“Feel the magma in your body,” the teacher yelled out over the pounding club beats. “Bring the texture in through your hands and feet.” My arms were extended from my body, and my right heel popped up as I tried to move texture from my heel through my leg, hip, torso, neck, then head. I wasn't sure how texture was supposed to feel or look, so I tried adding weight and tension to my muscles as I slowly undulated my extremities and torso in no particular pattern. Turning my head to the right, I saw a fellow classmate limply moving her limbs with low energy, looking like the calm floating sensation we had started class with. I wondered if that calm texture was what the teacher was talking about. I was about to experiment with this in my own body when the instructor yelled: “No, guys! FEEL the texture!” His loud voice drew everyone's attention as he moved near the limp dancer. “You can't be feeling magma and have dead flesh in your hands,” he demonstrated, relaxing his fingers and wrists down to the floor. “The flesh needs to be ALIVE!” He shot energy through his fingertips and then began actively wriggling the tension through his palms, wrists, and arms before it traveled through the rest of his body. Around the studio, the dancers’ energy increased, trying to follow his direction. As the music engulfed the room and the teacher's voice faded, I turned my attention inward again and focused on my hands, imagining moving them through molasses and taking this sticky texture through the rest of my body.
This process of learning how to embody magma—a Gaga principle defined as “feeding texture from hands and feet into rest of body”Footnote 1 —during a Gaga class in the 2015 Tel Aviv Summer Intensive illustrates the blurring of improvisation, direct physical instruction, and students’ choices in the pedagogical structure of Gaga classes. This complex practice is marketed simply as Naharin's “movement language.” Using this vague label privileges the individual's interpretation of how to express oneself, which suggests a disengagement from the cultural, pedagogical, and economic politics at play in Gaga. This practice was developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and made available to the public in the early 2000s in Tel Aviv. Initially developed as Naharin's unnamed personal practice, he began to teach “Ohad's class” to the Batsheva Dance Company soon after he became artistic director in 1990 (Galili Reference Galili2015). He was quickly encouraged by Batsheva staff members to give these classes to nondancers in Tel Aviv, and by the early 2000s he had named the practice Gaga and developed it into two tracks: Gaga/dancers and Gaga/people. Gaga/people classes are designed for individuals with little to no movement or dance experience, and Gaga/dancers is designed for dancers who have a wider range of movement and dynamics available to them. While dancers may use this training to benefit their performance careers, both classes adhere to the same general rules, activities, and principles. In the rest of this article, I focus on the practice of Gaga/dancers.Footnote 2
Combining the approaches to movement creation found in dance technique, choreography, and improvisation these Gaga classes can be better understood not as a movement language, but rather as a “metatechnique.” This term encompasses a pedagogical as well as a political reading of dancing. The concept of metatechnique emerges out of an analysis of the agency of a dancer, where dance scholar Randy Martin argues that dancers maintain individual agency even while working for a choreographer because the dancer's internal negotiation of bodily training and technique are necessary to learn and execute choreography. He wrote in 1998 that “choreography is a metatechnique. It is a method for generating means of movement [offering] a basis for differentiating movement values out of a given cultural context that provides the orienting principles for a body of techniques” (Martin Reference Martin1998, 214). This definition accurately describes what Gaga does: teach students strategies for differentiating movement qualities and forms and develop strategies for drawing on and orienting the multiple techniques that dancers bring with them to the Gaga classroom. This definition also prompts an analysis of Gaga in its cultural context to better understand its orienting principles for movement, which is a perspective that is largely missing in existing literature on Gaga.Footnote 3 Although Martin initially describes choreography as the illustration of a metatechnique, he does not confine the term to this usage. I argue that Gaga is an example of a popular trend in dance training that has emerged in the early twenty-first century and aims to teach students these skills of internal negotiation rather than assume that the dancer is innately capable of this labor. Dance classes that focus on approaches rather than the mastery of form-based postures have existed in the past. Yet, the rapidly growing popularity of Gaga and other metatechniquesFootnote 4 calls for an analysis of how this trend relates to contemporary cultural, economic, and artistic forces and of what impact these forces have on the contemporary dancer's agency. Specifically, I illustrate how Gaga simultaneously encourages dancers to develop their own approach to movement and enforces set tools, modes, and styles of movement creation. This instructional strategy both enables and hinders a dancer's agency through its particular approach to blurring methods of teaching and performing technique, choreography, and improvisation.
This critical analysis of how the case study of Gaga expands upon Martin's original definition of metatechnique is not just a timely evolution of the term, but also follows Martin's own call for dance scholars to continuously question the relationship between choreography, technique, and dancing. Martin writes: “The premise that wherever there is dance, choreography and technique are mobilized through dancing, is an open and ongoing hypothesis that dance studies must continually pose. For to answer or prove this hypothesis definitively would conclude the final dance study” (Martin Reference Martin1998, 214). As such, in the section “Revisiting Terminology” I question not only the roles of choreography and technique in the practice of Gaga, but also the inclusion of improvisation as a method for dance movement creation. Such a study requires a rethinking of the terms choreography, technique, and improvisation and how they become blurred in this new understanding of metatechnique as a pedagogical model. Each of these terms has been investigated by dance scholars, often as separate entities; but Gaga practitioners learn to continuously oscillate between the roles of choreographer, improviser, and model student mimicking external forms. This blurring between modes of movement creation expands upon Martin's existing claims about metatechnique as choreography, illustrating how his initial observations about the act of dancing and its relationship to individual agency and politics remains relevant, and can evolve to address the concerns of dance and dancers today.
Expanding the applications of the term metatechnique for a contemporary context also offers a framework for discussing contemporary concert dance training trends in the context of neoliberal dance markets, a topic I take on in the section “Gaga as Neoliberal Metatechnique.” Gaga is one of the most sought-after training methods on the global dance market at the moment, and its focus on improvisation and teaching dancers skills for negotiating multiple stylistic and formal influences falls in line with contemporary demands from popular choreographers such as Hofesh Schechter and Jiří Kylián as well as from college dance programs such as Juilliard.Footnote 5 As several dance scholars have documented, choreographers and dance companies in the current moment are radically changed from the modernist model of a single director/choreographer with a large, semistable company of dancers trained to excel in a single technique or style (Bales and Nettl-Fiol Reference Bales and Nettl-Fiol2008; Foster Reference Foster and Desmond1997 and Reference Foster2010; Kedhar Reference Kedhar2014). Increasingly, dancers are expected to excel in multiple styles rather than specialize in one and be available for impermanent contract work. This trend, although in part due to changes specific to the dance market, follows in line with neoliberal market trends that demand efficiency, flexibility, and multiple skills from laborers (Brown Reference Brown2015; Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2012; Martin Reference Martin2012; Standing Reference Standing2011; Harvey Reference Harvey2007; Ong Reference Ong1999). Gaga is a popular training method that teaches dancers skills to excel in this neoliberal model of flexible labor, and better understanding how it is structured and what it teaches students through its metatechnique pedagogical structure offers insights into the socioeconomic impacts of neoliberalism on global dance training and the development and recognition of a dancer's agency. Similar to Martin's analysis of modern dance as a technique of establishing a national identity (1998), I analyze the metatechnique of Gaga as directly related to the social context in which it emerged. I approach these issues through a hybrid methodology, drawing on theoretical interventions rooted in my own ethnographic experiences of participating in Gaga classes and conducting interviews with fellow Gaga students and Gaga teachers and administrators.Footnote 6
Revisiting Terminology
Technique, choreography, and improvisation are all terms that frequently circulate in Gaga discourses but are rarely used to label the practice of Gaga, particularly in preapproved materials circulated by Gaga Movement Ltd. For instance, Deborah Friedes Galili—a Gaga teacher, scholar, and administrator for Gaga Movement Ltd.—wrote that Gaga goes “beyond the label of technique” (Galili Reference Galili2015, 375).Footnote 7 She argues that by moving past conventional technique class structures, Gaga is both indicative of a broader shift in contemporary dance training practicesFootnote 8 and that “it is precisely by eschewing traditional models of technique class that Gaga addresses the diverse yet specific needs of advanced dancers working in the contemporary dance landscape” (Galili Reference Galili2015, 361). I strongly agree with Galili's analysis of Gaga's status and important role in contemporary dance training. However, I contend that Gaga has not moved beyond technique. Rather, as a metatechnique, it blurs the lines between what dancers and scholars understand as technique, choreography, and improvisation.
This difference between moving beyond technique and functioning as a metatechnique is an important rhetorical distinction because of what it implies about the skills the dancers are taught in Gaga and how this impacts their agentive roles in the process. In Galili's claim that Gaga moves beyond technique, she repeats the common Gaga rhetoric that these classes give students “freedom to explore” (Galili Reference Galili2015, 360)Footnote 9 their own movement and directives. This is true insofar that in Gaga students are free from many conventional technique class structures and are more open to creating their own forms in response to a teacher's open-ended directives. Yet, to infer that Gaga is an experience of unfettered freedom is misleading. In the process of teaching metatechnique strategies—such as how to layer tasks and sensations to produce specific movement qualities or shifts between dynamics—Gaga is training the minds and bodies of the dancers to adhere to these specific strategies and be influenced by the style of the instructor and the other students around them. While these strategies may feel freeing at times,Footnote 10 and certainly give the dancers useful tools that they are able to use in their own ways, it is important to acknowledge the extent to which Gaga enforces norms and ideals even within the improvisational, open-ended structure of its classes. These ideals are enforced subtly, through the presence of the dancing teacher as model for how to embody the prompts and the verbal coaching that pushes students to explore ideas in a particular way. Further analysis of the terms technique, choreography, and improvisation is thus required to understand how each is consistently at play within the structure of Gaga classes and how this impacts the agency of the students. Such a study goes beyond an analysis of Gaga alone; as Galili (Reference Galili2015) illustrates, Gaga has become an internationally renowned practice over the past decade and is increasingly influential in the broader contemporary dance market and representative of many trends in training and teaching dancers in global neoliberal societies. This shift in understanding the dancers’ agency as both engaged and compromised in metatechnique classes such as Gaga is also integral to understanding the role of dancers as laborers in neoliberal economies, which will be addressed further at the end of this article.
Technique
In the process of researching Gaga, I have frequently interviewed dancers that refer to Gaga as a “technique.” In spite of this recurring colloquial use of the term to describe Gaga, it is a label that Ohad Naharin actively rejects. In an open question and answer session during the 2015 Gaga Summer Intensive in Tel Aviv, I asked Naharin why he calls Gaga a movement language and how that separates the practice from techniques or other somatic practices. He answered simply:
Well, before I called Gaga “Gaga,” I called it my movement language. So, it's not that I call Gaga my movement language; my movement language is called Gaga. And the reason it's my movement language, and not a technique, is because I feel that by calling it a movement language, it stays open for changes. … A technique it feels something more finished. Done. That's it.Footnote 11
Naharin's perception of what a technique is—fixed—provides his justification for refusing to ascribe this label to Gaga. Indeed, this understanding of technique is a common one because of the prevalence of modernist techniques designed by and named after individual choreographers and remaining largely unchanged over time.Footnote 12
Although several exercises commonly used in Gaga/dancer classes draw from well-known techniques such as ballet,Footnote 13 Naharin's rejection of the term technique as a label for the practice has great political significance. Classifying Gaga as a movement language rather than as a technique consciously attempts to dissociate the practice from the concert dance world—which relies heavily on the mastery of specific techniques—and does not engage with the racial and aesthetic politics of the term “technique” (Quinlan Reference Quinlan2016). Yet I would argue that Gaga's emphasis on Europeanist dance techniques in Gaga/dancer classes requires a closer analysis of how these racial and aesthetic politics embedded in the concept of technique remain present in Gaga. Technique, within the dance world, is embroiled in a framework of cultural and racial politics that upholds hierarchies about who should dance what form, where, and for what audience. There is a general unwillingness in the world of Euro-American concert dance (marked as “high art”) to recognize any dance form that deviates from the formal structure of ballet and modern dance as a viable technique for Western concert dance training.Footnote 14 This lack of value ascribed to non-Euro-American forms diminishes their status and value and asserts an assumption about the superiority of Europeanist aesthetics and forms embedded in the contemporary use of the term “technique.” A common example of this is explained by Raquel Monroe in her 2011 article on university dance programs, where she outlines how many students describe practices such as ballet as having technique and social dance forms such as salsa or hip hop as not contributing or even detrimental to students’ development of “technique”—a concept structurally reinforced by curricular standards requiring ballet classes but not social dance forms (Monroe Reference Monroe2011). Coming out of long histories of trying to categorize and define different types of dance and cultural production, this type of aesthetic discrimination has become systemic in both university and private dance organizations.Footnote 15 Dismissing the idea of Gaga as a technique, then, rhetorically distances the practice from these cultural and racial hierarchies so commonly associated with the term and theoretically invite a range of movements regardless of aesthetic or cultural background. Yet, the prevalence of Europeanist techniques within the practice of Gaga challenges the viability of denying Gaga's association with both the pedagogical structure of form-based techniques and the sociopolitical histories of the term.
The trend of choreographers naming techniques after themselves to codify their personal choreographic and aesthetic preferences during the modern period of American dance history in the twentieth century further solidified this colloquial understanding of techniques as static, form-based practices with clear top-down power dynamics between a teacher and a group of students.Footnote 16 This type of class structure—which is still common in many forms of dance training today—was examined by Susan Leigh Foster in the seminal article “Dancing Bodies” (1997), where she analyzed the process of learning a form-based technique through perception, mimicry, and idealization. In it, she suggests that techniques aim at “creating the body” of a particular dancer to adhere to a unified aesthetic, using case studies such as ballet, Cunningham technique, and contact improvisation to illustrate the ways that the processes can shift to form bodies for these particular practices. Foster presents the agency of the dancer required to successfully move through this type of technical training as rooted in the internal process of interpreting and adapting external visual and verbal cues into one's own body. At the same time, the dominant powers in the classroom are that of the teacher and the ideal of the form that students strive to reach.
The same process of learning a technique is unpacked in Martin's “Between Technique and the State” (1998). He suggests that technique can serve a function of the state and thus act as a coercive power training bodies to be subservient to an authoritarian power much like Foucault's docile bodies (Foucault [1977] Reference Foucault and Sheriden1995; Martin Reference Martin1998). Martin also acknowledges that in the process of learning a specific dance technique, one has to contend with a range of techniques already residing in the body. He suggests that:
The prospect that contending principles of movement reside within the same body suggests that part of the effort entailed in learning a technique has to do with the dancer's ability to generate terms of mediation among different demands on the body. In this process of self-governance, a technique for regulating techniques, the dancer must generate her own authority. (Martin Reference Martin1998, 175)
While this process of self-governance is left to the individual in the case of the modern dance techniques Martin references here, the pedagogical imperative of Gaga challenges the naturalization of this process. Martin's statements about the agency of the dancer in the context of a Graham technique class are relevant for understanding the average experience of dance students training in Western concert dance systems, but they do not entirely apply to the improvisational structure of Gaga. While there are similarities between the authoritative teacher in Graham classes and the Gaga teacher leading the improvisational prompts, the power ascribed to the teachers in these two instances varies greatly. Even as the Gaga teacher imparts suggestions and models for approaching certain technical skills, such as switching between two dynamics quickly or remaining light during jumps, the student is granted greater freedom for self-exploration within this prompt. Whereas mimicry is an integral component of a strictly form-based technique such as Graham, external mimicry and form is only one component within Gaga. This changes the transfer of knowledge and the power dynamics between teacher and student. Though I would argue that Gaga classes do impart techniques and encourage mimicry—there is even a Gaga term called kagami that refers to the mirroring process of looking at the teacher to get the essence of what he/she is doing—it is not entirely in the same form discussed by Martin.
I suggest that this technique for regulating techniques that Martin defines as an internal “process of self-governance” is now being taught in Gaga as a metatechnique. Acknowledging Gaga as a technique for regulating techniques suggests that Gaga is itself a technique, although it is not a form-based technique in the conventional modern-dance sense. As a metatechnique that focuses on how to approach internal negotiations of style and form, the practice of Gaga challenges the idea that these processes of self-choreographing—negotiating bodily techniques within one's body—are naturally happening. Acknowledging this conscious labor of internal negotiations of multiple bodily techniques challenges the power dynamics often assumed to exist within the dance classroom by giving increased agency to the dancers as choreographer of their internal processes. The increasing prevalence of dancers having to negotiate multiple techniques within the body has created a fertile space for metatechniques to emerge. These practices offer strategies for self-governance in a way that was perhaps not as crucial when dancers were more often able to stay in one technique rather than being expected to be masters of multiple techniques. If this self-governance of techniques within the body is counterhegemonic to the authority of the modern dance instructor as Martin suggests, then how does the structure of agency change in the context of a class that is teaching students strategies for self-governance? What is the freedom being experienced that Gaga rhetoric so frequently evokes, if any? And does this newfound attention to the process of self-governance and how to control it challenge previous scholarship on the agency of the dancer in modern dance techniques?
Choreography
Similar to the term “technique,” choreography is a label consciously rejected by Naharin to describe the practice of Gaga. This differentiation between Gaga and his personal choreographic practice allows for a critical distance between a practice that is intended for wide distribution and his personal artistic vision that is predicated not on Gaga's principles, but his own strategic editing and compositional strategies. When asked about his creative process in a question and answer session during the Summer 2015 Gaga Intensive, Naharin clarified that for his work with the Batsheva Dance Company “Gaga is our toolbox, but Gaga is not choreographing.”Footnote 17 He continued to clarify the relationship between Gaga and choreography in response to a question about the difference between Gaga/people and Gaga/dancers: “It's very clear that to dance doesn't mean to perform. Doesn't mean to be on stage. To dance is not about performing, is not about choreography” (Ohad Naharin, July 31, 2015).Footnote 18 Naharin suggests here that dancing is an act separate from choreography and that engaging with Gaga is important for everyone regardless of potential interest in performing.
Though Naharin acknowledged that Gaga provided many tools and inspiration for his choreographic works—particularly the use of improvisation in the early stages of his choreographic process and the shortcuts he is able to use when directing his dancers to embody a particular movement quality—his statements infer that there is no inherent tie between Gaga practice and performance. Indeed, Gaga is structured as a stand-alone practice. Because it is theoretically not tied to a particular choreographic vision, Gaga is open for students to manipulate and engage with through their own artistic and aesthetic visions. Though individual choreographers, such as Naharin and his many former company members, may utilize tools learned in Gaga as part of their own choreographic practices or inspiration, and students can use skills from Gaga to learn and perform staged works, Gaga itself only exists in a class format. This separation is made explicitly clear through the use of two tracks of Gaga: Gaga/dancers and Gaga/people. The Gaga/people track in particular emphasizes that dancing does not need to be linked to performance; this idea is often carried over into Gaga/dancer classes as well. Yet, if we understand choreography in a more expansive sense of the term not directly tied to stage performance,Footnote 19 we can see how teachers and students in Gaga classes are engaging in choreographic acts. Acknowledging the choreographic component of Gaga—for both teacher and student—complicates the agency ascribed to the student. The students are learning and replicating techniques for creating movement, and the inference is that the students’ agency is contingent on their understanding of the authority figure leading the class. Yet, there is also space for students to regain control and choreograph their own experiences by choosing when to apply or ignore the teacher's prompts, thus choreographing their own participation in the class.
Critical to this intervention is an understanding of how the term “choreography” is used in dance studies literature. In general, dance scholarship presents choreography as an organizational and structural system of movement. Although the general agreement about the structural element of choreography is often presented as universal, the specificities of the application of the term are extremely subjective and political. Marta Savigliano writes that although choreography is often understood and employed as “a universal strategic tool for making dances” (Savigliano Reference Savigliano and Foster2009, 169), it is “a strategic tool systematically developed in, and claimed by, the Western dance tradition” (Savigliano Reference Savigliano and Foster2009, 175). Savigliano's critique of choreography as developed by and promoting Western dance specifically is closely tied to the modernist conception of the term that continues to circulate in popular discourses,Footnote 20 and the fact that choreography is often presented as an unmarked, universalist concept even as it actively upholds Western aesthetic and structural hegemonies, such as the single author, in the contemporary dance world. As Foster (Reference Foster2011) points out in an overview of the term “choreography,” scholars such as Marta Savigliano, Jens Giersdorf, and Anthea Kraut have raised critical questions about the lack of specificity that this term offers and the problematic erasures that may come with its use (Foster Reference Foster2011, 3–4). Despite these critiques and the extensive work dance scholars have done to expand the understanding of the term,Footnote 21 the understanding of choreography as something produced by a sole creator and produced for concert venues remains a common application of the term in the world of Euro-American concert dance practitioners. It is this colloquial understanding of choreography that Naharin rejects in his claim that “Gaga is not choreographing.”Footnote 22
By applying the definition of choreography in its broadest sense to Gaga—organizing or creating a score for movement—it is clear that Gaga embodies multiple choreographic moments. It is also fitting to apply the term “choreography” to this practice, which, similar to the discourses on choreography, is often presented as universal but is in fact heavily influenced by Western aesthetics and practices. The teachers choreograph the class by leading the students through a series of tasks, sensations, and guided improvisation. There is a standardization of Gaga teachers enforced through yearly check-ins in Tel Aviv, and as a result the teachers exhibit very similar ways of introducing prompts. The emphasis on codification and standardization in Gaga is not dissimilar to the modernist model of sole-author choreographer figures such as Martha Graham. The codification of Gaga is even stronger in Israel, where teachers are required to do more frequent check-ins. Rossi Lamont Walter, an American dancer who moved to Israel to dance for a year, noted that “the language that's used, the images that are used … each teacher has their sort of favorite, maybe something that resonates for them, but I think the language in Gaga classes feels pretty consistent.”Footnote 23 This consistency within the language used in Gaga illustrates the uniformity of tools employed by Gaga teachers in the choreography of their individual classes, stemming from Naharin's own research and vision of what Gaga can and should teach students.
At the same time, Walter notes that the teachers demonstrate clear preferences when designing their classes, a fact that resonated in my interviews with Gaga teachers. As a result, students frequently have strong opinions about their favorite instructors. Some students will not take a class with someone they dislike even if they are usually avid Gaga participants. This similarly influences the students’ attitudes in class and how they choose to choreograph their own movements and reactions to the teacher's instructions. Though students are frequently urged to let go of their consciousness and not plan movements, relying instead on listening to the body and its sensations, this release of agency to the dancers is often introduced as a method for students to methodically explore existing prompts or movement ideas in multiple ways. Thus, even in their supposed moment of freedom to create, the students’ inspiration is supposed to be rooted in the prompts offered by the instructor, potentially limiting the scope of their exploration if they are diligently following all class prompts and engaging with the teacher's choreographed sequence of movement exploration.
Acknowledging the ways in which both teachers and students can choreograph their activity in the classroom brings us back to the question about agency in dance. The recognition of agency often centers on the term “choreography” because this label infers ownership and active control over the creation and structuring of movement (Foster Reference Foster2011).Footnote 24 As Gay Morris and Jens Giersdorf explain:
Choreography [is] an organizational, decision-making, and analytical system that is always social and political. This incorporates established definitions of choreography as purposeful stagings of structured, embodied movements that aim to communicate an idea or create meaning for an actual, conceptual, or purposefully absent audience for aesthetic and social reasons. Important for this definition is the acknowledgement of training, technique, rehearsal, performance, and reception as intrinsic parts of choreography, not only to reveal labor and agency but also to examine discipline and resistance to it. (Morris and Giersdorf Reference Morris, Giersdorf, Morris and Giersdorf2016, 7, emphasis added)
Thinking through Gaga—which purposefully absents audiences to encourage open investigation by the students by limiting the inhibitions that can arise from having observers present—in this framework of choreography allows for an acknowledgement of the politics of labor and agency within the process of taking the class even though it is not rooted in an intent to create a staged choreographic production.
With the guidance of imagery, sensations, and movement suggestions, the students are required to create, research, and develop their own movement. Although this movement is not intended to be repeated, edited, or performed for an audience, the process of selecting, creating, and placing movement remains present. This happens at a self-choreographic level, referring to the process of negotiating the many techniques within one's body as well as to the choreographing of external forms through solo improvisation. Gaga, as a metatechnique, integrates the practice of choreographing, embodying specific techniques, and improvising movement. Acknowledging the choreographic elements in Gaga, for both the teacher and the student, is critical for recognizing the agency of the dancers to make their own decisions about where, when, and how to move even as they are actively learning techniques for making these decisions and adhering to an instructor's directions.
Improvisation
Gaga classes are not advertised as improvisation; yet, the structure of the class is guided improvisation. Teachers present movement prompts and suggestions that depend on sensations (i.e., taste something good) and imagery (i.e., imagine balls of energy running through the highways of your body) as well as physical forms (i.e., extend your bones into space and make straight lines with your body, as if the bones are breaking through the skin because of the energy of their reach) for the students to explore in their bodies. The teachers introduce suggestions frequently and regularly, giving students just enough time to explore the sensation before being urged to add another task, but the students are theoretically free to follow or ignore these verbal and physical cues because there is a lack of formal corrections and unity in the class structure.Footnote 25 In both Gaga advertising and colloquial conversations with Gaga students, this guided improvisational structure with the onus on the student's in-the-moment choice making is often connected to the “experience of freedom and pleasure” (Gaga Movement Ltd. 2016) that is advertised as present in Gaga classes. As Danielle Goldman notes, “Such celebratory pairings of improvisation and freedom are common in the field of dance—not only in colleges but also among critics, scholars, and practicing artists across a range of genres” (Goldman Reference Goldman2010, 1). Despite the common association with freedom and improvisation, several scholars have begun to denaturalize this concept and assert the labor and limitations of improvised movement. For instance, David Gere points to the cognitive labor in improvisation: “It is while improvising that the body's intelligence manifests itself most ineluctably, and that the fast-moving agile mind becomes a necessity. The body thinks. The mind dances” (Gere Reference Gere, Albright and Gere2003, xiv). Goldman argues that movement improvisation always exists in a “tight space” of constraints, and that understanding “one could escape confinement only to enter into or become aware of another set of strictures is vital to understanding the political power of improvisation” (Goldman Reference Goldman2010, 4). According to this logic, because improvisation exists within a set of constraints and rules, it cannot be inherently free or natural, even though Gaga's advertising continuously appeals to these ideas.
I argue that although Gaga falls into the tropes of connecting improvised dancing to freedom in its advertising rhetoric, the refusal to designate the class as improvisation alone points to the heavy structure embedded in the improvisatory elements of this metatechnique. In an interview Deborah Friedes Galili described how:
… sometimes there's confusion about whether Gaga is improvisation, and the place that I'm at in my understanding of it is that we're using improvisation as a tool but Gaga itself is not an improvisation class. Gaga offers some tools which can address some of the goals of a traditional improvisation class… and yet I'm not aiming at that same end point, even though most of the time I am in fact improvising.Footnote 26
Galili is speaking here as an individual Gaga teacher and practitioner rather than as a Gaga administrator, and her complication of the label of improvisation is an important distinction for understanding the power dynamics and agency within the Gaga classroom. Though the teachers’ prompts are presumably tools to lead participants to the “experience of freedom” advertised on Gaga's homepage, the frequent prompts from instructors consciously restrict the freedom that can be found in Gaga by imposing a great deal of direction on the improvisation. The reminder from a teacher to never stop moving in the middle of an aggressively vigorous jumping exercise certainly does not feel like an invitation to enact your full range of free will, for instance. The verbal cues given by instructors to guide students closer toward a specific physical embodiment of a Gaga concept—such as magma, in the case of this article's introduction—are also often repeated and rephrased to move toward a specific result. Because Gaga is a class designed to impart metacognitive skills about choice making, it is not actually an exercise in attempting to find an absolute, idealistic freedom of movement as it is often advertised to be; rather, it is the rehearsal of choice-making strategies imparted by the instructor. Recognizing the ways in which improvisation and the skills required to improvise in different mediumsFootnote 27 suggest a relationship more akin to technique and the learning of specific skills again brings us back to Gaga's blurring of these different approaches to movement creation and execution: technique, choreography, and improvisation.
Technique, choreography, and improvisation are each clearly present—albeit not necessarily consistently—in the pedagogical structure of Gaga. I argue that understanding Gaga as a metatechnique challenges the assumption that Gaga goes beyond these terms by acknowledging the ways in which they all remain present in the Gaga classroom. Thinking through Gaga as a metatechnique urges a rethinking of the politics that remain in the practice through these particular modes of movement creation. This article also challenges conventional understandings of a dancer's agency and process of self-direction by unpacking the ways in which contemporary metatechniques attempt to shape the thought processes and instincts of dancers. This suggests that the dancers, although still enacting their own agency in the sense that they are processing the tools taught in these classes, may not have complete freedom in the process of self-negotiating bodily techniques as was previously inferred by Martin (Reference Martin1998) and Foster (Reference Foster and Desmond1997). Rather than being given space to form one's own skills to move between dynamics and bodily techniques, with instruction only on the final form or product, Gaga classes are structured to interfere with this internal choice-making process in an effort to help the dancer develop skills for self-negotiation of techniques already housed in the body. This type of pedagogical strategy differs from the politics, strategies, and forms analyzed by Martin and Foster and is indicative of a shift in dance training practices that have become increasingly popular in the contemporary moment. Building on the work of these scholars, my arguments put their questions and discussions in context of this contemporary practice and the shifting political realm in which it is embedded.
This pedagogical imperative of negotiating multiple influences is not unique to Gaga, however. It is indicative of a broader trend in neoliberal society that encourages laborers to be flexible and acquire multiple skills to increase employment opportunities. The analysis of a dancer's agency, then, is not just a study of the internal power dynamics of an individual Gaga class. It also considers the effect of current socioeconomic pressures on dancers. The blurring of the lines between choreographing, improvisation, and technique in the metatechnique structure allows for a rethinking of processes that are often inferred to be already happening without instruction, such as the self-negotiation of multiple skills. Acknowledging that skills must be learned and developed to self-negotiate multiple techniques challenges not just existing dance rhetoric, but also the structure of the flexible workforce in global neoliberal dance economies.
Gaga as Neoliberal Metatechnique
The structure of Gaga as a metatechnique—utilizing elements from conventional technique, choreographic, and improvisatory structures to train dancers to negotiate multiple bodily techniques—falls in line with neoliberal values of efficiency that require laborers to be skilled in multiple rather than specialized tasks. Neoliberalism, as both an economic practice and a term, emerged in the second half of the twentieth century in South American countries such as Chile and then in several major national economies such as Britain, the United States, and China. Several major economies shifted to free market models led by governments that believed personal and financial freedom comes from a diminishment of government oversight in the market (Brown Reference Brown2015; Harvey Reference Harvey2007; Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2012; Martin Reference Martin2012).Footnote 28 Emerging partly out of a reaction against Cold War politics and the threat of communism, neoliberal economic policies move away from government intervention to emphasize deregulation, privatization, and individual entrepreneurial freedom. These shifts were geared toward personal and political freedom for individuals, which was theoretically attainable if individuals had the ability to enter the market and have free will as both workers and consumers. Significantly, this freedom has not been made available to all workers. Economists such as Guy Standing (2011) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Reference Hardt and Negri2012) have argued that these neoliberal policies have produced a class they have termed the precariat,Footnote 29 resulting in increased pressure on workers to be flexible in terms of contracts, schedules, and skills.
I argue that the case study of Gaga is uniquely suited to an analysis of neoliberal values because neoliberalism has been the predominant economic theory during the development and current practice of Gaga. The two emerged in close proximity to one another and contain several overlapping values. Naharin has never directly stated neoliberalism as an influence on his development of Gaga. Yet, I argue that even if this was not a deliberate decision by Naharin, the similarities of values found in both neoliberalism and Gaga are striking, as I will demonstrate below. Ohad Naharin began developing Gaga in a structured way in the 1980s after an injury and while living in the increasingly neoliberal environment of New York (Harvey Reference Harvey2007, 48). The two projects—neoliberalism and Gaga—both became increasingly popular over the past several decades. Moving beyond economic definitions of neoliberalism, scholars have recently critiqued the overwhelming dominance of neoliberal values in contemporary life as a threat to democracy (Brown Reference Brown2015) and a movement that has oppressed and disenfranchised wage workers (Standing Reference Standing2011) and have instigated large social movements protesting the effects of neoliberalism (Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2012). Scholars such as Wendy Brown seek to introduce a sociocultural analysis to studies of economic and state-enforced neoliberal policies by adapting Foucault's approach to “conceiving neoliberalism as an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life” (Brown Reference Brown2015, 30). Brown draws on Foucault's understanding of neoliberalism as a perpetuating rationality embedded in politics and society as well as economics, rather than the neo-Marxist reading of neoliberalism as a contemporary iteration of capitalism, a reading that has been put forth by scholars such as David Harvey (Reference Harvey2007). Brown also critically updates Foucault's initial observations from his theorization of homo oeconomicus from the 1978–79 Collège de France lectures on neoliberalism that predated the global expansion and application of neoliberal practices to make them applicable to the contemporary moment. I draw on both understandings of neoliberalism—as an economic and governing strategy and an ideological rationale—here, acknowledging that the ideas of neoliberalism are pervasive in social, economic, and political spheres alike. This understanding of neoliberalism's influence on contemporary issues has resulted in a widespread interest from humanities scholars, such as Aihwa Ong (Reference Ong2006), Anusha Kedhar (Reference Kedhar2014), and Hardt and Negri (Reference Hardt and Negri2012).
Though Gaga and neoliberalism do not directly mirror one another, there are overwhelming similarities in the two practices’ guiding principles. For instance, both are interested in developing efficient workers and privilege the individual as the primary agent for one's own destiny even while creating strict structures in which this individuality is allowed to exist (Brown Reference Brown2015; Harvey Reference Harvey2007; Standing Reference Standing2011). Even as Gaga resists some neoliberal values, such as the move away from physical labor to the financialization of economies, this metatechnique is able to produce dancers that are prepared to excel in contemporary neoliberal dance economies through the focus on self-negotiating multiple skills. I do not suggest that Gaga's ability to produce dancers well prepared for the current dance market is an intentional reaction to the economic climate or Naharin's goal for Gaga practice or that the transferability of Gaga skills to dancers’ employment is negative. Rather, I argue that it is an important analysis to make of this practice for two reasons. First, Gaga is teaching values and skills that are directly related to neoliberal trends and ideals in the current dance market. Regardless of whether or not this was the impetus for creating Gaga practice, the fact that it is being utilized as a training tool in the contemporary moment helps us understand the demands placed on dancers today and how Gaga has prepared them for success. Second, the advertising rhetoric of Gaga presents the practice as a utopian, idealistic space that is divorced from politics or sociocultural contexts. As such, it is important to remember that this is not entirely true: while utopian ideas are frequently employed in Gaga instruction, we must analyze the ways in which celebrating and striving for unachievable goals is complicated by placing the practice in context. While Gaga is not the only practice to impart such skills in the contemporary dance world, it is an important example to study because of its growing popularity in neoliberal global society.Footnote 30
In the current moment, the global concert dance market privileges dancers that are independently motivated, excel at improvisation, and are able to work in flexible pickup jobs: these are all traits of the precariat class that emerged as a result of neoliberal economic trends.Footnote 31 Gaga thrives in this context because it consciously develops these qualities of self-direction that dancers must now excel in to be marketable. For instance, Meredith Clemons, a recent college graduate currently training in Europe, explained that she continues doing Gaga because she finds it personally enjoyable but also important for professional development:
Particularly because lots of choreographers are looking for collaborative dancers, and dancers that have improvisation experience, and even though we talked about that it's actually a quite structured improvisation class, there are those moments, especially as classes get to the end, where you're just given complete freedom to play with the tools you've been given. I think I've become a much better improvisational dancer since starting Gaga, which in today's dance world is I think pretty invaluable when you're looking for work. And also, hitting back on this idea of maturity as a dancer, I think that's been really beneficial, that I now am self-motivated to find, you know, if a choreographer isn't spelling out for me, like this may be a deep and rich environment below the movement, to have the motivation from me to find that for myself, and to make this world that I'm in, I think that's really helpful professionally.Footnote 32
Though there are many layers of overlapping values shared by Gaga and neoliberalism, such as the imperative to develop strategies to work through and thrive in exhausted states, efficiency, and encouraging self-directed development of marketable skills,Footnote 33 I focus here on the way Gaga as a metatechnique teaches students skills to negotiate multiple techniques and thus multiple marketable styles without becoming homogenized or bland (Foster Reference Foster and Desmond1997 and Reference Foster2010). This is also an important neoliberal value. As scholars of neoliberalism have outlined, employers today require more generalists that have multiple skills rather than specialists confined to one area of expertise, and thus workers are expected to be skilled in and negotiate multiple skill sets to succeed in the increasingly flexible and contract-based market (Brown Reference Brown2015; Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Negri2012; Standing Reference Standing2011; Harvey Reference Harvey2007). This flexibility has been demonstrated to be important in the dance world as well (Kedhar Reference Kedhar2014).Footnote 34
Students develop a toolbox of metatechnique skills in Gaga classes, practicing a large range of approaches to moving the body. Gaga dancers learn how to embody drastically different dynamics, speeds, textures, levels, and postures and shift between them almost instantaneously; embodying all of these different ways of moving the body is seen as a tool, as is the skill of shifting between them quickly. This toolbox of skills helps dancers expand their range and physical capabilities. Dancers seek out this kind of training to make themselves more competitive on the job market. The need for dancers to expand their stylistic range has pushed dancers not only toward metatechniques such as Gaga, but also to multiple in-depth studies of specific techniques. Kedhar (Reference Kedhar2014), for instance, analyzes how migrant Indian dancers who work in the United Kingdom train heavily in bharata natyam as well as contemporary dance. Gaga does not function as a stand-alone technique like bharata natyam or ballet but rather as a method of developing strategies and tools to differentiate between styles and dynamics, and it is thus the container to hold these tools learned to negotiate the multiple techniques now expected of dancers in the contemporary concert dance market.
The status of dancers seeking a company to join is representative of the growing class of the precariat. Their lack of job security and the need to sell their own labor, rather than the capitalist model of managing their own means of production to hire other laborers to make a profit, places this class of workers at the mercy of employers. Though this is hardly a new state of affairs in the dance economy (the presence of dance companies able to employ their workers full time has always been limited, and dancers frequently commit to short-term gigs for little or no pay), in the neoliberal market contract work rather than full-time employment has begun to rise in other sectors of the economy as well. As Hardt and Negri argue, “once upon a time there was a mass of wage workers; today there is a multitude of precarious workers” (2012, loc 131 of 1456) that are often indebted to and dependent upon capitalist control. The basic skills of negotiating multiple bodily techniques learned in Gaga are similar to the ones necessary to survive in any neoliberal labor market. The recognition that these skills must be learned challenges the inherent agency often ascribed to students in movement practice, but at the same time it points to the importance of students learning these skills and the increased mobility and marketability that dancers stand to gain from engaging in metatechniques such as Gaga, an engagement that ultimately gives them more agency over their overall labor experience in the neoliberal framework.
Although Gaga was not intentionally designed to further neoliberal agendas of personal freedom and personal development for economic gain, it is easily subsumed in this process because of its applicability to contemporary demands in dance markets. While this is not an accusatory claim—in fact, it's largely beneficial for participants who aim to use Gaga to further their dancing careers—it is critical to be aware of this in light of the utopian rhetoric used by the Gaga organization to describe the practice and distance it from cultural, economic, national, and social politics. This analysis of Gaga may prove useful for understanding the plight of contemporary dance artists and what they must do to remain competitive in today's economic markets, but it also questions the impact that economics can have on artistic practices and pedagogies. If neoliberal economics continue to be a dominant model internationally, thus forcing individuals to remain competitive and economically motivated in all sectors of life, I argue that the pedagogical structures of practices such as Gaga that are used by dancers for professional development will remain influenced by the need to make progress for professional development and job security in the contemporary dance market. As long as these neoliberal pressures remain, dance training systems such as Gaga—and the types of agency they encourage and train students to embody—cannot be considered as devoid of external economic influence. I do not argue that this is necessarily a problem; Gaga practice simultaneously enables professional development and a space to explore utopian ideals in a way that is both productive and pleasurable for the majority of its students and teachers. Yet, I strongly suggest that the economic pressures placed on Gaga participants reduces their ability to fully engage in the utopian visions presented in class, and this pressure must be acknowledged in light of the advertising rhetoric that attempts to distance Gaga from these realities.
Understanding the impact of neoliberalism on Gaga, and Gaga's perhaps unintentional adherence to several core neoliberal values in spite of its simultaneous appeals to values such as pleasure and reveling in feelings and in sensations that seem counterintuitive to the neoliberal focus on growth and productivity, illustrates the importance of Randy Martin's call to continuously revisit the labeling and politics of dancing. Critically interrogating the political and economic context of Gaga introduces new perspectives on the agency of dancers resulting from the current rise in popularity of metatechnique models of training. The definition and usage of the term “metatechnique” has changed since Martin introduced it in 1998 because the world has changed. The evolution of the term can now encompass the blurring of pedagogical models of movement instruction and creation. Yet, Martin's initial questions about the agency of the dancer and the political context of a dance practice remain as relevant as ever. It is his underlying assumption that dance and politics are deeply intertwined that lays the framework for understanding the importance of continually returning to such questions in new sociopolitical contexts.
In contrast to Martin's Reference Martin1998 reading of metatechnique, however, the pressures of neoliberal economies on dance markets have produced the conditions for metatechniques as stand-alone practices to emerge. By revisiting Martin's terms now, it's possible to apply them to Gaga and neoliberalism, topics that have grown increasingly more relevant since Martin originally coined the term. Practices such as Gaga that focus on teaching students tools for approaching movement rather than form-based postures challenge what Martin and others have claimed as an innate practice: the dancer's internal negotiations of techniques that already exist within the body. A metatechnique such as Gaga does not strip dancers of all agency because it does encourage dancers to develop their own toolbox of skills for movement creation. Yet, this formulaic approach to training the body to react and embody sensations in particular ways demands a careful consideration of where a dancer's agency truly lies and how it relates to the agency of a dominant figure such as a teacher or choreographer. This is not to suggest that there is a practice or time when a dancer embodies full, unfettered agencyFootnote 35 —or that dancers must be striving for this unattainable status at all time. Rather, I argue that it is imperative to continually question what kind of freedom and agency is encouraged or allowed of participants in a practice that is advertised as celebrating utopian visions of freedom and release from habits and external pressures. As Martin (Reference Martin1998) encouraged, such questions must be asked constantly, not in order to definitively answer them but rather to increase awareness of the political and artistic tensions at play in the act of dancing.
