Gaga as Metatechnique: Negotiating Choreography, Improvisation, and Technique in a Neoliberal Dance Market

Feel the magma in your body," the teacher yelled out over the pounding club beats. "Bring the texture in through your hands and feet." My arms were extended from my body, and my right heel popped up as I tried to move texture from my heel through my leg, hip, torso, neck, then head. I wasn't sure how texture was supposed to feel or look, so I tried adding weight and tension to my muscles as I slowly undulated my extremities and torso in no particular pattern. Turning my head to the right, I saw a fellow classmate limply moving her limbs with low energy, looking like the calm floating sensation we had started class with. I wondered if that calm texture was what the teacher was talking about. I was about to experiment with this in my own body when the instructor yelled: "No, guys! FEEL the texture!" His loud voice drew everyone's attention as he moved near the limp dancer. "You can't be feeling magma and have dead flesh in your hands," he demonstrated, relaxing his fingers and wrists down to the floor. "The flesh needs to be ALIVE!" He shot energy through his fingertips and then began actively wriggling the tension through his palms, wrists, and arms before it traveled through the rest of his body. Around the studio, the dancers' energy increased, trying to follow his direction. As the music engulfed the room and the teacher's voice faded, I turned my attention inward again and focused on my hands, imagining moving them through molasses and taking this sticky texture through the rest of my body.

This process of learning how to embody magma—a Gaga principle defined as "feeding texture from hands and feet into rest of body"¹—during a Gaga class in the 2015 Tel Aviv Summer Intensive illustrates the blurring of improvisation, direct physical instruction, and students' choices in the pedagogical structure of Gaga classes. This complex practice is marketed simply as Naharin's "movement language." Using this vague label privileges the individual's interpretation of how to express oneself, which suggests a disengagement from the cultural, pedagogical, and economic politics at play in Gaga. This practice was developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and made available to the public in the early 2000s in Tel Aviv. Initially developed as Naharin's unnamed personal practice, he began to teach "Ohad's class" to the Batsheva Dance Company soon after he became artistic director in 1990 (Galili 2015). He was quickly encouraged by Batsheva staff members to give these classes to nondancers in Tel Aviv, and by the early 2000s he had named the practice Gaga and developed it into two tracks: Gaga/dancers and Gaga/people. Gaga/people classes are designed for individuals with little to no movement or dance experience, and Gaga/dancers is designed for dancers who have a wider range of movement and dynamics available to them. While dancers may use this training to benefit their performance careers, both classes adhere to the same general rules, activities, and principles. In the rest of this article, I focus on the practice of Gaga/dancers.²

Combining the approaches to movement creation found in dance technique, choreography, and improvisation these Gaga classes can be better understood not as a movement language, but rather as a "metatechnique." This term encompasses a pedagogical as well as a political reading of dancing. The concept of metatechnique emerges out of an analysis of the agency of a dancer, where dance scholar Randy Martin argues that dancers maintain individual agency even while working for a choreographer because the dancer's internal negotiation of bodily training and technique are necessary to learn and execute choreography. He wrote in 1998 that "choreography is a metatechnique. It is a method for generating means of movement [offering] a basis for differentiating movement values out of a given cultural context that provides the orienting principles for a body of techniques" (Martin 1998, 214). This definition accurately describes what Gaga does: teach students strategies for differentiating movement qualities and forms...