Controversial choreographer Ohad Naharin has made a significant imprint on Israel’s contemporary dance scene.
By MICHAL LEVERTOVThe Batsheva Dance Company performs ‘Mamootot’(photo credit: GADI DAGON COURTESY BATSHEVA)
On stage, as a dancer and choreographer, Ohad Naharin is known to be bold and daring.In the more intimate setting of a one-on-one interview, however, he comes across as rather cautious, even somewhat shy and elusive.I had been enormously impressed by “Mamootot” (Mammoth), Naharin’s acclaimed 2003 work, which I saw just days earlier.The work bursts with so much longing, intimacy and pensiveness, and at the same time vividness and thirst for life, that I could not help but think about the grief that may have had shaped it.I ask Naharin about the part that mourning for his wife, Mari Kajiwara, who died of cancer in 2001, had played in the creation of “Mamootot.” Kajiwara was an American, who had danced with the Alvin Ailey troupe, before founding in New York, together with Naharin, the Ohad Naharin dance company and later joining the Batsheva Dance Company when he became its artistic director.“Now,” Naharin tells me off gently with his soft voice, “we are gossiping.” Not that he minds gossiping, he says, but “in order to experience this work, you don’t need to know my private tragedies. You don’t even have to connect it to mourning. This is something that is just part of me being a person who is creating a work but who is interested in structure, dynamic, volume, texture, understatement, overstatement, delicacy, efficiency of movement, form. All these things are much more interesting to me. I don’t do it to bring out the story of a subject. If I wanted to do something about mourning or to do something about a subject, I don’t think I would have choreographed it.”“Mamootot” is one of three works by Naharin that Batsheva is re-performing this summer to mark its 50th anniversary. Naharin, 61, has been the company’s artistic director for almost half of this period. As such, he has made a significant imprint on Israel’s contemporary dance scene.Under Naharin’s leadership, Batsheva is not only the most prominent dance company in Israel, but it has gained a stellar international reputation. Based at the Suzanne Dellal Centre, a performance hall compound in the picturesque southern Tel Aviv seaside neighborhood of Neve Tzedek, the company is also a lodestone for talented dancers from all over the world. It tours frequently, performing Naharin’s prolific oeuvre on the globe’s finest stages, where, just as in Israel, it attracts constant praise from audiences and critics alike.We meet at a cozy vegetarian bistro in central Tel Aviv – Naharin’s choice and obviously his preferred local eatery, although he was made do with just a cup of coffee.He asks if it would be ok to sit near the wall where, he explains apologetically, he feels more comfortable and secure. Only when asked about Maxim Warrat – a pseudonym he has been using in recent years – does a wave of sheer luminosity brighten the otherwise concentrated look on his face. It seems nothing puts Naharin at ease as does the mention of this fictional character.A husky seaman, the outspoken Warrat is a substantial alter ego for Naharin to lean on and toy with. “I met Maxim Warrat just before I started working on ‘MAX,’” Naharin tells me.Debuted in 2007, “MAX,” too, is among the three works being re-performed by Batsheva (May, June and July). Warrat, according to “MAX’s” credits, composed and performed its soundtrack.“He was breaking the windows of my car and I caught him,” Naharin says reminiscing.“It was winter. It was cold. He didn’t have a place to live, and wanted to be caught by the police and taken to jail so he could have a warm meal. And he chose my car to break into in front of me.” Instead of handing him over to the police, Naharin continues, “I took him in. We became friends and started to collaborate.”Naharin does not need or seek the shielding presence of Warrat to opine about political matters. Nor does he remain coy when it comes to speaking out about issues regarded by the Israeli mainstream as controversial.Unlike most Israeli artists, Naharin has never abstained from openly voicing political views.While he strongly insists that his artistic work should be interpreted in the abstract, rather than reflecting themes or subjects, it is in interviews, he tells me, that he makes a point to talk about concrete matters.Such an opportunity came when I ask him about a comment he made during a Batsheva press conference a few days earlier, when a journalist asked about the makeup of the team. Naharin replied that two-thirds of the dancers are Israelis, “but one cannot tell them from the others, which is a good thing.”“The connotation,” he elaborates in our interview, “is that ethnicity, nationality or geography do not have a place in my work. It is not just about where the dancers are from but about why we dance, what we dance, how we treat each other, how we relate to our codes of behavior, what we believe in. So it doesn’t matter if they’re Jewish or French or whatever.“The only advantage of being an Israeli – the only advantage – is that it is cheaper for the company.” He immediately clarifies, “Our country is so racist that it costs more money for us to employ a dancer from abroad. We pay more taxes, we pay fees to get a work permit, which we then have to renew every year, and after five years we have to file a special appeal, or the dancer will be deported.“And when the criteria are not the professional abilities of a person, but whether they are Jewish or not – that’s racism. In our parliament there are people who come from the Dark Ages, who talk about Jews as a better race. And it is legal for them to speak like that. So, how can I not think that my country has legally authorized a racist policy against minorities?” Naharin was born in Kibbutz Mizra and grew up in a small northern town, Kiryat Amal, to which the family moved when he was five years old. He served in the IDF as a singer and dancer in one of the army’s military troupes. At the age of 22, he joined Batsheva. Martha Graham, a visiting choreographer at Batsheva at the time, recruited him to her New York-based dance company and, with his move to the Big Apple, the young Naharin also began studying at the School of American Ballet and then Julliard.Alongside an ascending career as a dancer – he performed with, among others, Israel’s Bat Dor dance company and Maurice Bejart’s Ballet du XXe Siecle in Brussels – Naharin started to choreograph. In 1980 in New York, he formed, together with his wife, a new dance company and created choreographies for renowned companies worldwide.His work has not gone unrecognized and he has been awarded honorary doctorates from Israeli and US universities; the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government; and many other awards including the prestigious Israel Prize.Five years ago, in 2009, Naharin became a father. His partner, Japanese-born dancer Eri Nakamura, 30, is a graduate of The Australian Ballet School in Melbourne. She joined Batsheva in 2011. The couple lives, with their daughter Noga, in Tel Aviv.Despite the prizes and the recognition, Naharin has also experienced clashes with the Israeli establishment. In 1998, ultra- Orthodox Knesset Members demanded that Batsheva’s participation in Israel’s central jubilee ceremony be canceled because the company was scheduled to perform a segment from Naharin’s “Anaphaza” at the end of which the dancers were wearing underwear.Huge pressure from political figures – including the president – that the company change the dancers’ attire ended with a last-minute decision by Batsheva not to appear.Naharin, who at the time reacted to the censorship by resigning from his post (he later returned), has not given up on his struggle for artistic freedom. In “Mamootot,” one of the most enchanting segments is a long, powerful and tender duet that includes male nudity. But, today, he sounds calmer. “I think that overall we live in a country that has no censorship. And, obviously, nobody can censor what I do on stage. I can be criticized, maybe even boycotted,” he says, “but I am free.”When I ask what he means by boycotted, he explains simply, “I know that there are people who don’t come to see our shows because of my political views. But I want to live here. I like living here. Sometimes I feel like I live in hell. But, at the same time, I really want to be here. This is where I feel I am at my best, where I feel most alive. You know, I can go abroad and be very calm, but over there I might also become very numb.”
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