Gaga is the movement language developed by Ohad Naharin throughout many years, parallel to his work as a choreographer and as the artistic director of Batsheva Dance Company. Gaga originated from Naharin’s need to communicate with his dancers and his curiosity in the on-going research of movement.
This Gaga Workshop starts with a Gaga/dancers class and continues with a repertory class, which gives dancers an opportunity to learn excerpts of Ohad Naharin’s choreographic works and to apply their training in Gaga to the repertory.
Gaga/dancers classes are open to professional dancers or advanced dance students aged 16+. They employ the specific vocabulary and skills that are part and parcel of a dancer’s knowledge. The layering of familiar movements with Gaga tasks presents dancers with fresh challenges, and throughout the class, teachers prompt the dancers to visit more unfamiliar places and ways of moving as well. Gaga/dancers deepens dancers’ awareness of physical sensations, expands their palette of available movement options, enhances their ability to modulate their energy and engage their explosive power, and enriches their movement quality with a wide range of textures.
Gaga provides a framework for discovering and strengthening the body and adding flexibility, stamina, agility, and skills including coordination and efficiency while stimulating the senses and imagination. The classes offer a workout that investigates form, speed, and effort while traversing additional spectrums such as those between soft and thick textures, delicacy and explosive power, and understatement and exaggeration. Participants awaken numb areas, increase their awareness of habits, and improve their efficiency of movement inside multi-layered tasks, and they are encouraged to connect to pleasure inside moments of effort. The language of Gaga is in a continual process of evolution, and the classes vary and develop accordingly.
“We become more aware of our form. We connect to the sense of the endlessness of possibilities. We explore multi-dimensional movement; we enjoy the burning sensation in our muscles, we are ready to snap, we are aware of our explosive power and sometimes we use it. We change our movement habits by finding new ones. We go beyond our familiar limits. We can be calm and alert at once.” – Ohad Naharin
Matan David
