With each new work I’ve seen performed at the Bat-Sheva dance company over the last few years I thought to myself: “well, this is the best ensemble yet I’ve seen at Bat-Sheva”, only to realize the next time round they dance even better than last time. “It’s the result of GAGA”, I was told. Somehow, GAGA did not sound like a serious proposition. “Ohad Naharin is one of the best living choreographers and his work simply keeps improving”, I thought to myself and dismissed GAGA. A few weeks later my sister Anat Baniel calls me after she has seen a choreography by Ohad Naharin with the Bat-Sheva dance company while on a visit to San-Francisco: “The movements he gets his dancers to do” she insisted “must be influenced by the Feldenkrais Method”. I checked with some mutual friends and found out that Ohad’s mother is in fact a Feldenkrais practitioner. Listening to the excited dancers speaking about their Gaga experience again and again, no wander I have been waiting for a chance to learn about GAGA and experience it for myself. This week, 100 “friends of the Bat-Sheva company” assembled at their spacious new studio in Tel-Aviv. Some belonged to the dance community, others to the Theatre world, but most were business people with their wives, lawyers, accountants etc. We were all handed a one page flyer with the following text written by Ohad:
“Gaga challenges multi layer tasks. It is fundamental for gaga users to be available for this challenge. At once we, the users, can be involved in moving slowly through space while a quick action in our body is in progress. Those dynamics of movement are only a portion of what else might go on at the same time”.
One of the most striking elements of gaga that captured my attention right from the start was awareness of the connection between effort and pleasure – both Feldenkrais and Anat Baniel stress the importance of awareness to: effort vs. pleasure, of abundance of time when moving fast, awareness of the distance between body parts, of the friction of flesh and bones, awareness of weight of our body parts, of unnecessary tension.
Like the animated cartoon figure in the Desk-Trainer exercises, in gaga we see, we listen, we measure, we play with the textures of our flesh, we play with directions, we are invited to be silly, we are invited to laugh at ourselves as we move.
Like the Anat Baniel Method (ABM) gaga encourages people to discover the animal within them and the incredible power that imagination provides them with – taking them away from pain, stress and injury. Both ABM and gaga define “blockades” as interferences in the flow of movement and work to by-pass those or undo them. Both teach us to find new and efficient patterns of movement. Both build on a constant search for variation as a creative and safety measure. Injuries such as Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI) that Desk-Trainer relieves, are almost absent at the Bat-Sheva dance company. (Injuries in dance are very common). Like ABM, gaga speaks about the importance of the mind and the information it gets and sends out for the quality of the movement, its richness and expressive power. In Desk-Trainer, we ask our members “do less, move slower, listen to your body, be aware of what a movement in one part of your body does to the rest of it and connect to the sense of endless possibilities”.
Unlike Feldenkrais and Anat Baniel, because Ohad Naharin works with virtuoso dancers he through gaga he researched the passion to move and to connect it to the effort, the sweat and the limitless powers of imagination. Ohad underlined the difference between pleasure – that his dancers feel when they move – and joy – they find in the movements of others around them. He talked about connecting to groove, even when there is no music. Rehearsing with a company, says Ohad, you become aware of other people in the room. “We explore multi dimensional movement, we enjoy the burning sensation in our muscles, we are ready to snap, we are aware of what we are made of, we are aware of our explosive power and sometimes we use it”.
At some point during the meeting, Ohad suggested that we, the guests sitting opposite him and his dancers do a simple movement of our hand round an imaginary large ball - clockwise. He then asked us to caress that ball in the diagonal, then forward, then the other diagonal and finally back round the ball – only this time we discovered the direction changed – we were moving counter-clockwise. A feeling of vitality embraced me.
I looked around me: the pleasure of the people as each one moved, their joy as they looked at their neighbors…
Ohad Naharine finishes his short expose with a sentence which seems like a quote from Anat Baniel and Desk-Trainer: “We change our movement habits by finding new ones, we can be calm and alert at once. We become available…”
Gaga is developing all the time, and together with other more established brain-to-movement methods such as the Feldenkrais Method and the Anat Baniel Method they can really change the quality of our lives. If you find this hard to believe, please try to see the Bat-Sheva dance company and you’ll understand – such harmony of movement, such beauty, such a rich and generous expression. This is what you get doing one or more of these three methods.
Eran Baniel
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TECHNOLOGIES