“These movements do not come from a relaxed state of mind, when you perform them you have to be obsessed” – this is how the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin gave the dancers of the Paris Opera access to a phrase in his rousing, transporting the essence of his dance art in 2018 “ decadence".
Getting dance movements to exude an involuntary quality that makes them irresistibly attractive is very difficult.
Therein lies the art of Ohad Naharin.
For him, obsessively dancing from the gut is always also aesthetically shaped.
Naharin's obsession is the transformation of passion into beauty, he takes the risk of kitsch with his eyes wide open.
And it's great kitsch, kitsch at a very high level, artfully put together from the individual parts of our dance past and present that are compatible with pop culture.
There is folk dance earthiness, there are the big gestures of the musical, looks at the stage sky, screams, shouts, jumps, runs as if for one's own life, and there are all these cool passages, as if thought up for the club, performed as if in a trance.
One suddenly turns into the other.
Watching Naharin dance is like stepping into his stream of consciousness, in which fragments of our collective moving memory are rephrased and stitched together in such a way that we recognize ourselves in these dances.
Suddenly it makes sense that we're so torn.
That we want to form a community and cannot live without a community, but that it threatens to break up.
That we must consider ourselves individual and learn in humility that we are like everyone else
Since Corona, Mr. Gaga, as Naharin is known by the avid practitioners of his movement style, has taught and had his methodology taught in online classes.
Anyone could and can do it, and it's great fun to try.
For Ohad Naharin, who has been running the Batsheva Dance Company since 1990, controlled letting go has turned out to be a globally successful method.
Today he is agile seventy years old.