Decadance, by the Batsheva Dance Company

In 1964, Martha Graham and Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild founded the Batsheva Dance Company  in Tel Aviv. The company, considered to be the Israeli national ballet, has been directed by Ohad Naharin since 1990. Naharin is a multi-award-winning choreographer trained by Marta Graham and Maurice Béjart.

He is now one of the major players on the international choreographic scene. His technique, which he himself named the “Gaga technique”, to use a childish word and avoid always talking about “his language”, gives a particular colour to the movement of his dancers. In 2016, filmmaker Tomer Heymann dedicated a documentary to him entitled Mr Gaga.

In 2000, Ohad Naharin created Decadance to celebrate ten years leading the Batsheva Dance Company. A collection of excerpts from company performances, the play contains the DNA of Ohad Naharin's choreographic writing. The choreographer constantly recreates it by adding new fragments to his creations or by arranging it differently, “like one destroys a house to rebuild it from the same pieces”.

A true anthology of the Batsheva Dance Company’s repertoire, this flagship work concentrates the diversity of its dancers’ movements, from the most reserved gesture to the most expansive.

Gaga Dance is a contemporary dance method developed by Ohad Naharin and used daily by the dancers of the Batsheva. At once a physical language and a pedagogical approach, it is “another way of preparing the body, a toolbox for the dancers”. The Gaga technique aims to develop speed, explosive power and movement texture within a broad creative freedom.

Taught today in many countries, it is aimed at both professional dancers and amateurs. The range of Gaga-style movements is particularly apparent in the Decadance show.

Brazil, The United States, Australia, Canada, China ... Since its creation, Decadance has roamed stages around the world. The success of the performance can be easily explained: constantly reinvented, it is always a plunge to the heart of the Batsheva.

It is also a repertory work that inspires the world’s greatest dance training institutes: The Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York, and the Opéra de Paris have notably taken it up, allowing successive generations of dancers to share memories of Gaga dance.