Batsheva Dance Company. Where: Matthews Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton. When: 8 p.m. Monday. How much: $41-$54. Call (609) 258-2787 or visit mccarter.org.
Not everything that moves is alive. Ohad Naharin, choreographer and artistic director of Batsheva Dance Company, would include some dancers in this category, along with windblown objects, flotsam and machines.
Batsheva, the premier contemporary dance troupe of Israel, appears in Princeton Monday. Their engagement reprises "Three," an evening-length work the troupe presented in 2007 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Naharin says an important goal of the performance will be to awaken sensations that allow everyone present to experience each moment fully.
"Many dancers can move and be very busy and active, but still be dead flesh," Naharin says. "I use this term a lot with dancers. I tell them, 'You move a lot, but you are full of dead flesh.' And dead flesh is the opposite of being able to sense.
"Dancers and audience members need keys that they can use to enrich their sensations," he says. "What can create a good moment is the right sensation."
The dancers of Batsheva work to eliminate movement habits they have acquired unconsciously. Each gesture and each step, Naharin says, must represent a choice and never a "default" position. Although the composition of his pieces is delicately balanced, he says he likes to experiment with extremes -- exaggerating certain movements to help his dancers break down familiar limits, and also relying upon understatement. Like other recent Naharin works, the episodic "Three" incorporates startling theatrical devices, including nudity.
"I don't think you can dance and not be vulnerable," Naharin says. Speaking about the moment in "Three" in which the dancers pull down their pants, he says, "You will see that it's much more about the ability to laugh at ourselves than anything sexy."
Of the purpose of the work in general, he says, "It's a lot about connecting to the power of imagination, to emotional states and unconscious conditions, and admitting our weaknesses."
Naharin, who served his apprenticeship under the dramatic and psychologically astute modernist Martha Graham, now creates spectacles with interchangeable parts. These works come more and more to resemble post-modern vaudeville. Yet while they are evidently filled with ideas, he denies that his dances are primarily conceptual. Their emotional and intellectual impact grows organically out of the dances' physical architecture, he insists.
In "Three," movement themes (like making the dancers stand) unite three acts that Naharin designed so they could be shown independently of one another. The music is a heterogeneous mixture that includes Bach, Brian Eno and the Beach Boys. The first section of "Three" has been choreographed for an equal number of men and women; the second part for nine women. Yet these details are ultimately irrelevant.
At one point, a man carries a television on stage, with a talking head (his own) describing what the audience is about to see.
"I get rid of the trivial questions," Naharin says, explaining this device. "When you tell an audience how many dancers are going to be there; you tell them something about the costumes, something about the lights. You tell them something about the music. Once they know, they don't ask themselves those questions anymore, and they can watch the piece from a better perspective. It's more about sensations."
Robert Johnson may be reached at email@example.com.