✦ Origins ✦
Ohad Naharin, then artistic director of Batsheva Dance Company, created Sadeh21 in 2011, premiering it in May at the Sherover Theater in Jerusalem as a commission for the Israel Festival and Toronto's Luminato Festival, before it moved to Batsheva's home stage at the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Tel Aviv weeks later. Its title combines the Hebrew word "sadeh," meaning field, with the number 21, referring to the work's structure of 21 sequential sections, or "sadot," each functioning as a distinct choreographic field flowing into the next without pause.
The piece stands as a landmark, large-scale expression of Gaga, the improvisation-based movement language Naharin developed over decades and instilled throughout Batsheva's training. Rather than following a fixed narrative, the work is organized as an accumulating sequence of ensemble and solo episodes exploring individual and collective states — tenderness, aggression, isolation, unity — moving fluidly between them across its length. As with much of Naharin's work, the piece grew directly out of Batsheva's daily company class, where Gaga principles of sensation-driven, continuously moving improvisation are used to generate raw material that Naharin and his dancers then shape into set choreography, keeping a visible line between the company's training practice and its finished repertory.
Structure
The work is staged on a bare, largely unadorned stage dominated by a single tall white wall at the rear, which dancers periodically fall backward from, are caught against, or scale, using it throughout as a recurring physical and metaphorical threshold. The 21 sections vary widely in scale and tone, moving from full-company unison surges to exposed solos, with the piece's momentum built from the accumulation and juxtaposition of these fields rather than from a conventional dramatic arc. Some sections deploy the full company in dense, driving unison, drawing on the same grounded, weighted physicality found throughout Gaga practice, while others narrow to a single dancer working in near silence, so that the piece's scale and intensity shift dramatically from one field to the next rather than building steadily toward a single climax.
Reception & Legacy
Sadeh21 is recognized internationally as one of Naharin's most complete large-ensemble statements of Gaga's expressive range, extending the visibility Batsheva had already gained through earlier repertory. It toured extensively and is frequently cited in writing on Gaga as a case study for how the movement language scales from an individual training practice into full-company choreographic structure, and it remains part of Batsheva's core touring repertory. Its reception also strengthened Gaga's growing profile beyond Batsheva itself, at a time when Naharin's movement language was increasingly being taught in open classes to dancers and non-dancers internationally, giving audiences who encountered Sadeh21 on tour a frame of reference they could sometimes access firsthand through Gaga classes in their own cities.
That direct line between a company's daily training and its finished repertory is unusual even among contemporary companies, and it sets Batsheva's process apart from choreographer-driven ensembles such as Complexions Contemporary Ballet, where a single choreographic voice, rather than a shared training practice, defines the house style.
See Also
Read more about Batsheva Dance Company, where Naharin developed his Gaga movement language — see the glossary for more on Gaga.