Ohad Naharin is a dancer and choreographer of contemporary dance. Since 1990, he has been the resident choreographer of the well-known Batsheva Dance Company, based in Tel-Aviv. He has also developed a teaching method, Gaga dance, which he describes as a “toolbox” for professional and amateur dancers, enabling them to explore movement through sensations and decoordination among others, thus overcoming the limits of the body.
O. Naharin’s creations, interpreted by the dancers of the Batsheva Dance Company, systematically contain a gestural and emotional power that offers the spectator an extraordinary experience.
In his latest creation, MOMO[1] (in which the dancers are co-choreographers), four men dressed in military-style trousers step out on stage as a single body and remain there for the duration of the performance. Their choreography uses clichés of virility, their precise and cadenced steps follow one another, they move together, carry each other, lean against each other, shout in unison, like a welded block: sentinels? brothers? comrades?
A man in a pink leotard appears, another in a tutu. Then, as we go along, other dancers, mismatched, join in, one by one. Their movements are fluid, disorderly, singular and seem almost improvised. Their incomparable bodies pulse, leap, twist, stretch.
Order and liberty rub shoulders and respond to each other on stage. These states are not in conflict and one might even assume that one is necessary for the other. And although the dancers end up interacting and influencing each other, they leave just as they arrived, it is repeated… or almost.
In his artistic work, O. Naharin investigates the paradox, without eliminating it: how to combine delicacy and power, or mastery and lightness?[2] Through movement, he tries to bring together what doesn’t belong together; he searches around the impossible and the failure.
The elements that run through MOMO resonate with the contemporary criticism of patriarchy: virility, violence, domination, emancipation, struggles, fluidity, minorities… However, O. Naharin does not impose a one-sided reading, he articulates; and in so doing, he relies on the power of movement to subtly leave the task of interpretation to the spectator.
Thus, dance, writing, cinema, photography are all ways of dealing with the real of existence, as you will read in the texts by Philippe Lacadée, Danièle Olive, Claire Debuire and Émilie Diallo that make up this issue of Noboddady. These are completed with texts by Agnieszka Kurek, David Briard, Romain Aubé and Simon Darat, all of whom agree on the need for psychoanalysis, that is to say that psychoanalysis is oriented by what constitutes the hole for each parlêtre.
References from the author:
[1] Naharin O., Cohen A., & al, “MOMO”, Batsheva Dance Company, Chaillot, national dance theatre, 2022, on view until 3rd June 2023 at La Villette in Paris.
[2] Cf Heymann T., Mr Gaga, in the footsteps of Ohad Naharin, documentary, Heymann Brothers Films, Israel, 2015.
Translation: Ana-Marija Kroker
Proofreading: Benjamin Wimmer
Picture : © Nathalie Crame
