Naharin’s Virus is one of those performances that is ahead of its time. Even in a decade and a half after a premiere it looks stunningly ground-breaking and “different”.

When I first saw a performance of “Naharin’s Virus” over a decade ago, I knew that this ritualistic, insurrectionary dance was the way my own body wanted to move, if only it could be freed from gravity and decorum, Anna Della Subin says.

That is what Naharin did: he wasn’t just staging the play but liberating the dancers and letting them float freely in the sea of the sculpturesque creativity. The energy that literally radiates from the Batsheva dance here integrates with the deep meaning of the body language that was reinvented, but remained comprehensive and meaningful. Although plotless the show deeply penetrates into the audience’s soul. And probably not so much into the soul but into the self-awareness, self-consciousness of the audience.

The piece was based on and inspired by the text of Peter Handke, one of the most significant writers of the second half of the 20th century, the great rioter of the European New Wave. Offending the Audience was written back in the 1960-s and became one of the program works of the Neo-Avantgarde: without plot, action or even characters, capable to clear off “the exact moment in time at the exact point in space” out of the meaning imposed by words.