What is the naftali method?

naftali method is an improvisational dance practice where softness and speed generate inquiry.

The practice is designed primarily for dancers, inviting them into a sustained investigation of how release reorganizes effort, attention, and momentum in the body. Through imagery and focused attention on the body’s major joints, dancers explore softness not as passivity, but as a condition that allows movement to travel with clarity and ease.

From this state of release, speed is examined—not as force or exertion, but as a form of attention. Movement becomes quicker and more responsive through softness, requiring minimal muscular effort and allowing momentum and impulse to lead.

Rather than emphasizing output, the practice questions dominant notions of productivity. It asks how efficiency, precision, and responsiveness might emerge through release, continuity, and listening, instead of strain.

While rooted in dance training, the practice remains accessible to nondancers through its emphasis on sensation, attention, and improvisation rather than codified technique. Participants enter the work through perception and choice, allowing individual histories and abilities to inform how the inquiry unfolds.

Within this framework, dancers develop tools to generate their own movement language. Expression is shaped through the how of moving—through sensation, timing, and relational choice—rather than through predetermined forms.

Developed by Brianna Lopez in 2020 through self-directed case studies, the work was first piloted under the title Soft as a Cat, Quick as a Bird at ConnectArte Espacio Multidisciplinario in Tijuana, Mexico. It was later named naftali method in 2024, when it was taught at the San Diego Dance Theatre Intensive.