The company, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, will perform Naharin’s latest work, “Venezuela,” which contains familiar ingredients like ferocious solos, kaleidoscopic ensemble scenes and moments of theatrical audaciousness. Here, it’s all hung on a bold conceptual structure: It’s performed twice. After 40 minutes, the choreography repeats, although with different music, different lighting and different dancers.
And something else will be different on this visit: Naharin is no longer in charge of Batsheva. Last September, after nearly 30 years as the company’s artistic director, he handed the reins to Gili Navot, a former dancer with the company, while he assumed the position of house choreographer. In that role, Naharin will continue to create new work, while Navot will be responsible for the daily decision-making and long-term direction of the company.
Is this the beginning of a new era or just an administrative reorganization? “Sometimes it feels like, wow, it’s a huge change,” Navot said in a phone interview from Tel Aviv. “And I feel that we’re different, very different, Ohad and I.” On the other hand, she said: “Ohad’s here. He’s creating. He’s very vital and continuing to invent himself every day. So, it feels like both at the same time.”
The transition brings to a close a thrilling chapter in Batsheva’s history, one that has helped fuel a dance boom in Israel and raised the country’s profile as a hub of contemporary dance.
The company, founded in 1964, gained fast acclaim for its vigorous interpretations of Martha Graham’s work, while a stream of visiting top-shelf international choreographers, including Jerome Robbins and Donald McKayle, provided it with a robust repertory. But after a decade, Graham pulled her dances and the company struggled to find its own artistic voice. By the late-1980s, Batsheva was having an identity crisis — and it was running through directors every couple years.
Then, in 1990, Naharin arrived. Or, rather, he returned. A former Batsheva dancer whom Graham had wooed to New York to be in her company, Naharin became the company’s artistic director. Now a choreographer, he began to build a body of physically fearless, darkly comic work, which gave Batsheva an electric, identifiable style all its own. Under Naharin’s direction, the company has ascended to the upper echelons of contemporary dance while a generation of former Batsheva dancers has helped populate an impressive independent choreographer scene in Israel, with some establishing themselves abroad.
Navot, 38, watched all of this unfold as an aspiring dancer in Haifa, Israel. She encountered the company as a high school student and remembered the strong impression Naharin’s work made on her, visually and emotionally. At 18, she joined Batsheva’s junior company, the Young Ensemble, before graduating to the main company, where she danced for seven years. In the decade since she departed — she left to start a family and get a degree in dance education — she has regularly restaged Naharin’s work and teaches his popular movement method, known as Gaga. She understands the legacy she’s inheriting.
“I feel the weight of it,” she said. And she was surprised by the offer. “I had to do a double-check with myself to feel that I’m good enough to do it,” she said, “or capable to do it. I had to give myself the legitimacy to give it a try.”
“She was always turned on by research and discovery,” Naharin said of Navot in an email, adding, “She knows how to turn conflict into dialogue.”
Naharin was always a reluctant administrator, preferring to create work and explore movement than to manage departments and chase donors. He stepped down as director once before, in 2003 (Yoshifumi Inao took over), but returned a year later when the company decided it still needed him at the wheel. Now, he said, the company is in a better place financially and artistically, and this transition feels more organic.
His happiness is palpable. “So much weight is off my shoulders,” Naharin said. “I feel calm knowing the work is being done as well, and probably even better, as when I was director.”
Navot’s appointment was announced more than a year before she took over. Beginning in January 2018, she started shadowing Naharin and participating in the running of the company, getting “cooked into it gradually,” as she put it. Even now, the two are in constant communication. “We meet or talk almost every day,” she said. “Sometimes I make the decisions based on the big picture, but he adds his input into the picture since it’s his work.”
In recent years, that work has felt both more expansive and more probing. In the case of “Venezuela,” Naharin is testing his maxim that music isn’t necessary for dance, and needn’t serve a determining role. “Venezuela’s” alternating scores — a Rage Against the Machine song in one half, Gregorian chants in the other — allowed him to explore “the groove that happens inside you,” he said.
Naharin remains coy about what the title of his abstract, episodic work refers to. One version has it that he spun a globe and planted his finger on Venezuela. Though that country’s political situation has been deteriorating for years, it was not front-page news when the work made its debut in Tel Aviv in 2016. The company says that “Venezuela” is in no way commenting on the real Venezuela.
For almost 30 years, American audiences have known Batsheva almost exclusively through Naharin’s work. With Naharin as house choreographer, that won’t change anytime soon but Navot is open to the possibility. “If we have a meaningful process here,” she said, referring to a guest choreographer, “I’d love it to go on tour as well.”
In the meantime, Navot is settling into her role overseeing both the main and junior companies. For his part, Naharin said he is “trying to make what I have to do and what I want to do as similar as possible.” This includes family duties (he has a young daughter), sharing Gaga technique and creating new works.
Both are also focused on the company’s new home, a multi-arts campus that Batsheva is building in partnership with the Tel Aviv municipality, designed by renowned British architect David Adjaye. The site, once the city’s old bus station, is in the low-income neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan, home to many refugees and foreign workers. Some residents have voiced concern that the project will gentrify the area. Batsheva is taking that into account, said Dina Aldor, the company’s executive director.
“That’s why we chose to work with David Adjaye, because he does projects which are social in nature,” Aldor said. “We’re developing with the city various ways in which to include the community, both in the planning and in the usage of the place afterward.” The $52 million project is on track to break ground next year and be completed in 2022.
The campus, anchored by Batsheva, will host shows and exhibitions across the spectrum of the visual and performing arts. In creating a space for artists, Batsheva is not just building a new home, but also stepping up to become a steward of Tel Aviv cultural life.
That’s quite a portfolio for Navot, who only a decade ago was just another member of the company. But being a Batsheva dancer has always been about exploring limits, and, she said, “I enjoy putting myself outside my comfort zone.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.