With a hand on the pulse – Newspaper Kommersant No. 240 (7441) of 12/24/2022

The TheaterHD project of the art association CoolConnections, with the support of the Embassy of the State of Israel, has prepared a mini-film festival in honor of the 70th anniversary of choreographer Ohad Naharin, an icon of modern dance. Program “Ohad Naharin. Freedom of dance” is shown in cinemas in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg. About the hero of the day – Leila Guchmazova.

In terms of biography, the hero of the festival is a standard: he was born in a kibbutz to a father who is a psychologist and a mother who is an instructor in body psychotherapy, at the age of 22 he started dancing with a good education, was immediately noticed by Martha Graham, who helped the land of his ancestors, and found himself in New York, where he got the best from the same Graham, at Juilliard, at the School of American Ballet at the New York City Ballet. He was invited to Israel in 1990 to head the Batsheva Dance company. It was Naharin who brought her to world fame, and he also accumulated thoughts about dance into a special system, the famous “gaga dance”. This system puts at the forefront attention to one’s own impulses and subtle reflection, but without the charlatanry that usually accompanies them: although Nakharin trumps the absence of mirrors in the repzals, he has strict requirements for the craft of artists. That is, in the dance with such a message, there is no weak-willed cleverness – it is sharp, impulsive, full of energy and in its delightful thirst for life is in tune with the national character. So Naharin is the first and best among Israeli choreographers, but he does not fit well as an official cultural calling card.

Because he does not campaign for anything, even for the environment. And when “Batsheva” was asked to perform at an official event, dressed a little more thoroughly than it was supposed to be for the performance, so as not to offend the feelings of believers, Nakharin slammed the door. Because freedom of dance. Officialdom in general is categorically not his element – whether it’s a wrinkled T-shirt on a lame bicycle to cut through Neve Tsedek with a satisfied look (I saw it myself).

There are three films in the program of this mini-festival: firstly, “Mr. Gaga” directed by Tomer Heymann, known to those involved in a semi-legal form for five years and explaining Nakharin’s system on the fingers; it was shown before by the Moscow Jewish Film Festival and Diana Vishneva’s Context. Secondly, the film “Out of Focus” shot by the same director about the preparation of the play “Deca Dance”, the author’s summary of Nakharin’s own productions (the play was brought by Valery Shadrin to the Chekhov Festival). The main surprise is Hora, the February premiere adapted by Naharin for the big screen. Actually, you need to watch three films, but especially the black-and-white Chorus.

It strikingly merges expression and non-fussiness. The camera calmly pans close-ups of those sitting – a black background, different faces of different races of screwed up humanity, which has ceased to understand what is happening. The Gaga system instructs you not to go back without feeling the pull back. This is how people begin to move, meditatively, at the same time, each in his own logic, composing a hypnotic sketch. Instead of yet another minimalism, Nakharin’s austere aestheticism, for a start, offers Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun as a soundtrack – only remixed to a cosmic sound. There are no fragile or sick people in Naharin’s troupe, but all the more amazingly these dense bodies touchingly explore themselves, others and space. The advocate of freedom Nakharin is still a dictator – he works superbly with the masses, loads with synchronism, arranges people in a chess line with the fifth position and in a “swan” square. Sometimes it teases: white and yellow people, having faced nose to nose, attentively sniff dissimilar each other. You can’t call them a duet, the dancers don’t interact, but call to each other – that’s how you sometimes feel kinship with a random person you meet. No “peace to the world”, but everything is clear.

The film was clearly controlled not by the director, but by the choreographer, and he did not have the task of building a new cinematic reality – he does not fuss with camera angles and framing. But there was a task to convey to the viewer the performance in all the details of the local mix of high and low. Under Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the athletic heroes of Leni Riefenstahl appear on the stage, and when the artists fall into the splits in one direction, the inevitable Wagnerian Ride of the Valkyries erupts – but all this should not be confusing. Unwilling to grow wiser, humanity in Nakharin stubbornly goes forward, knocked down by an unknown force. But he also puts a tight-fitting gentle duet next to him, hinting that in our imperfect empathy there is a chance for salvation.