How does the naftali method work?
The naftali method functions as an ongoing inquiry into how the body organizes effort, attention, and momentum. Rather than treating speed and softness as opposites, the practice examines them as interdependent conditions—each revealing and reshaping the other.
Through improvisational structures and somatic attention, dancers investigate what becomes possible when softness is approached as an active state. As unnecessary tension is released, the body gains agility, responsiveness, and continuity. Speed, in turn, is explored not as urgency or force, but as sustained pace—an attentive state that allows movement to remain inhabitable rather than consumptive.
Together, these investigations cultivate a body capable of staying present within complexity. The work asks how movement can remain available, adaptive, and precise without hardening or retreating—how clarity can emerge through listening rather than control.
The practice does not aim to produce a specific aesthetic or outcome. Instead, it creates conditions in which dancers can observe, test, and reorganize their own patterns of effort, allowing understanding to arise through experience.
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The practice often begins by examining softness as a possible default state of the body.
Through joint mobility and release—guided by metaphorical and sensory language—dancers investigate what occurs when the body becomes receptive rather than held. Softness is approached not as collapse, but as availability: a state that allows adaptation, responsiveness, and variation without strain.
Within this inquiry, softness reveals its relationship to agility. A soft body listens quickly, changes direction with ease, and remains spacious within complexity. Effort is observed as something that circulates rather than accumulates, supporting movement that is sustainable, clear, and attentive.
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Speed is approached not as urgency, but as pace to be examined.
Through improvisational structures, dancers investigate steady, continuous rhythm as a condition that can invite a flow state—often experienced as meditative. This pace is low-vibration and monotone, and its sustainability is evident in the body's softness.
Rather than imposing a set speed, the practice supports dancers to discover their own tempo. Through guided attention, each dancer locates a pace they can sustain—one that supports clarity, presence, and continuity—and learns to remain in an ongoing relationship with it as movement unfolds.
Photography by Ignacio Ponce.
ApproachThe practice is organized through a water-based framework that serves as a lens for observing the body’s changing states. Drawing from the qualities of water—fluid, powerful, and ever-shifting—the work investigates how movement gathers, travels, and releases over time.
The framework moves through three recurring conditions: spring, surge, and delta. Rather than functioning as fixed stages or goals, these terms enable dancers to examine momentum, accumulation, and release as evolving physical states. The emphasis remains on transition and flow—how the body responds, adapts, and reorganizes as conditions change.
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Naftali is named after the sixth son of Jacob, who is described as a deer let loose—associated with movement, responsiveness, and poetic speech. The name felt fitting for a practice that values adaptability, imagery, and metaphor as ways of thinking through the body.
The word method is used to describe a way of approaching inquiry rather than a fixed system. naftali method remains an evolving practice, shaped by those who enter it and the questions that emerge through movement.
The name is written in lowercase as a gesture toward the work rather than authorship, inspired by bell hooks’ decision to decenter the self in favor of what the work makes possible.
