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Hubbard Street Dance goes Gaga with its thrilling night of Ohad Naharin work

For risk-loving contemporary dancers, Gaga needs no Lady.

It’s the name of a technique pioneered by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, artistic director of the Tel Aviv-based Batsheva Dance Company (until September, when he plans to step down). Gaga, which you can experience for yourself this weekend at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s spectacularly immersive, must-see Naharin celebration at the Harris Theater, is a movement language that emphasizes attention to the thrilling rush of physical sensation.

It’s about making yourself available to hear what the body has to say in any given moment. And if you do that — the Naharin thinking goes — you will free yourself from the conventional ways people move, and the ordinary way they construct dances. You’ll move differently through time and space.

To put all that another way — and hang in there with me as you ponder your weekend’s choices — it’s not so much that Hubbard Street’s “Decadance/Chicago” contains fresh moves in the usual choreographic sense. It’s that the actual raw material — the ingredients in the Impossible Burger of great contemporary dance — have been swapped out and scrambled, the supermarket ground beef replaced with grass-fed, organic matter. That’s what Naharin does. You feel like you are watching an entirely different set of juices flowing before your eyes, and it’s inestimably exciting to see them pop and sizzle on the Hubbard Street griddle.

For all the emphasis on technique, Naharin’s work is fundamentally funny, populist and fascinated by the intersection between concert and social dance. He prizes audience engagement and interaction, and the Gaga principles apply there too. How do you get an audience to think about themselves differently, less passively? Can you involve them in the work? Can you confront some of the assumptions that govern not just how dance is performed but how it is consumed by the viewer?

If you’re into all that kind of stuff, you’ll be fired up all night.

It’s meta, sure, but it’s also liberating for both dancer and audience. Since the practice of dance is so associated with youth — but watching dance not so much — the co-mingling of those two worlds is really remarkably empowering. For most of us, the more we move, the longer we live. To celebrate physical interaction is a way of saying, “L’Chaim!” (To Life!”)

“Decadance/Chicago” (you only have until Sunday to partake) is a bit like a greatest Naharin hits experience, or maybe a Naharin remix or reboot, ideal for anyone who never has seen his work. There are elements of numerous past works forged across the years, including the jaw-dropping “Minus 16” (which I recall seeing in its U.S. premiere at Hubbard Street in 2000), “Virus,” “Three,” “George and Zalman” and “Max.” In most cases, you’re watching only elements of narrative (sometimes text-based) pieces originally expressed only in whole cloth. You couldn’t do this with the work of most choreographers.

But you can with Naharin, because his work is so elemental: Imagine a kinetic brick, an exciting, sensual, daring block of human movement, taken from a fresh quarry, ready to build.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones@chicagotribune.com

Review: “Decadance/Chicago” (4 stars)

When: Through Sunday

Where: Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St.

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

Tickets: $26-$110 at 312-635-3799 or www.hubbardstreetdance.com