✦ Origins ✦
Batsheva Dance Company was founded in Tel Aviv in 1964 by philanthropist Bethsabée de Rothschild together with American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, who served as the company's first artistic advisor and shaped its early repertory around her own technique. The company's identity changed dramatically from 1990, when Ohad Naharin — an Israeli dancer and choreographer who had performed with Graham's own company in New York — became artistic director and began developing the movement practice that would become the company's global signature.
Gaga: A Movement Language
Naharin developed Gaga as both a training method for his company dancers and, distinctively, as a movement practice taught to the general public in classes worldwide. Gaga asks participants to focus on sensation and internal imagery rather than mirrors or set steps, building physical availability, stamina, and a highly specific quality of movement — explosive, sustained, and unusually alert to texture — that has become instantly recognizable as the company's house style on stage.
That style is visible across Naharin's company repertory, including widely toured works such as Minus 16 and Deca Dance, programs that repackage excerpts from his broader body of work into accessible evening-length shows.
Structure & Succession
Batsheva operates alongside a junior ensemble that gives younger dancers a pathway into the main company's demanding Gaga-based technique before they join the senior roster. Naharin later stepped back from the day-to-day artistic director role while remaining the company's house choreographer, continuing to create and restage work for Batsheva even as formal artistic leadership passed to others — a transition designed to keep Gaga's originator directly involved in the company's repertory rather than handing it off wholesale.
Why It Matters
Gaga's popularity as a public class format — taught in studios far beyond Israel and far beyond professional dance — has made Batsheva unusual among major companies in shaping how ordinary people move, not only what audiences watch. Naharin's decades of leadership built one of contemporary dance's most technically singular ensembles, and the company continues to develop new artistic leadership drawn from dancers who came up inside that tradition.