December, 2018 - Mostly Dance

Beginning of the New York Company

JoAnne Tucker / December 7, 2018December 15, 2018 / New York Company

While I am fuzzy on dates and exactly how I started a second company of Avodah in New York City I am clear on what motivated me. A modern dance company based on Jewish liturgy, rituals, text and history needed to be located in a place where there would be lots of opportunities for bookings and performances. Tallahassee was not that place. Yes, we had done a bit of touring in Savannah, Pittsburgh, Tampa and even one performance in Closter, NJ but somehow that wasn’t enough for me. While I found Tallahassee a wonderful place to experiment, to develop repertory, I longed for more opportunities to tour and share the repertory. The idea of having a second company based in New York City and making regular trips to New York really appealed to me.

By this time, I had stopped performing myself, stepping into the role of choreographing, directing and managing the business side of the company and non-profit. Around the same time, my father was spending a lot of time in the New York office of the sportswear company he worked for, and my sister, Peggy, had decided to make a transition to working in New York. My father and Peggy found a lovely apartment on the East side near the UN and so I had a place to stay. Peggy and I recently brainstormed exactly when that was and we think it was in May 1978. As best as I can tell from programs in my scrapbook, it was the summer of 1978 when I formed a company of 5 dancers and did an evening performance at Temple Israel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

How did I find the dancers? Well what is coming to mind is that I returned to take some classes from a favorite teacher of mine from Juilliard, Alfredo Corvino, who had a studio called Dance Circle on 8^thAvenue between 46^thand 47^thStreet. That is where I found Lynn Elliott who would dance with the company for quite a few years. A dancer from Tallahassee that I had worked with, Peggy Evans, had moved to New York City and so I reached out to her to join the company. Three other dancers, Kathy McDonald, Yael, and Benjamin Greenberg, I may have found through an audition notice or perhaps I also found them at Alfredo Corvino’s studio.

Rabbi Walter Jacob, by then an Avodah Board member, reached out to Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, located at that time on West 68^thStreet, and arranged for us to have rehearsal space at the school. That was the beginning of a long-term relationship with HUC-JIR. I hoped to invite people to the concert at Temple Israel who could help with bookings for the New York company. I have pictures that clearly show the repertory we did and that Irving Fleet joined us for the performance working with a choir for In Praise. Other pieces performed in the afternoon concert were Sabbath Woman and a newly created piece, I Never Saw Another Butterfly. The bema of the Temple provided a beautiful setting for the concert and one major contact was made for the company that had a profound impact on our development both in increased bookings for the New York company and in Florida for the Tallahassee company.

Kathy McDonald as the bride in *Sabbath Woman*.

Yael in front, Kathy behind in *I Never Saw Another Butterfly*.

Stephan Bayer, head of the Lecture Bureau for the Jewish Welfare Board (now called the Association of Jewish Community Centers), attended the concert and asked if he could add us to the roster of people they represented. Furthermore, Stephan also agreed to welcome me into the Lecture Bureau office and teach me how to book performances and put a tour together. I am forever grateful to Stephan for the role he played in helping us develop as a company. Later Stephan joined our board and served as an outstanding President for a number of years. Our next New York performance was in the spring of 1979 as part of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion’s Sunday Afternoon at the College Series. Lynne Elliott, Peggy Evans and Kathy McDonald continued to dance with the company and two new dancers, Holly Kaplan and a male dancer whose name I can’t recall, joined us. The three pieces done in the summer were included along with a new piece Sarah which I had created in Tallahassee with the help of a grant from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. The piece received its first performance in Tallahassee at Temple Israel on March 3 and six weeks later I restaged it with the New York company.

While the area the dancers had to work on was small, I remember being so proud of the performance they gave and I love this picture which was taken of us outside of HUC-JIR after the performance.

From Left to Right: JoAnne Tucker, Irving Fleet, unknown male dancer, Kathy McDonald, Peggy Evans, Lynn Elliott and Holly Kaplan.

I feel so very grateful to have had long-term relationships with dancers in the company. Each relationship has taken on its own special character. Lynn Elliott worked with the company for a number of years and many years later her daughter Justine performed with us. I will be writing more about Lynn in later blogs. While Kathy McDonald only danced with us in New York for that first year, she has kept in touch with the company and myself through the years. Each year she has sent a contribution first during Avodah’s fundraising campaign and now Healing Voices – Personal Stories. I always feel a wonderful glow as I open the envelope and remember her beautiful lyrical quality portraying the bride in Sabbath Woman. Many years later, Kezia, looking for a place to take adult ballet classes in Poughkeepsie, found a wonderful class taught by Kathy, who had opened a studio there specifically for adult dancers. Besides realizing they had both been in Avodah, they discovered they had performed the same solo in I Never Saw Another Butterfly.

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Poetry and Art Inspire I Never Saw Another Butterfly

JoAnne Tucker / December 14, 2018December 15, 2018 / New York Company

In the last post I mentioned the piece I Never Saw Another Butterfly. It was actually created in 1977 in Tallahassee, Florida receiving its first New York performance at Temple Israel in 1978. This was the first of four pieces that I created between 1977 and 2002 to remember the Holocaust or as memorial pieces for the Holocaust. The book I Never Saw Another Butterfly first came out in the early 60’s. By 1977 there was a lot of interest in the poems both in music and in dance. In fact, I was not the only choreographer that year to set some of the poems. Pearl Lang created her I Never Saw Another Butterfly in 1977, as did Wendy Osserman collaborating with composer Peter Schlosser.

Pearl Lang was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company from 1942 to 1952. When she left the company to form her own company in 1952, one of the first pieces she did was Song of Deborah, and she continued to often create works related to her Jewish background. In a radio interview in 1977 she referred to the piece I Never Saw Another Butterfly as a memorial to the Holocaust. I did not get to see Lang’s Butterfly but I did see an earlier piece she created in 1960 called Shirah, which I found hauntingly beautiful. I also had the opportunity to study with Pearl in 1960 at the Connecticut College Summer Dance Program. For six weeks in an hour-long composition class a small group of students, maybe four or five of us, worked on studies. I was assigned to do a laughter study and an anger study. Another older member of the class created a piece inspired by the fragile character Laura in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I don’t remember the dancer’s name but the delicate way she wove movement together left a lasting impression.

In dance classes with Louis Horst at Juilliard, particularly his second year class called Modern Forms, he often encouraged us to visit museums and to even develop pieces inspired by the art that we saw. The Museum of Modern Art was one of my favorite places to go and there was one picture that I was strongly drawn to. Titled Hide and Seek, it was painted by Pavel Tchelitchew in 1942. The picture is a tree made up of children. There are arms reaching for each other, faces calling out, hands and toes as roots of the tree. Standing in front of the painting I felt life and death captured in the same moment. The painting seemed to cry out to me just as the poems in I Never Saw Another Butterfly did. In studying the painting I saw five particular parts that stood out and so I decided to limit the piece and only set five of the poems. Each dancer would recite a poem as they moved based on the five images that stood out.

In my file on I Never Saw Another Butterfly is a postcard of the painting, sent to me by Nanette Joslyn, a dancer in the NY Company in the early 80’s who also shared that she was dancing at the time with Pearl Lang in a spoof on the Esther–Modecai story.

Postcard of Pavel Tchelitchew’s painting *Hide and Seek* sent to me by Nanette Joslyn.

A description of the book tells us that 15,000 children under the age of 15 passed through the concentration camp of Terezin. Fewer than 100 survived. The poems and also pictures that they drew shared both the daily misery as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism.

There are only a few pieces of my choreography that I could get up and do now or at least set with only limited help of a video, and I Never Saw Another Butterfly is one of them. I also think it had the longest history of performances in the company, being performed through the early 2000’s. It opens with the group of dancers close together doing a random number of steps and stops as if they were bundled in a train car that stopped and started in no particular pattern. 1 hold 2 walk 3, 4, 5, hold 6 walk 7 and so the piece starts. Later they peel off and take shapes related to the poem and it is from these shapes that each dancer emerges to begin his or her poem.

Bea Bogorad and Randy Allen rehearsing *I Never Saw Another Butterfly* at the Creative Dance Center Studio in Tallahassee, Florida. Can you see the arms reaching for each other in Pavel’s painting that inspired this moment?

I was still performing with the company and my poem began:

I'ld like to go away
Where there are other nicer people,
Somewhere in the far unknown
Where no one kills one another.

After the first performance in Tallahassee, a member of the audience that I only knew casually came up to me and said he was very moved by the piece and that he was about to close out a bank account and wanted Avodah to have the balance left of $600. That was a large contribution for our little company back in 1977 and we were most grateful.

The title poem captures both the optimism and the despair:

The last, the very last
So richly, brightly, dazzling yellow
Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing
Against a white stone.

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly way up high.
It went away I'm sure
Because it wished to kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto
But I have found my people here
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut candles in the court
Only I never saw another butterfly.

As I write this, I have a sinking feeling in my stomach, aware of the current news where we in this country are separating immigrant children from their parents and putting them in large detention camps behind barbed wire and bars. Maybe this piece needs to be revived and seen again with the backdrop of current day pictures reminding us that we cannot be silent and allow this to continue.

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Exploring Biblical Sarah

JoAnne Tucker / December 21, 2018December 21, 2018 / Dances on Biblical Women, New York Company, Tallahassee

The third piece that Irving Fleet and I collaborated on was called Sarah. I mentioned it in the blog about the beginning of the New York company and want to go into more detail about the piece in this blog. Irving is quoted in an article in the Tallahassee Democrat as saying, “JoAnne was always intrigued with the character of Sarah” (March 2, 1979). And I hunch that was probably what motivated us to begin exploring her story. We honed in on that part of her life centered on first being unable to bear a child for her husband, then offering her handmaiden, Hagar, to bear a child for her and finally, when she becomes pregnant, Abraham celebrating the news. For me this was the beginning of my own journey creating “dance midrash.” Midrash refers to both the early interpretations and commentaries on Torah as well as modern ones. At the time I didn’t know this word. Later I would create a number of dance pieces that I considered midrash, co-author a book on dance midrash (Torah in Motion: Creating Dance Midrash, with Rabbi Susan Freeman), and teach many workshops involving dance midrash.

While telling the story was somewhat important, it was exploring Sarah’s emotions that we focused on the most: Sarah’s anguish at not becoming pregnant; her jealousy and anger at Hagar when Hagar does bear a child for Abraham, which results in Sarah banishing Hagar; and then her joy when she becomes pregnant in her old age.

Ritual movement again played an important choreographic role in the piece. When Abraham renews his covenant with God following news of Sarah’s pregnancy, Sarah, in our midrash, takes off the rope from her gown and gives it to Abraham. He then uses it for tefillin (ritual leather boxes with straps, which contain Torah text). Tefillin are traditionally only worn by men during the weekday morning service. They wrap one set around the arm, hand and fingers, and wrap the other set above the forehead. As Abraham is often referred to as the father of the morning prayer this ritual seemed an appropriate one to draw on. In the same article in the Tallahassee Democrat that I referred to earlier I am quoted as saying, “Dance composition should go back to everyday gestures, take them, enlarge and manipulate them.” And that is exactly what I did with the ritual of wrapping tefillin. I thought it worked very well. However, not everyone agreed with me. In fact, we had received some funding that year from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and when the piece was later performed in New York City, the Executive Director from the NFJC made a very strong point of letting me know that I clearly didn’t understand what wrapping tefillin was, as it was entirely inappropriate for Sarah to hand Abraham the rope from her gown to use. Indeed I did very much understand and part of my feminist statement was purposefully to have Sarah hand it to him.

On Saturday March 3, 1979, the first performance of Sarah was held as part of a concert at Temple Israel in Tallahassee along with Sabbath Woman, In Praise and I Never Saw Another Butterfly. The piece was created on the Tallahassee company with Ellen Ashdown as Sarah, Michael Bush as Abraham, Judith Lyons as Hagar and two handmaidens, Donna Campbell and Trish Whidden.

From my scrapbook. Photograph that was part of the *Tallahassee Democrat* article,
March 2, 1979.

Six weeks later I recreated the piece for the New York company with Lynn Elliott dancing the role of Sarah in a performance at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion’s West 68^thStreet Campus.

In the fall of 1979, we did a three-week season at Henry St. Settlement House on the Lower East Side of New York City as part of the American Jewish Theater. This was an excellent experience for us and I will write a full blog about it. For right now I want to share part of a review from Dance Magazine (by Marilyn Hunt) of the performance of Sarah at Henry St.

Sarah, a Grahamesque drama of a woman of large-scale passions is portrayed concisely and lucidly. Sarah vents her despair at being childless by lashing one leg around, pacing, and whipping her hair in a circle. In contrast, her handmaiden, young Hagar, whom Sarah gives to her husband, Abraham, to bear him a child, carries her imaginary water jar with chest thrust proudly forward and has a formal ritual-like mating with Abraham. Only the ending, God’s promise that Isaac, Abraham and Sarah’s belatedly-born son, would father the tribes of Israel, failed to come across in dance terms. The two women’s roles were especially well filled by Lynn Elliott and Peggy Evans. Dance Magazine, February 1980.

A year later when Rick Jacobs, who was then a rabbinic student at HUC-JIR, joined the company and learned the part of Abraham, the ending blessing took on a whole new dimension, as the prayer and actual movement were already deeply meaningful to him, and he performed the section in a uniquely heartfelt way.

Rick Jacobs as Abraham, 1981. *Photo by Amanda Kreglow*

Rick Jacobs and Lynn Elliott in *Sarah. Photo by Amanda Kreglow.*

Sarah continued to be beautifully performed regularly by the New York company during the next several years with Rick dancing the part of Abraham, and Lynn Elliott dancing the part of Sarah. For me Sarah was the first of a series of pieces focusing on Biblical women. And I would revisit Sarah, more than once.

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A Three-Week Season in NYC

JoAnne Tucker / December 28, 2018December 28, 2018 / Avodah's Early History, New York Company

I think Stanley Brechner, the Artistic Director of the American Jewish Theatre, came to our performance at Hebrew Union College in April of 1979 and that is where the discussion first began for us to become part of the American Jewish Theatre’s 1979 – 1980 season. I found in my file two letters between myself and Stanley Brechner. Avodah would receive 70% of the box-office receipts with ticket prices in the range of $2.50 to $3.50 in a house that seated 90. While that wasn’t great compensation I do remember knowing this was a great opportunity for us to have exposure in the New York area. An article in Show Business (September 27, 1979) was among the publicity we got for the three-week run:

“The American Jewish Theatre produces, mostly comedies and dramas, although occasionally we do musicals and dance,” says artistic director Stanley Brechner. “Quality is the first criterion,” he stresses, “although the play should deal with the Jewish experience in some way.”

As I began to work on this blog, I was curious to learn more about the American Jewish Theatre. Did it still exist? And if not what was Stanley Brechner doing? I got some answers but not all. The American Jewish Theatre was founded in 1974 by Stanley Brechner. Henry St. Settlement gave them space for three to four productions a year, office space, use of telephones but no money. By the end of the 1979 season they had moved to the 92^nd Street Y and remained there until 1987. Shortly after that they occupied the Susan Block Theatre in Chelsea as a subtenant of the Roundabout Theatre. In 1993 an article in The New York Times (July 17, 1993) reported a disagreement between the Roundabout Theater and its tenant, the American Jewish Theater, over the occupancy of the Susan Block Theater because the Roundabout said it wanted to use the space itself. Locks were changed and all the property of the American Jewish Theater was moved to a locker. Stanley Brechner is quoted as saying, “The American Jewish Theater is now homeless.” The article went on to point out that the American Jewish Theater had 2,500 subscribers and an annual budget of $375,000.

It appears that they continued producing plays through 1998. After that I can’t find any professional information on either the American Jewish Theater or what Stanley Brechner is currently doing.

Back to 1979 and our performances in the very simple and intimate recital hall of Henry Street. We presented the five pieces in our repertory at that time: In Praise, Sabbath Woman, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, Sarah, and Shevet Ahim Gam Yahad. I have written about the first four of those pieces in earlier blogs. Shevet Ahim Gam Yahad (“behold, how good it is to dwell together”) was set to music of Lucas Foss and explored how we can relate to each other as community. I did not feel most of the piece was successful but did love a trio section that later I included, to different music, in a piece that we created for the Selichot Service.

Beatrice Bogorad and Randy Allen rehearse the section I like from *Shevet Ahim Gam Yahad* in the Creative Dance Center in Tallahassee where I created the piece.

Among the dancers in the Fall of 1979 in New York City was Beatrice Bogorad whom I met when she was a dance major at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Bea came to dance late in her college career and I remember seeing her in class when she first came and wondering if she would make it in the dance world. Well…. she sure did and I was so glad that she worked with us first in Tallahassee and then continued to perform with the New York company when she was available.

Our Poster for the Performances at Henry Street Settlement as part of the
American Jewish Theater.

As a relatively unknown modern dance company in New York City and with so many performances it was a challenge to fill the house. Luckily Henry St. and the American Jewish Theater had a following. Sometimes we were totally full and at other times we had small audiences. One particular night stands out very clearly in my mind. There were only six people in the audience. However, one of those attending was Jennifer Dunning, one of three dance critics of The New York Times. Hum… do I share this with the dancers? I pondered and then thought I had best mention it because I certainly did not want them to be discouraged with such a small audience. They, of course, danced beautifully. We eagerly waited for the review to appear in the paper. Alas, it didn’t. I learned that many reviews are cut based on space and the editor of the section. I did call the Times and ask if we could see the review and a week or so later I received it in the mail. It was quite respectable and while I couldn’t quote from it, it was very reaffirming. The review was positive to all the dancers and ended with, “Miss Bogorad, in particular, is a young dancer to keep an eye on.” Indeed she was right on, for over the next several years, Bea danced with Charles Moulton and Susan Marshall, consistently receiving outstanding reviews. We were thrilled when she was free and could continue to perform with Avodah.

Having a three-week season so early in Avodah’s history taught me many things. Among them were never judge an audience by size for one never knows who is there and how they might impact you, and repeated performances help to build a quality level in a company.

Richard Osborne, Bea Bogorad and Lynn Elliott in *I Never Saw Another Butterfly* in the Recital Hallat Henry St. Settlement, October 1979.

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