By Gilly Katz Ben Sheffer, clinical psychologist
Recently, I went back to speaking Gaga, Ohad Naharin’s movement language. Last May, some 80 people from all over the world gathered to dance in the lush surroundings of Piedmont, at the Italian dance school Orsolina28. For some, this was the first physical encounter with Gaga teachers, after two years of dancing online in the time of Covid-19, and for almost all of us this was the first time meeting Ohad Naharin.
Gaga is a babyish word, an infant’s first nonsensical babbling, beckoning us to remain in alert and curious attentiveness to the world, in constant awareness to our sensations, simultaneously holding and releasing. “When you feel your muscles burn, that you cannot go on, you make small gestures, small movement, with a little smile, and tell yourself, this is a piece of cake, a piece of cake!” Naharin does not compromise on movement for one second. You do not stop moving, even if it is only subtle movement, one you cannot see. We are parts and pieces, organs that one has to awaken, restart and sense, all the time, and hone their movement while constantly maintaining flexibility between textures, intensities, images, and rhythms. And there is not a single part of us that is not alive, the eyes are turned towards the wide-open world, the expanses, the skin senses. And we are awake. Always awake.
Gaga is the psychoanalytic institute of the dance world.
In the final session with Ohad Naharin, while dancing, we were asked to hum the tune of a lullaby, and at the same time to increase the tempo of the dance, that became more and more intense. “Feel the gap. Lean more and more into this gap,” asks Naharin, as the low humming continues, and the tempo of the movement increases. The studio becomes a place without words, emotive, strangely human, almost hypnotic. Most of us teared up. Some wanted to talk, others to be alone, to process.
In the closing conversation, one of the older women said in a choked voice, “Gaga changes lives.”
In his article “Standing in the Spaces” (1996), the American psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg describes how in our emotional life we move between different “self-states,” identifying mental health with the flexibility to linger in the spaces between different self-states. Mental wealth, says Bromberg, “is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them – the capacity to feel like one self while being many.” Emotional existence of this kind allows us to experience our selfhood in a multidimensional way, and to move between different self-states. This ability, it seems, is lost when we are rigid or haunted.
Naharin speaks with the body the ability to move within difficulty, to accept it as a part of us, to embrace it, observe it. To not be only it, but also an observing, playful, compassionate, supposedly successful, soft, flexible, suggestive self. He asks us to observe the difficulty and at the same time to be in the able, moving, embracing, forgiving body, as two co-existing self-states, with us moving in the spaces between them.
Like Naharin’s instruction to dance with open eyes, to see those dancing around us, to move together while paying attention to others next to us, allowing ourself to be influenced by our surroundings, the same is true of the therapy room. Two bodies, two psyches. We dance a joint dance, at times subtle, in the shared space, to inner music composed together in the room. We have nothing except the space between us and the patient to create this connection. In many respects, the space is the same space – between me and the patient, between his multiple self-states and mine, between our own different self- states. Those move in the shared space and are habitually influenced by one another, constantly constructing themselves outside of the precise words, in a nonverbal existence, in a type of shared Gaga.
Photo: Tommy Pascal
