arts, just had to do with thè maintenance of your body. Healing your body, finding pleasure and joy in movement and nothing to do with ambitions to be on stage. That became a very serious thing in my life-- working with non-dancers. Today we have a venue with hundreds of non-dancers who come to take Gaga classes. AT: is it possible for someone to start as a child and be completely trained as a dancer? Or do you need to Supplement with other forms? ON: Right now I think of Gaga as the higher education of dance, You do elementary school, high school and go to college. So Gaga is this part of your education. We do have schools which approach us to teach kids. I'm more interested (in working) with adults. This year we allowed Gaga to be ¡n the curriculum of the performing arts school in Jerusalem. But that is for 17-year-olds and over, not for kids. All the people already have (dance) training. The important idea is to make people excel in the method they already know. It's not to abolish or cancel or change their techniques. if someone wants to be a ballerina, then Gaga can help her to be a ballerina. You should come and take Gaga class with us, We do it before the show as a warmup.