On Ohad Naharin’s ZŌ, and what we are not yet saying

I went to see Ohad Naharin’s ZŌ knowing something of his work, knowing something of gaga, the movement language he has spent decades building into a philosophy of the body.

At the end, a colorful elephant was inflated in the middle of the room, and I felt joy in the revelation of something hidden.

ZŌ is about the body pushed further than I had seen gaga taken before. Naharin has always believed that movement begins where language fails, but in this work he went somewhere new. The face. The voice. The eyes. The dancers were not performing feeling. They were occupied by it, moved through by something they did not entirely govern. And then they looked at us. Not the performed gaze of theater, not the fourth wall thinly pretending to hold. They looked at us the way people look when they connect truly.

We have been in this war for nearly three years now. I do not mean only the military fact of it, though that is real and ongoing and close. I mean the other war, the one happening in our families, in our societies, in the world. The one you see in the........

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