Boxerman by Noa Zuk. Dancers: Maree ReMalia, Mara Penrose, and Dante Brown. Photo by Melissa Bontempo.

As my family and friends in the U.S. have updated me about snowstorm after snowstorm, I have developed an even greater appreciation for our mild Israeli winters.  But in a little over a week, I will happily trade these warmer climes for the cold Midwest, lured by a conference hosted by the Melton Center at The Ohio State University (OSU).  The conference, titled Modern Jewish Experience through the Lens of Dance, promises a plethora of presentations, performances, and spirited discussion – and it is all free and open to the public, so if you are in the Columbus area, come on out and join us on February 13 and 14!  The participating dancers and scholars will cover a wide range of topics, spanning a spectrum from folk dance to contemporary dance, and I am happy to contribute two talks that reflect some of my research here in Israel.  During the opening session on Sunday the 13th, I will give a presentation called “Beyond the Hora: Israeli Contemporary Dance,” and at one of the panels on Monday the 14th, I will give a presentation called “Questioning the ‘Israeli’ in Israeli Contemporary Dance.”  As an added bonus, the audience at the opening session will be treated to OSU students’ performance of Boxerman by Noa Zuk, an Israeli choreographer and former Batsheva dancer who, along with Ohad Fishof, recently taught Gaga at OSU as a Schusterman Visiting Artist.

Read on for more details about the conference.  Hope to see some of you there!

Modern Jewish Experience through the Lens of Dance

February 13-14, 2011
Sullivant Theater, Sullivant Hall, Ohio State Campus
1813 N. High Street

The conference opens with a public performance:
Jewish Dance in the 20th Century
Words, Imagery, Movement
Sunday, February 13 at 3:00 p.m.
Sullivant Theater, Sullivant Hall, Ohio State Campus
1813 N. High Street

This unique conference will include dancers and dance scholars from the U.S. and Israel to examine Jewishness in dance in the 20th and 21st centuries. This two-day international conference opens with a public performance focusing on modern Jewish dances, dancers, and choreographers, emphasizing the interrelationship between historical developments and dance. Scholarly panels and roundtable discussions will take place on Sunday evening and Monday morning.

The conference is free and open to the public. The complete conference schedule can be found on our website: www.meltoncenter.osu.edu

Supported by the Thomas and Diann Mann Distinguished Symposium on Judaism and the Herbert and Betty Schiff Fund for Jewish Studies.

Co-sponsored with The Ohio State University Department of Dance, The Ohio State University’s Center for Slavic and East European Studies, and The Lenore Schottenstein Jewish Arts Endowment and the Sara and Harry Schwartz Memorial Fund of the Columbus Jewish Foundation

Gaga Intensive. Photo by Gadi Dagon

Many of you have inquired about the 2010 Gaga Intensive, a two-week summer course offered by Ohad Naharin along with dancers from Batsheva Dance Company.  So, as the registration coordinator for the workshop, I’m pleased to offer you the scoop: this year’s intensive will be held from July 11-23 in Tel Aviv at the Batsheva studios in the Suzanne Dellal Center.  The Gaga Intensive is geared towards dancers and dance students age 18+.  Classes in Gaga, Naharin’s repertory, and Gaga methodics will run Sundays through Thursdays from 10:00 in the morning until 5:00 in the afternoon, and there will also be classes on Friday mornings. The course will cost 2000 NIS, or roughly $500.

If you have questions, please do not contact me through Dance In Israel but instead e-mail me at: gagaint@gmail.com

You can register at: www.gagapeople.com

Hope to see you in Tel Aviv this summer!

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• “Going Gaga: My Introduction to Gaga Dance Classes” (my overview of Gaga dance classes)
• “Gaga: Ohad Naharin’s Movement Language, in His Own Words” (featuring a quote by Ohad Naharin about Gaga)
• “Gaga: A Foreigner Explores Ohad Naharin’s Movement Language” (a reflection on my experience in Ohad Naharin’s Gaga classes)
• “Ohad Naharin on Gaga (Video)” (with a video of Ohad Naharin discussing some concepts from Gaga)
• “A Glimpse into the Gaga Workshop (2008)” (including a video from the 2008 workshop)
• “Reflections on the Gaga Intensive 2009″ (dancers share their memories from the 2009 workshop)
• “Gaga for Dancers: From the Gaga Intensive to New Open Classes” (my article on the 2009 intensive and an announcement about Gaga/dancers classes)

Related Links

• Gaga website (including registration for Gaga Intensive)
• Batsheva Dance Company
• Suzanne Dellal Center

Video: Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performing Ohad Naharin’s Decadance

If you’re in Atlanta, Georgia – or if you know someone in Atlanta – here’s a heads up:

I’m happy to announce that I am speaking in the Emory Friends of Dance Lecture Series on Wednesday, February 24 at 7:00 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time).  My talk, Foreign Exchange: American and Israeli Dance from Martha Graham to Ohad Naharin, will precede a performance by Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet of Ohad Naharin’s Decadance.  I won’t be in Atlanta in person, but I will be speaking via Skype and have an exciting presentation prepared!

Cedar Lake performing Ohad Naharin’s Decadance.  Photo by Paul B. Goode.

Here’s the official blurb about my lecture:

Forty years ago, Israel’s premiere dance company imported works by top American choreographers.  Now cutting-edge American troupes like Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet are drawing crowds with choreography by Israeli artists.  In this lecture, dance scholar Deborah Friedes Galili explores the dynamic relationship between American and Israeli dance and traces the meteoric rise of Israeli contemporary dance.  This lecture will be presented live from Israel via webcam prior to the performance by Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet.

Cedar Lake performing Ohad Naharin’s Decadance.  Photo by Paul B. Goode.

My lecture is free and open to the public, so if you’re in Atlanta, I hope you will come listen in the Chase Lobby at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, 1700 N. Decatur Road.  I will speak for one half hour, and then there will be a question and answer session.  Please let others know about this event as well!

Related Articles on Dance In Israel

• Batsheva Dance Company: From Graham to Gaga
• Americans in Israel: Cedar Lake in Tel Aviv Dance 2008
• Ohad Naharin’s Deca Dance in Israel: A Cycle Completed

Related Links

• Emory Dance Program Events
• Emory Report (article about the event)
• Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
• Batsheva Dance Company

In honor of our website’s first anniversary, we’ve rolled out a new magazine-style design!  If you’re reading this in your e-mail inbox or RSS feed reader, please visit us online and explore the new features we’ve unveiled (featured content, easier navigation, a better featured video system, an advanced search box, and more).

In the next few weeks, aside from our usual articles, we will publish some posts talking about the new features and also asking you about the direction we will take in the upcoming year.

A lot has happened since we established Dance In Israel one year ago today.  We’ve published over 90 articles, including 8 podcasts.  26,000 visitors from 137 countries around the world have explored our site, looking at 2 pages on average.  120 people subscribe to us via e-mail, and approximately 40 have our content delivered to their RSS feed readers.  We have 312 fans on Facebook (and counting).  We’ve hit Google page rank 5, a sign of our strength on the web.  And to boot, we – Deborah, who writes the posts, and Tal, who builds the blog – got married!

Thank you for following us as we developed over the past year, and please stay with us – there’s lots more to come!

Speaking about dance in Israel to a group of tourists, March 2008. Photo by Marilyn Friedes.

As you know by now, I have a passion for writing about dance in Israel.  I also have a passion for speaking about dance in Israel, and as I plan a trip to the U.S. in April, I’m hoping to give a few lectures on the subject.   If you’re interested in hearing a lecture or can recommend a place to give a lecture, please read more.

Recommend a place:

Do you know of an organization, community center, university, or other venue that might be interested in hosting a lecture on dance in Israel?

Maybe you’re part of an organization in the dance world which would love to host a talk about the developments here in Israel.  Or perhaps you’re part of an organization in the Jewish community which would like to have a different window into contemporary Israeli culture.   Or maybe you simply have ideas about which organizations might be interested in inviting me to speak.

If you have any connections or ideas about where I could lecture in the New Jersey, New York City, and Boston areas during April, please contact me.  You can also e-mail me directly: deborahfriedes@gmail.com

Show your interest:

If you live in these areas and would like to attend a lecture, if you don’t live in these areas but are interested in a lecture, or if your organization can’t host a lecture right now but might in the future – in all of these cases and more – I would love to be in contact with you.  Please fill out the form below to let me know who you are, where you are, what you’re about, and how to contact you.

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Shortly after I started blogging, I found the desire and the need to follow other dance blogs on a regular basis.  I was eager to discover other dance bloggers and connect with them; I hoped that online, I might find a community feeling similar to what I had always enjoyed in the studio.

Three issues arose as I explored the dance blogosphere from my initial vantage point:

• It wasn’t always easy to find dance bloggers, even though we exist (really!)
• Once I found other dance bloggers, following their posts by entering their sites individually (every day) became very time consuming and tiring.
• I still wanted to connect more easily to other dance bloggers and readers – especially since I was halfway around the world from most of the people I met online!

I hope to see these issues resolved through the introduction of a new website that is bringing dance bloggers together: www.DanceBloggers.com

What is DanceBloggers.com?

DanceBloggers.com is a central hub for people who blog about dance in English. The site will help dance bloggers connect and follow the dance blogosphere; it will also allow people interested in dance and blogging to learn more about the field.

How does Dance Bloggers operate?

This site will aggregate feeds from participating dance blogs.  The beginnings of each participating blog’s posts will automatically be displayed on the main page; when someone clicks on a post to read more, he or she will be redirected to the original blog.  All participating blogs will have links in the “Contributors” section of our sidebar and in the Dance Bloggers Directory.

Here is a screenshot of the DanceBloggers.com homepage (click on in for a larger image):

What can Dance In Israel readers gain by tuning into Dance Bloggers?

The screen shot above highlights each of these three benefits:

• Follow: Subscribe to daily e-mails featuring teasers of posts from many dance blogs.
• Connect: Become a friend of Dance Bloggers to connect and share thoughts on our wall thanks to Google Friend Connect (just like in Facebook).
• Participate: If you are also a dance blogger, you can submit your blog and gain visibility.

Want to see more about Google Friend Connect so you can use it on Dance Bloggers and Dance In Israel?

(Video: Introducing Google Friend Connect)

Want to support Dance Bloggers?

Please share this with your friends via e-mail and Facebook!

* * *

Full disclosure and thanks: My partner Tal and I started Dance Bloggers, and above is an edited excerpt of the Dance Bloggers About page.

I’m also grateful to Kristin Sloan and The Winger - a collection of dance professionals blogging on one site – which first hooked me into the larger dance blogosphere.

Deborah Friedes stretching on the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel.

My very first post on my very first blog was titled, “Some context, or why I am traveling halfway around the world for a year.”  I was about to leave the U.S. for Israel, where I would be researching Israeli contemporary dance on a Fulbright grant.  Little did I know that I would travel halfway around the world and stay there.  After seeing the vibrancy of dance in Israel, I realized I could research the subject for years to come, and so in the fall of 2008, I undertook a major move to pursue my passion: I made aliyah and moved to Israel.

Every week, on DanceInIsrael.com, I will publish written posts, photo journals, and audio podcasts. My content will reflect the range and vitality of the concert dance scene in Israel.  Beside publishing fresh content, I will also re-publish material from my Fulbright year; some of this was initially posted on The Winger, Israel Seen, and my own blog.  For those of you who have followed my writing on other websites during the past year, you’ll be happy to know that I will preface my older posts with brief musings and my current perspective on the subject.

I invite you to subscribe for free e-mail updates from DanceInIsrael.com when new content goes online by clicking here and typing your e-mail address (please make sure to follow the link in the first e-mail you will receive to complete the subscription process!).

And now, on to the blog! Before we plunge into the heart of the subject, let us start together at a jumping-off point: the seeds of my research.  Below is my first post from my original blog, published on my professional website on September 18, 2007.

* * *

Upon hearing of my upcoming journey, a new acquaintance wondered, “How did you decide to research dance in Israel?”  Here’s an answer, albeit a somewhat simplified, pared down version (despite the length!).

I first saw the Batsheva Dance Company during my sophomore year in college on a Birthright Israel trip in January 2001.   Thousands of young Jews packed an auditorium for an evening of speeches from high-profile politicians and performances from a variety of groups representing Israel’s cultural riches.  The mood in the hall was electric even before the event began, so we were primed when a lone woman, her already long limbs extended by stilts, languidly strutted onstage to begin Batsheva’s portion of the program.  A mélange of excerpts from Ohad Naharin’s repertory followed.  Lined up downstage in white tube-like costumes, each dancer slid fluidly through a brief solo and then joined the group in a series of explosive bursts, their fists pounding the air in front of them; seated in a semi-circle, the company rebelliously stripped down from suits to skivvies in a movement accumulation matching the form of the Passover song “Echad Mi Yodea?” (“Who Knows One?”).  When the performers prowled through the audience and pulled unsuspecting viewers to the proscenium as dance partners, the energy in the hall crackled.  We cheered on the amateurs who gamely bopped alongside their professional counterparts onstage.  As Dean Martin crooned the lyrics to “Sway” and the Batsheva dancers saucily shimmied and cha-cha-ed in unison, the seduction was complete.  I was smitten.  This was the start of my interest in the company and the larger Israeli modern dance scene.

I started studying dance history that summer, and my first research topic was the influence of Jewish culture in American modern dance.  References to Israeli modern dance and folk dance cropped up throughout the literature I devoured at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.  As I focused more closely on four American choreographers born to Eastern European Jewish immigrants for my undergraduate thesis – Helen Tamiris, Daniel Nagrin, Anna Sokolow, and Sophie Maslow – I found that the latter two had set dances on the Batsheva Dance Company; Sokolow also made yearly trips to Israel since the 1950s, working first with the Yemenite Inbal company and then with her own Lyric Theatre.  Both Sokolow and Maslow were affiliated with the New Dance Group, and when I began studying their colleagues from that organization, I discovered that Jane Dudley, Donald McKayle, and Talley Beatty also had artistic relationships with Israel’s premiere modern dance company.

The crossover of American artists to the Batsheva troupe fascinated me.  Funded by the Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, a patron of Martha Graham, the Batsheva company was a repertory troupe which showcased not only Graham’s work but that of her disciples and fellow Americans.  Besides the aforementioned choreographers, Norman Walker, William Louther, Paul Sanasardo, Robert Cohan, Ethel Winter, Pearl Lang, Linda Hodes, Jerome Robbins, José Limón,  John Butler, and Glen Tetley contributed to Batsheva’s repertory in its first few decades (some of them also served as artistic director).  In the 1980s and 1990s, David Parsons, Daniel Ezralow, Elisa Monte, Mark Morris, and Peter Pucci staged or created works for the Israeli company.  Batsheva did perform dances by European and Israeli choreographers, but a listing of the company’s repertory from its inception in 1964 until 1994 published in Israel Dance magazine (Oct. 1994) reveals that the company primarily featured works by American artists.

In 2004, Batsheva’s 40th anniversary year, I had the good fortune to see the company in both Columbus and New York City.  Now aware of the troupe’s artistic lineage, I was struck by the company’s aesthetic.  Reviews of dances by Israeli choreographers during Batsheva’s early decades commented on the structural and stylistic similarities to Graham’s work, but despite Naharin’s own history with the American pioneer – which included a season performing in her company in New York – he clearly had broken away from the path taken by his predecessors.  To me, his work seemed more closely related to some contemporary European choreography than to either Graham’s repertory or that of more recent Americans, but I would not simply categorize his style as “European” (an overly general, problematic distinction anyway).  My curiosity was piqued.  How did the Batsheva company and Israeli modern dance as a whole shake off such a strong American influence and evolve into a more innovative, Israeli-driven form?

I was also intrigued by Naharin’s usage of “Echad Mi Yodea?” and started to wonder how he and other Israeli choreographers incorporated references to Jewish culture in their dances.  The contexts in which Jewish-American and Jewish Israeli choreographers live – and the manifestations of Jewish identity and culture in each of these contexts – are quite different.  When and how do Israeli choreographers draw on specifically Jewish material?  And how does a primarily Jewish audience react to these dances?  I could probably write another paragraph on my experience watching the “Echad Mi Yodea?” excerpt first in a Jewish crowd in Israel and then in a primarily gentile, Midwestern audience; the conversations I had after each performance were, shall I say, worlds apart.  But now I must pack up my computer.  I’m off to the airport!

*This post was made possible thanks to a Fulbright student grant funded by the U.S.-Israel Educational Foundation and hosted by the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.