He’s a company man, after all

Three years ago, Ohad Naharin believed he “needed a change,” so he stepped down as artistic director of the internationally acclaimed, Tel Aviv-based Batsheva Dance Company. “It was a decision that meant I was really stopping, that I wasn’t coming back,” he recalls.

It was also a decision that lasted about a year and a half.

These days, Naharin is once more at the helm of Batsheva, having returned last year to a job he first assumed in 1990. He feels “a sense of longevity with the company that I didn’t necessarily feel the first time around. Time allowed me to see how much I love this company,” he says, sounding like a man who recently patched up his marriage.

Not that Naharin is inclined to reveal everything. Discussing his life and career from a hotel room in San Francisco, where the Batsheva dancers have been performing his new work, “Three,” prior to their shows Saturday and Sunday at Royce Hall, the 54-year-old choreographer comes across as forthright yet opaque.

“I’d rather not say,” he responds when asked why he wanted to leave Batsheva in the first place. “But I found myself staying in touch with the company, and the dancers seemed a bit lost. It seemed I had to come back fully or leave completely.”

As for his choreographic creations, about two dozen to date, “it’s hard to talk about them. It’s hard to be accurate,” he says. “There’s something about the dances I make that to me seems so ephemeral. It’s not like talking about my dog or my friends.”

Indeed, it might be more like talking about his family, for Naharin, who was born in Israel, started his dance training with Batsheva, a company founded in 1964 by Martha Graham and the French-born philanthropist Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild. After only a year with the troupe, however, he left for New York to train with Graham’s company and at the Juilliard School. He also briefly danced with the Maurice Bejart Company in Brussels before making his choreographic debut in New York in 1980.

By the time he returned to Batsheva, Naharin had developed his own distinctive movement language -- which he dubbed Gaga -- and gained renown in his own country and abroad for creating provocative, sensual and, above all, passionate dances. They have been performed by such companies as Nederlands Dans Theater, the Frankfurt Ballet and the Lyon Opera Ballet.

“What is often unusual about Ohad is that he perceives his dancers as deeply human rather than just instruments of dance,” says Jim Vincent, the artistic director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, which has performed five of Naharin’s works in the last six years. “As a result, his choreography can be interpreted on a number of different levels, from the enjoyable to the deeply contemplative.”

In the case of “Three,” which premiered last year in Israel and has generated a slew of mostly positive reviews, Naharin wanted to explore the contrast between “minimalism and exaggeration, or overstatement and understatement. Like when you listen to music, you can turn down the volume so you can hardly hear it, or you can turn it too loud and become overwhelmed,” he says.

Like other Naharin works, the three sections of the dance, called “Bellus,” “Humus” and “Secus,” have been set to a wildly eclectic musical score, this one including selections from Brian Eno and the Beach Boys, as well as Glenn Gould playing Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.

In “Bellus,” 10 dancers separate into pairs and mirror one another’s movements. In “Humus,” a man explains, via a video monitor he’s holding, what’s going to happen and what the audience should expect to see before five female performers emerge to begin the dance. In “Secus,” the entire company participates in a series of solos, duets and the kind of cohesive, virtuosic yet quirky group movement Naharin is known for in other works such as “Telophaza,” which received standing ovations last summer at New York’s Lincoln Center.

Naharin observes that the three parts of the dance could be performed independently, but “it was my desire to put them together, the way you choose to put three different pieces of furniture in one room. My sense is that they make a coherent evening.”

It’s when the conversation turns to the movement style he uses not only in his work but to train his dancers that Naharin becomes most voluble.

“You could say it had a lot to do with Gaga,” he says of feeling “recharged” now that he’s back as Batsheva’s artistic director. “The development of Gaga has been so meaningful and is something I take very seriously.”

Naharin prefers to describe Gaga as “a language” rather than a technique. He explains that he began developing it in 1987 after suffering a back injury.

“I was searching for ways to get back movement in my body,” he says. “And I also wanted to give dancers better keys to understanding my work. With Gaga, my dancers learn how to connect to their bodies in more efficient ways, understand their weaknesses and find within themselves multidimensional movement.”

Largely but not entirely improvisational, Gaga is “a lot about suggestions,” he says. “We cover the mirrors in the studio and focus on sensations in the body, on the spaces between the joints, muscles and nerve endings. I’ll make suggestions to help the dancers recognize the strengths and weaknesses in their body and connect it with their passion to move.”

In recent years, Gaga for non-dancers has become something of a phenomenon in Israel, with regularly scheduled workshops in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that attract hundreds of people.

“It began as a joke with the people in my marketing department, with them asking me to teach them to dance,” says Naharin. “It was then I discovered an aspect to Gaga that has nothing to do with the ambition to be on stage. I wanted to help people get stronger, to help them find a freedom they didn’t know existed in their bodies.”

He has trained others to lead Gaga workshops and says he loves nothing more than seeing “people coming in heavy and depressed and coming out energetic and aroused.” He himself practices Gaga every day, even if he has time to do it only in the shower. “That’s the beauty of it,” he says. “You can do Gaga anywhere, even in a wheelchair.”

As for the future, Naharin has just started work on a new dance that will be performed in silence.

“Right now, moving through space and in silence inspires me,” he says. “But this is just the starting point. I always discover things as I go along. I’ve always had this need to be in a place where I’ve never been before.”

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Batsheva Dance Company

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA

When: 8 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday

Price: $26 to $48

Contact: (310) 825-2101 or www.uclalive.org