Ohad Naharin and Batsheva Come to BAM With "Hora" The Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin with dancers in Batsheva Dance Company. From far left, Shamel Pitts, Rachael Osborne and Doug Letheren rehearse Mr. Naharin's "Hora," which is coming to Brooklyn. JUST a few feet from the Mediterranean Sea here, people gather on Saturday mornings for weekly folk dance sessions, a tradition that takes place all over the country as it has since before the establishment of the state, when dance was used to forge national identity. Participants execute variations of that twisting, weaving, circle dance that most people in America know from awkward renditions at weddings and bar mitzvahs: the hora. A mile down the coast, at the Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theater, a sprawling campus of white-stone plazas surrounded by date palms and cafes, the Batsheva Dance Company recently rehearsed its own "Hora," a 2009 work by the choreographer Ohad Naharin, the group's artistic director. The hora, with its simple steps and "the more the merrier" attitude, is all about dancers losing themselves in the collective. In Mr. Naharin's "Hora," which is coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, dancers assert their individuality in virtuosic solos, only occasionally moving in sync. Instead of creating a dance of unity, Mr. Naharin, as he does in much of his work, explores the complicated dynamics of the individual within the group, rendering the classic hora completely unrecognizable, if not altogether erasing it. Don't expect Mr. Naharin, who turns 60 this year and took the helm of Batsheva in 1990, to admit the connection between the hora and "Hora." His dancers point out that the word also means "hour" in Spanish, serves as a casual greeting in Japanese and, to the discomfort of presenters in Norway where the work was performed last year, closely resembles a certain Norwegian insult to women. The mischievous denial of his title's obvious allusion is consistent with Mr. Naharin's playful humor. It also reflects the way he and Batsheva, Israel's premiere contemporary dance troupe and one of its most popular cultural exports, have made an art of challenging assumptions about Israel and Israeli culture. Although nearly half of Batsheva's dancers are foreigners, as an Israeli dance company that has reached a high level of international success - it has performed in nearly 20 countries in the last two years alone - it continually confronts the paradox of wanting to embrace its national roots while simultaneously working to cultivate an independent identity in which art is the only thing that matters. "It's a secular religious experience," Joseph V. Melillo, the executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy, said of watching Batsheva. Mr. Melillo, who discovered Mr. Naharin at Dance Theater Workshop in the 1980s, first presented the company in 2002 and has invited them back four times, including this week. Mr. Melillo said he responded to the emotional and psychological punch of Mr. Naharin's choreography. "You feel something personal and spiritual at a Batsheva performance," he said. He called "Hora" a refinement of the company's essence, saying, "It has moved up on the aesthetic eco-chain to a new plateau." The score for "Hora" also subverts expectations by using unusual versions of some of the world's most recognizable music: Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," which has a secure place in dance history; Strauss's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," used in Stanley Kubrick's "2001"; and even "Ride of the Valkyries" by Wagner, whose anti-Semitic sentiments make him a polarizing figure in Israel, where it is still taboo to perform his music live. Each of the pieces carries artistic baggage. But the nontraditional, synthesized interpretations from the 1970s by the pioneering Japanese composer Isao Tomita underscore Mr. Naharin's interest in examining and reinterpreting the things we think we already know. In creating "Hora" Mr. Naharin has tried to confront cliché head on. In movement as in music, "I play with rules," he said. I make up rules. I break those rules. That seems a fitting attitude for someone who is a bit of a rock star, both at home in Tel Aviv, where even the cabdrivers know his name, and in the dance world, where his work and teaching have amassed a devoted following.