In the twenty-first century, the Gaga movement language has been a pervasive influence in the work of contemporary dancemakers, especially those connected to the Batsheva Dance Company or Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Keren Rosenberg, a dancer and choreographer currently based in Amsterdam, employs the manipulation of body and space as metaphor for the flexibility of gender and power dynamics. Specifically, in Body House, the sensory, aesthetic approach of the Gaga movement language magnifies the choices of the choreographer to propose as well as contradict archetypes of gender, sensuality and power.
Keren Rosenberg began her training in Israel with The Jerusalem Dance Academy and The Academy of the Kibbutz Dance Company. In 2011, then-artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company and inventor of the Gaga movement language, Ohad Naharin, invited Rosenberg to study the Gaga movement language under him and become a certified teacher. Previously, she had danced for Idan Sharabi, another Israeli choreographer who had experience with Naharin. These exposures to the modalities of the Gaga movement language have perhaps been infused into Rosenberg’s personal practice. Her work “explores a physicality that can liquidate the boundaries between the body and the environment, between social skin and the primal body underneath,” which parallels the objectives of “awareness of physical weaknesses, awakens numb areas, exposes physical fixations, and offers ways for their elimination” of Gaga (Rosenberg).
Naharin developed Gaga throughout his choreographic career with the Batsheva Dance Company. The training is intended to “increase awareness of and further amplify sensation,” tuning the dancer’s body through multi-layered tasks (“Gaga, the Movement Language Developed by Ohad Naharin”). In Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin's Movement Research, Einav Katan uses the example of the “float” command as an example of the sensual emphasis and metaphor-making inherent in the Gaga movement language. Katan notes, “As an exchange, the concrete feeling of bodily sensations (heaviness, energy) reforms the metaphor with its physical embodiment, as sensual meaning. This reformation is supposed here as a matter of embodied abduction in the process of sense making” (Katan 47). These ideas of sensuality are underscored by Rosenberg’s interest in“intuitive, emotional and sensorial entity, dealing with the embodiment of core driven sensations such as sensuality, sexuality, pleasure, lust and pleasure.” The imagery and instructions that make up the Gaga movement language are essentially metaphorical and abstract, which welcome open interpretation as well as puts power in the hands of the dancer to interpret the commands rather than mimic the choreographer’s interpretation.
This is especially useful considering the fluidity of the subject matter explored in Body House. Body House considers the human body as a physical metaphor for the fluidity of identity - skin conceals and protects the intimate inside, but is also a sensuous and permeable layer of the self. The notes for the piece are as follows: “The body and me are not the same. The body is the house in which I live in. I don’t own this house and this house is not me, though its my house. Sometimes I feel my body as a home and sometimes it can be an unfamiliar property.” Rosenberg calls her creative practice and pedagogy “Body House,” which describes the body as a pliable vessel and as one aspect of the individual. Looking at the chronology of her work, the piece, “Body House” can be considered a thesis through which Rosenberg introduces aligns pedagogic principles from the Gaga movement language into her own creative research and choreography. Within the context of the work, these principles are a metaphor for Rosenberg’s thoughts on the fluidity of social ideas like gender and the individual’s free will to manipulate them.
On her website, Rosenberg describes her creative philosophy: “I believe that every body has its own language, a language that should find a way to co-exist within [its] social context. I find myself in constant search to extract the essence of the individual, not as a mean of attack but rather as a mean to find connections.” This was manifest in a workshop I took with Rosenberg, in which Rosenberg also discussed her current research on “gender fucking.” This practice is an application of her creative philosophy, which specifically examines gender conventions and physicality through experimental methods. In the studio, we experimented with postures and embodiments that felt essentially masculine or feminine, shying away from tropes or stereotypes. Rather than critique or comment on the implications of gender, Rosenberg’s Body House principles and “gender fucking” prompts allowed for a complex and multifaceted insight on the use of movement to describe the social and outward vestiges of gender. In a sense, the movement language approach offered by Gaga sensibilities allows dancers to craft propositions about power and ultimately, identity.
The piece begins in a darkened room, and an overhead light slowly illuminates two female bodies. They first appear connected at the mouth, slowly writhing around and toward one another. One female is in a black bodysuit which covers her entire body from the neck down. Her dark hair almost matches the bodysuit, and is pulled up neatly into an updo. Her counterpart, a blonde with a loose ponytail, wears loose, cotton, naturally colored shirt with nude briefs. The connected creature oscillates liquidly from stage right to left and begins to more forcefully pierce space as the dark-haired woman thrusts her neck toward the light-haired woman, who reacts with a rippling retreat as the pattern continues and then reverses. Eventually, the back-and-forth movement condenses and the pair peacock at one another from a stationary position, jerking their heads back and forth. They quickly and unceremoniously separate, and the dark-haired woman quickly steps away. Though the space between the two is still intimate, the sudden change magnifies the effect of their separation.
The two women then perform an identical phrase, not quite facing each other but not quite flatly facing the diagonal. The dark-haired dancer watches the light-haired dancer intently, traveling gestures of the phrase around the light-haired dancer, whose focus is internal. The two begin to riff and depart from their unison, the dark-haired dancer traveling downstage slightly as the light-haired dancer retreats upstage. Complementarities and contrast between their body shapes - not their gestures - reference their intimate connection as they curve toward and away from each other. The dancer in black maintains her steadfast focus and reacts primarily to the dancer in nude, who continues in her internal focus. The effect is voyeuristic, and the dark-haired dancer seems to revel in this demonstration of power and begins to rapidly repeat gestures and spasm. The dancer in nude suddenly falls to the floor - the interruption makes the dancer in black pause briefly before returning to her pattern. The light-haired dancer lays still on the floor as the dark-haired dancer extrapolates these spasmodic tics into full-bodied gestures, with brief pauses as the light-haired dancer suddenly shifts position on the floor. The dancer in nude oozes across the floor upstage, contorting into yoga-like poses and liquefying through transitions. Eventually, the dark-haired dancer joins her on the floor, and the two begin mirroring each other, becoming increasingly intertwined. The taut, connected poses of the final two minutes is a circular reference to the beginning of the piece; the light dims as if in retrograde of the opening.
The contrast in appearance but similarity in phrasework of the two dancers suggests that they are in some way complements or opposites; perhaps, they are both. The neat ponytail and covered body convey restraint or some unnaturalness, while the loose and organic costume of the blonde-haired dancer projects natural energy in comparison. Throughout the work, they are in some way addressing one another through physical connection, unison, and complementary positions. The circular end also reinforces that there is some cyclical relationship between the two dancers, perhaps also connoting the circular scope of gender ideas from Rosenberg’s “gender fucking” explorations. Though the movement articulation remains pliable and supple, the characters played by the two dancers remains constant throughout the piece, almost as if navigating such a spectrum. Their movement is an abstracted conversation on two accounts: first, through the abstracted and visceral movement language of Gaga, and two, through the conceptual negotiation of these ideas.
Rosenberg’s choice to begin the work with the image of two female bodies connected by the mouth evokes images of female-female sexual interactions as well as a disconcerting creature-human. This also serves to objectify the performers by introducing them first as non-human, which sets the stage for further examination of their “body houses” as vessels and changeable. The juxtaposition of these references set the tone for the rest of the piece - Rosenberg at once employs sensuality without sexualizing the performers’ bodies. The liquid interactions between the two female bodies is a display of supple athleticism that serves to focus the audience's attention on the bodies of the performers rather than an emotional or narrative arc.
Throughout the piece, choreographic choices reveal important indicators of power dynamics. In the beginning, the dark-haired woman forcefully directs the connected creature by aggressively lunging toward her counterpart, who is forced to acquiesce each time or break away from the form. Their connection at the mouth, overlaid with this clear pattern of exchange, projects archetypal ideas of masculine aggression and female submission. Secondly, the intimate positioning of the two dancers also connotes that this might reference a violent sex act. This relationship is continued as the dark-haired dancer intently watches the lighter-haired dancer in her solo. This image also reinforces tropes: “dark” aggressors and tropes of fair, white female victims. The dancer in dark clothes also strides toward the audience while the dancer in light clothes makes a retreat away, upstage. It is only when the dark-haired dancer chooses to join the light-haired dancer on the floor that the pair begin to re-establish their connected shape once more, which further underscores the superiority of the dark-haired dancer. The sharp, erratic movements of the dark-haired dancer can also be interpreted as aggressive and conventionally “masculine,” while the slow, liquid poses of the fair-haired dancer may serve as visual juxtaposition or connote other “masculine” traits like control.
Keren Rosenberg’s creative practice, Body House, and principles of “gender fucking” are imbibed with the movement language of Gaga to ultimately present a sensuous, abstract duet. The Gaga movement language’s emphasis on the heightened sensitivity and its connection to the primal body are effective in projecting intimacy, power dynamics, and gender ideas. Through the costuming and choreographic choices in the piece, “Body House,” Rosenberg workshops these ideas through the aesthetic manipulation of the performers’ bodies. Throughout the work, Rosenberg succeeds in differentiating the performers’ outside, “social skin” from the ideas about gender that they embody.
Keren Rosenberg began her training in Israel with The Jerusalem Dance Academy and The Academy of the Kibbutz Dance Company. In 2011, then-artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company and inventor of the Gaga movement language, Ohad Naharin, invited Rosenberg to study the Gaga movement language under him and become a certified teacher. Previously, she had danced for Idan Sharabi, another Israeli choreographer who had experience with Naharin. These exposures to the modalities of the Gaga movement language have perhaps been infused into Rosenberg’s personal practice. Her work “explores a physicality that can liquidate the boundaries between the body and the environment, between social skin and the primal body underneath,” which parallels the objectives of “awareness of physical weaknesses, awakens numb areas, exposes physical fixations, and offers ways for their elimination” of Gaga (Rosenberg).
Naharin developed Gaga throughout his choreographic career with the Batsheva Dance Company. The training is intended to “increase awareness of and further amplify sensation,” tuning the dancer’s body through multi-layered tasks (“Gaga, the Movement Language Developed by Ohad Naharin”). In Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin's Movement Research, Einav Katan uses the example of the “float” command as an example of the sensual emphasis and metaphor-making inherent in the Gaga movement language. Katan notes, “As an exchange, the concrete feeling of bodily sensations (heaviness, energy) reforms the metaphor with its physical embodiment, as sensual meaning. This reformation is supposed here as a matter of embodied abduction in the process of sense making” (Katan 47). These ideas of sensuality are underscored by Rosenberg’s interest in“intuitive, emotional and sensorial entity, dealing with the embodiment of core driven sensations such as sensuality, sexuality, pleasure, lust and pleasure.” The imagery and instructions that make up the Gaga movement language are essentially metaphorical and abstract, which welcome open interpretation as well as puts power in the hands of the dancer to interpret the commands rather than mimic the choreographer’s interpretation.
This is especially useful considering the fluidity of the subject matter explored in Body House. Body House considers the human body as a physical metaphor for the fluidity of identity - skin conceals and protects the intimate inside, but is also a sensuous and permeable layer of the self. The notes for the piece are as follows: “The body and me are not the same. The body is the house in which I live in. I don’t own this house and this house is not me, though its my house. Sometimes I feel my body as a home and sometimes it can be an unfamiliar property.” Rosenberg calls her creative practice and pedagogy “Body House,” which describes the body as a pliable vessel and as one aspect of the individual. Looking at the chronology of her work, the piece, “Body House” can be considered a thesis through which Rosenberg introduces aligns pedagogic principles from the Gaga movement language into her own creative research and choreography. Within the context of the work, these principles are a metaphor for Rosenberg’s thoughts on the fluidity of social ideas like gender and the individual’s free will to manipulate them.
On her website, Rosenberg describes her creative philosophy: “I believe that every body has its own language, a language that should find a way to co-exist within [its] social context. I find myself in constant search to extract the essence of the individual, not as a mean of attack but rather as a mean to find connections.” This was manifest in a workshop I took with Rosenberg, in which Rosenberg also discussed her current research on “gender fucking.” This practice is an application of her creative philosophy, which specifically examines gender conventions and physicality through experimental methods. In the studio, we experimented with postures and embodiments that felt essentially masculine or feminine, shying away from tropes or stereotypes. Rather than critique or comment on the implications of gender, Rosenberg’s Body House principles and “gender fucking” prompts allowed for a complex and multifaceted insight on the use of movement to describe the social and outward vestiges of gender. In a sense, the movement language approach offered by Gaga sensibilities allows dancers to craft propositions about power and ultimately, identity.
The piece begins in a darkened room, and an overhead light slowly illuminates two female bodies. They first appear connected at the mouth, slowly writhing around and toward one another. One female is in a black bodysuit which covers her entire body from the neck down. Her dark hair almost matches the bodysuit, and is pulled up neatly into an updo. Her counterpart, a blonde with a loose ponytail, wears loose, cotton, naturally colored shirt with nude briefs. The connected creature oscillates liquidly from stage right to left and begins to more forcefully pierce space as the dark-haired woman thrusts her neck toward the light-haired woman, who reacts with a rippling retreat as the pattern continues and then reverses. Eventually, the back-and-forth movement condenses and the pair peacock at one another from a stationary position, jerking their heads back and forth. They quickly and unceremoniously separate, and the dark-haired woman quickly steps away. Though the space between the two is still intimate, the sudden change magnifies the effect of their separation.
The two women then perform an identical phrase, not quite facing each other but not quite flatly facing the diagonal. The dark-haired dancer watches the light-haired dancer intently, traveling gestures of the phrase around the light-haired dancer, whose focus is internal. The two begin to riff and depart from their unison, the dark-haired dancer traveling downstage slightly as the light-haired dancer retreats upstage. Complementarities and contrast between their body shapes - not their gestures - reference their intimate connection as they curve toward and away from each other. The dancer in black maintains her steadfast focus and reacts primarily to the dancer in nude, who continues in her internal focus. The effect is voyeuristic, and the dark-haired dancer seems to revel in this demonstration of power and begins to rapidly repeat gestures and spasm. The dancer in nude suddenly falls to the floor - the interruption makes the dancer in black pause briefly before returning to her pattern. The light-haired dancer lays still on the floor as the dark-haired dancer extrapolates these spasmodic tics into full-bodied gestures, with brief pauses as the light-haired dancer suddenly shifts position on the floor. The dancer in nude oozes across the floor upstage, contorting into yoga-like poses and liquefying through transitions. Eventually, the dark-haired dancer joins her on the floor, and the two begin mirroring each other, becoming increasingly intertwined. The taut, connected poses of the final two minutes is a circular reference to the beginning of the piece; the light dims as if in retrograde of the opening.
The contrast in appearance but similarity in phrasework of the two dancers suggests that they are in some way complements or opposites; perhaps, they are both. The neat ponytail and covered body convey restraint or some unnaturalness, while the loose and organic costume of the blonde-haired dancer projects natural energy in comparison. Throughout the work, they are in some way addressing one another through physical connection, unison, and complementary positions. The circular end also reinforces that there is some cyclical relationship between the two dancers, perhaps also connoting the circular scope of gender ideas from Rosenberg’s “gender fucking” explorations. Though the movement articulation remains pliable and supple, the characters played by the two dancers remains constant throughout the piece, almost as if navigating such a spectrum. Their movement is an abstracted conversation on two accounts: first, through the abstracted and visceral movement language of Gaga, and two, through the conceptual negotiation of these ideas.
Rosenberg’s choice to begin the work with the image of two female bodies connected by the mouth evokes images of female-female sexual interactions as well as a disconcerting creature-human. This also serves to objectify the performers by introducing them first as non-human, which sets the stage for further examination of their “body houses” as vessels and changeable. The juxtaposition of these references set the tone for the rest of the piece - Rosenberg at once employs sensuality without sexualizing the performers’ bodies. The liquid interactions between the two female bodies is a display of supple athleticism that serves to focus the audience's attention on the bodies of the performers rather than an emotional or narrative arc.
Throughout the piece, choreographic choices reveal important indicators of power dynamics. In the beginning, the dark-haired woman forcefully directs the connected creature by aggressively lunging toward her counterpart, who is forced to acquiesce each time or break away from the form. Their connection at the mouth, overlaid with this clear pattern of exchange, projects archetypal ideas of masculine aggression and female submission. Secondly, the intimate positioning of the two dancers also connotes that this might reference a violent sex act. This relationship is continued as the dark-haired dancer intently watches the lighter-haired dancer in her solo. This image also reinforces tropes: “dark” aggressors and tropes of fair, white female victims. The dancer in dark clothes also strides toward the audience while the dancer in light clothes makes a retreat away, upstage. It is only when the dark-haired dancer chooses to join the light-haired dancer on the floor that the pair begin to re-establish their connected shape once more, which further underscores the superiority of the dark-haired dancer. The sharp, erratic movements of the dark-haired dancer can also be interpreted as aggressive and conventionally “masculine,” while the slow, liquid poses of the fair-haired dancer may serve as visual juxtaposition or connote other “masculine” traits like control.
Keren Rosenberg’s creative practice, Body House, and principles of “gender fucking” are imbibed with the movement language of Gaga to ultimately present a sensuous, abstract duet. The Gaga movement language’s emphasis on the heightened sensitivity and its connection to the primal body are effective in projecting intimacy, power dynamics, and gender ideas. Through the costuming and choreographic choices in the piece, “Body House,” Rosenberg workshops these ideas through the aesthetic manipulation of the performers’ bodies. Throughout the work, Rosenberg succeeds in differentiating the performers’ outside, “social skin” from the ideas about gender that they embody.