• the217
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• Dancing from Durham, N.C.

Despite ever-increasing fame and proximity to the limelight, Gossip Girl, Perez Hilton and excessive media have nothing on modern dance

choreographer Ohad Naharin.

Naharin, the artistic director of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, is the 2009 recipient of the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for $50,000.

It is hard to imagine that anyone is able to escape the wrath of a society that emulates and exploits the rich and famous, a society focused on scandal and overindulgence. Yet Naharin has found a way.

“I have nothing to hide. I don’t have any secrets,” he said.

Naharin lives life transparently in an effort to maintain his privacy, but he is not apt to surrender facts about himself. He said he feels that facts are like gossip; they are pieces of trivia that satiate the public’s thirst for insight into his personal life. It was for this reason that Naharin’s biography in the program read, “Nothing is permanent” for several years.

Naharin said he believes in the ephemeral nature of dance, and he does not document his work on video. He said he does not know how to make a video documentation of his work while maintaining the integrity of the live performance.

“I don’t want to reduce or dilute the work just to bring it to a larger audience,” he said.

Naharin’s commitment to his principles is inspiring, especially considering the recent explosion of dance in the United States media.

Naharin strongly values understatement, a term that he defines as “doing something almost invisible but believing in it.” He tells his dancers to think about movement the way they think about controlling volume when they listen to a piece of music.

The volume of a piece is determined by the number of people in the room, the size of the space and the proximity of the listener to the source, to name a few factors. In the same way, it is necessary for dancers to make situational adjustments to the volume, or the intensity, of their movement.

“You don’t need to make something bigger, accessible, exaggerated to connect to the audience,” Naharin said. “If you do something to the degree where the most sensitive person can recognize it, that’s enough.”

Naharin’s philosophies about life emerge as he discusses dance. He said that no matter how hard people work, there will always be a limit to what they can do.

“We will never fly, but there are an endless amount of possibilities within the limitations,” he said. “It is important to visit as many of those possibilities as possible.”