YAG By Ohad Naharin
Performed by Batsheva Dance Company
Duration: approx. 50 min without intermission
The show includes nudity*
“A magical journey in the recesses of body and time” (Idit Suslik, Achbar Ha’ir)
YAG is a chamber piece that links six dancers with an existential thread, transforming them into a family that shares the same movement DNA.
The question of how a family as a unit is ingrained in the body and activates it runs through YAG. In the face of the mantra chanted by the dancers – a biographical foothold that discloses their relationship – the dance erupts as an uncontrollable tremor, a vital force that binds them. The collective memory of the family unit in YAG comprises rhythms, vibrations, gestures, soft and disciplined movements, and ones that explode and cut through the air with sweat, passion, pain, and laughter. A voice tries to wrap around movement, and the movement flees the voice, undoing the ties that formed in the imagined family tree.
In YAG, Naharin touches the spiral, almost compulsive movement up and down life – a spiral that is how we walk away from our parents and towards them, even after they are gone, the iteration of movement in the flesh, a dance that stands as the opposite of death.
Performed by Batsheva dancers:
Chen Agron, Billy Barry, Yael Ben Ezer, Matan Cohen, Ben Green, Chiaki Horita, Sean Howe, Londiwe Khoza, Chun Woong Kim, Shir Levi, Adrienne Lipson, Ohad Mazor, Eri Nakamura, Gianni Notarnicola, Igor Ptashenchuk, Yoni (Yonatan) Simon, Hani Sirkis, Amalia Smith
Lighting & Stage Design: Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi)
Costumes: Eri Nakamura Music: John Zorn /
Music from the album Absinthe (Naked City), Gaetano Donizetti / Una furtiva lagrima sir D'amore, from the opera L'Elisir D'Amore (Jussi Bjoerling), John Taverner / In-Nomine, from the albums Rosa, Elizabethan Lute Music and Sixteenth Century Music for Viols, Ran Slavin / Bum Carib, from the album Thermo Swing
"Sweet and Sour": Tommy shles Shaffir, from the book "Me and My little sister" by Dan Timor, Am Oved Publishers Ltd., 2003
Photography: Ascaf
Dedicated to Roni Azgad and her family
Originally commissioned for Batsheva Dance Company
World premiere – July 3rd, 1996, Suzanne Dellal Center, Tel Aviv
