Month: February 2019

A Comedy Tonight

JoAnne Tucker / / Uncategorized

As Avodah began to get more concert bookings I thought it would be fun to add some humor to our very serious repertory based on liturgy, biblical stories and Holocaust poetry. So in the spring of 1980 I added two new pieces inspired by weddings.  One of those pieces, Three Brides and a Cow, inspired by French Painter Marc Chagall, was short-lived in the repertory.  Both the music by Irving Fleet and my choreography were not up to their usual standards.  The costumes, however, created by Tallahassee artist Stuart Riodan, were outstanding.

The second piece, Mother of the Bride, did work and stayed in the repertory for quite a few years.  Our daughter Julie had had her Bat Mitzvah recently and that had influenced the piece as I saw how much planning can go into an event and how easy it could be to forget about the significance of the moment and in a frenzy just get caught up in all the details.  So in Mother of the Bride I took things to the extreme, focusing on a mother taking on an extremely strong role.  

A review in 1983 in the Montgomery, AL paper describes it wonderfully:

Mother of the Bride was a very funny piece with Ms. Mindlin as the harried mother trying to organize her daughter’s wedding.  The other characters were Ms Behrendt as the bewildered bride standing in roller skates as activity swirled around her and Ms. Rodin as a bridesmaid.  The mother literally rolled the bride off stage to her wedding after she had been dressed in her finery and a bouquet stuffed in her hands.

(Although the bride is on roller skates, she is stuck in one spot throughout the whole piece, unable to move independently, because her mother controls all the action.)  The music was Purcell and the mother’s costume actually came from my own closet.  A long party dress I had worn was altered to fit the various dancers who played the part of the mother! (Kezia, who often played the part of the mother, notes that when she was married and the organist asked if she wanted the familiar Purcell piece played at the ceremony, she shouted, “NO” and then had to explain her unusually strong reaction.)            

A year later I added a piece I called Noshing to fun Klezmer music. It was all about eating and talking.  There are quite a few different definitions for the Yiddish word to nosh.  They range from eating food enthusiastically or greedily to having a snack between meals.   A trio for three dancers, the piece opens with two dancers greeting each other in a rather catty way… looking each other up and down, with one dancer even checking the label in the other dancer’s dress.  A third dancer joins them.  Soon they are at a buffet table filling their plates with food.  One dancer is attempting to resist the temptation of filling her plate with too much food. Three chairs are upstage center. The dancers soon sit down and then alternate between pantomiming eating and talking.  These movements usually amuse the audience quite a bit.As Noshing continues we see two dancers busily having a “conversation” in dance highlighted by fancy footwork and then one dancer does a solo conveying a very gossipy tale. It’s a fun piece filled with more balletic steps than usual for me.  I found two videos in my Avodah collection and it was great fun to watch a performance in Omaha, NE and another outdoor one in Great Neck, NY – two different casts both successfully and playfully

(l to r) Nancy and Muriel Melacon in the chatty duet in Noshing.  Photo by Jim Williams.
My apologies to Nancy – and Anita, below – as I can’t remember their last names and don’t seem to have any reviews or programs which help me.
(l to r) Nancy and Anita in Noshing. Photo by Jim Williams. 

In the fall of 1982, Rick Jacobs suggested doing a piece honoring three Jewish comedians: Woody Allen, Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce.  The choreography was mainly Rick’s, with some suggestions from me. The piece received a preview performance on our January tour to Alabama.  In the Woody Allen section, a beautiful female dancer seated in a chair downstage right totally ignores his attempts to flirt. The dancer leaves and Rick pretends the chair becomes the “beautiful lady” and dances with the chair.  As the section ends he is on the floor as the dancer returns and for the first time takes notice of him – on the floor, much to his dismay.

Abandoning a sweater and putting on a  jacket and nose glasses Rick becomes Groucho.  I particularly enjoyed this section with his bold Groucho strides.  Soon a dancer portraying Mrs. Dumont enters.  They dance together in a sarcastic way and at the end Rick carries her off much like a sack over his shoulder.  

Luckily I had a video of these two sections done in a performance at a JCC in New Jersey which helped to refresh my memory.  Alas I don’t have any video of the Lenny Bruce section and I don’t remember it performed very often.

With the rest of the repertory being so serious these three comedies added a new dimension and gave the audience a chance to laugh.  

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Things you Learn from Touring

JoAnne Tucker / / Uncategorized

This evening as we were getting ready to go out to dinner, Murray said, “Oh by the way the back door of our Rav SUV isn’t closing.” OK, I thought, let me take a look at it.

So… I opened the back door which looked normal except it wasn’t closing tightly and I immediately saw that the latch wasn’t hanging right.  Since it was evening and dark… I got out my iPhone, put on the flashlight and saw that one screw had come out of the latch and so it was hanging downward.  Murray joined me and we soon found the missing screw. Murray got a screwdriver and in just a few minutes it was back to working perfectly.

The fixed Latch of the car door.

Now Murray was a bit surprised, because he’d figured he would have to take it into a repair shop. While I usually am not solving car problems, this was a no brainer… and Murray was very happy that I had just saved us $85 or more.  All I could think was that one benefit of touring and running a dance company is that you learn to quickly problem solve.

Tonight I am remembering those moments of touring which required quick problem solving, and the last-minute challenges of directing a dance company.  One example I have already shared — the snow storm that left two dancers performing “Let My People Go” when there should have been a full company of six.  In a few hours that day we figured out how to make something work for the evening performance. (See “Let My People Go Meets Let it Snow”.)  

Last minute casting changes sometimes happened.  Like the time that Beth Millstein got the chicken pox two days before we were due to perform in Boston.  Well…  I called my good friend Linda Kent and asked if she could recommend one of her students or past students from Juilliard who might fill in and she said SHE was available. Wow that was pretty awesome to have a former member of Alvin Ailey Company and Paul Taylor Company subbing for us.  

And then there was the time in the airport when one of the dancers hadn’t arrived at our meeting place and it was getting very close to the time that the plane was due to take off.  Hmmm…. Not wanting to have the rest of us miss the flight, I left her ticket with a ticket agent and we all boarded the plane.  Just as they were about to close the door, the dancer appeared to a round of applause from us and those sitting near us.

When performing in services, we always worked to get furniture moved from the bema so the dancers could have as much space as possible to move. One day when one rabbi was determinedly saying that a podium couldn’t be moved, Rick and I gently tilted it back, disconnected the wires and moved it over to the side, giving the dancers their needed space.  The rabbi wrote a lovely review back to the Jewish Welfare Lecture Bureau that had booked us, saying that “JoAnne Tucker was very pleasant to work with in spite of being persistent.”

At one Friday Sabbath service in Connecticut, the rabbi was certain the best place for us to perform was in an area in the back of the sanctuary and everyone could just look over his or her shoulders to see us.  Now that was by far the oddest suggestion I had ever heard and there was no way I could agree to that.  For several hours we went back and forth… meanwhile I simply told the dancers to work on their spacing on the bema.  Finally I quoted scripture – Exodus 40:30-32 about levels of sacred space and remembered something we had written in Torah in Motion.  I convinced him that it would be all right for the dancers to be on the bema because they would not be going up to the ark where the Torah scrolls were kept. That space was just for him! Success!  We danced on the bema!

So many times, I entered a space in the early afternoon and had to make decisions of where I would run the sound, set it up, and make sure it worked.  How many times dancers had to quickly adapt to a new space, making it their own and performing brilliantly.  And then when we were in a theatre, I had to quickly learn the lighting system.  Larger companies carried tech people.  We didn’t. While I rarely ran the lights, I had to learn how to communicate with the light person and sometimes a sound person to be able to call the cues.  Then I would call my own cue and walk into the spotlight to narrate between pieces.

So… what I learned from running a dance company was to be flexible.  Problems can be solved by stopping, taking in the situation, and then seeing the possible solutions.  This training has served me very well in life and fixing our car door tonight was a small example.   

Murray and I, happy that the car is repaired.

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Dance and Art Together

JoAnne Tucker / / Art, Movement Workshops

In 2003 when my husband and I were thinking about moving from the New York area and I was becoming aware that I no longer had new goals for the dance company, I treated myself to classes at The Art Students League on 57thStreet.  Later I’ll write more about my beginning studies in art.  I knew it would be important to keep creative energy going in my life. Today I am excited to share how dance and art came together.  Just a few weeks ago (on Saturday, January 12th), I led a movement workshop at the Community Art Gallery here in Santa Fe.  It came about as a result of having a painting in the show “Exquisite Corpse.”  The show was for the 10thanniversary of the gallery, and to be eligible to participate, you had to have been juried into one of their themed exhibitions.

A floral painting of mine had been in an earlier show so I emailed back the form saying I wanted to participate.  

The painting that I did for “Viva Flores” in 2013 that made me eligible to participate in the 10thAnniversary Show “Exquisite Corpse.”

The program for the 10thanniversary show describes the intent and motivation:

Exquisite Corpse is an historic parlor game in which participants create one of three components of a figure drawing: head, torso and legs.  130 participating artists created one of those distinct sections.  When assembled together, these sections will create an exhibit that unites the disparate parts into singular figures.  Each artist’s section is priced individually at $150, and buyers have the opportunity to create their own combinations. ….. What better way to celebrate ten years of building innovative programming hand-in-hand with the community than to have a decade of artists together build a collective work of art.

When I got the return email in the spring, saying that I had gotten the body part of the “head,” I did a big sigh and was glad that I had all summer to work on it.  The painting wouldn’t be due at the gallery until the beginning of October.  Our instructions were that the piece had to measure 30” wide by 10” high. Well at least that gave me room to put things around the head!  I am not good at portrait drawing even though I did do a 5-month program in Santa Fe with the outstanding teacher Anthony Ryder in 2009.  In fact it was during those 5 months that Murray and I fell in love with Santa Fe and decided that we wanted to move here and make it our permanent year-round home.   

OK… since I was good at flowers I would do a self-portrait surrounding my head with tulips.  I had just returned from a spring trip to New York City and had been admiring all the beautiful displays of tulips, particularly in lower Manhattan near where the ferry from Jersey City arrived. Since I was staying in Jersey City and taking the ferry in daily I had lots of opportunity to wander through the display and take photographs.  

Slowly over the summer I developed the oil painting, particularly challenged with the self-portrait and loving doing the tulips.  I dropped it off at the gallery thinking, “Well at least I completed the assignment even if it wasn’t very good.” They had rescheduled the opening and Murray and I had reservations at Monument Valley, a place we had long wanted to visit, and so we missed the opening.

The view from our room in Monument Valley.


A week later, after returning from Monument Valley, I got an email from the gallery saying my painting had sold.   Wow… I was totally surprised.   Murray was busy in his office and I went bounding in asking if he wanted to go see the show and go to lunch afterwards. We agreed and I had an hour or so before we would leave.  For fun I googled the phrase “Exquisite Corpse” and the most amazing dance interpretation consisting of 42 choreographers, most of whom I was familiar with, came up.  (One of the choreographers was former Avodah dancer Sidra Bell.)  Each choreographer creates a phrase of about 10 seconds and the next choreographer opens his/her phrase with the last movement of the previous choreographer’s work.  The video on You Tube was great fun and extremely well made. 

When I got to the gallery I was thrilled with how Rod Lambert, the Community Gallery Manager, had put together the show.  He was the one who selected which heads would go with which torsos, and with which feet, and he had done an amazing job.  I was thrilled with how my head was arranged with two other pieces.  

My self-portrait and how it was arranged with two other pieces in
the Exquisite Corpse show.

When I congratulated him on how well the show was displayed, he shared how well the opening had gone, with enthusiasm from both the artists and other attendees.  He told us that more paintings were sold at the opening than for any other show.  At some point I talked about the video I had seen where 42 choreographers did their version of Exquisite Corpse.  Immediately Rod asked me about my background and whether I would be interested in doing a dance workshop related to the show.  He always arranged various kinds of workshops around the show and it would be fun to do a dance one since they rarely if ever had done dance.  There was a small honorarium for leading the workshop.  Of course I said yes and over the next several weeks, via email, we selected a date and I sent in my bio and a brief description of the workshop.

The workshop ended up being quite wonderful.  While it was small,with only five participants, each person was totally engaged and brought something special to the group.  My friend Regina (a professional storyteller)was one of the participants and she had brought a friend of hers who was also a professional storyteller. Of course at one point in the workshop Regina and I just laughed remembering that we started doing such things together when we were about six years old in her living room.  (That’s another blog sometime down the road.) One of the participants was totally deaf.  She read lips very well and when she didn’t understand something we wrote on a large piece of paper we had placed on the wall. She had a lovely quality of movement. Two other women came in a few minutes late, one a writer and the other a therapist who had a dance background.  They quickly became a part of the group.  

We used some warm up improvisational work to lead to the centerpiece of each person creating their own solo. (Since it was a small group and each person was very capable I changed the original plan of small groups creating a dance and instead asked each person to create a solo.  That would have been risky with most small groups but not with this one.)  I asked them to select a head, a torso and feet from any of the works; the parts did not need to be from the same arrangement.  By the way, some of the works were sculptures, like the torso in the piece I was a part of, while others were photographs or paintings in any medium.  The choreographers were then to imagine how the head, torso and feet would move with at least 2 movement phrases for each part of the body.

While they were creating their pieces, I put a blanket of percussion instruments out, bringing the energy of my favorite accompanist Newman Taylor Baker into the room.  When we gathered back together, each person shared their solo and I accompanied.  Then after exploring the instruments, one person selected the instruments they wanted for their solo and another person in the group accompanied them. Each workshop participant also took us to the pieces that had inspired their movements.

The results were super.  Before ending we linked the solos together as the 42 choreographers had done, and then we all watched the video I had seen, and which I highly recommend.  Here again is the link to watch it.

I left feeling a sense of completeness.  Dance and art together shared with five totally present and creative participants!                

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Book Signing at Jewish Education Conference

JoAnne Tucker / / Dance Midrash

We were thrilled when our publisher, A.R.E. Publishing Inc., arranged for Avodah to perform and lead a workshop at CAJE, a conference of Jewish educators.  Founded in 1976, The Coalition for the Alternatives in Jewish Education held its first conference with about 500 in attendance at Brown University.  By the time we appeared at the 15thConference at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio there were 2000 in attendance and the name had changed to The Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education.  The full company of four dancers (Kezia Gleckman Hayman, Deborah Hanna, Susan Freeman and Elizabeth McPherson) participated in a concert that combined a lecture demonstration as well as a performance. When Susan and I were not leading or attending a session we had fun being at the A.R.E. booth and signing copies of our book.  

It was very special to have the two owners of A.R.E. so actively involved in promoting our book and I was so glad to find the following two pictures in Avodah’s scrapbook. 

Rabbi Ray Zwerin introducing us at CAJE
Audrey Friedman Marcus selling our book at CAJE

Avodah had recently added a new piece to the repertory called Sisters which I will describe in detail in a later blog.  For the CAJE conference we used excerpts from the piece as part of the lecture demonstration

From l to r: Elizabeth McPherson, Susan Freeman, Kezia Gleckman Hayman, and Deborah Hanna showing moon shapes from the piece Sisters.
During the performance I could be found sometimes backstage and sometimes at the side of the auditorium running the sound.

The conference built a lot of momentum for Avodah with Jewish educators and we soon found ourselves leading regular sessions in dance midrash, particularly in Reform Congregations throughout the New York area, for the next 12 years.  I continued to attend CAJE conferences over the next several years and was often invited to do teacher-training programs in different parts of the country. 

Much to our surprise and delight, Torah in Motion: Creating Dance Midrash received quite a few reviews in different publications. In a review in Compass, a publication of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Rabbi Nancy Weiner wrote,” What a revolutionary concept it is to blend proud academic analysis with the vibrancy of movement” (Vol. 13, No. 3, Spring– Summer 1991).  A review in the Sacred Dance Guild Journal in the Fall of 1990 pointed out that “this book not only contains introductory material to help the reader/teacher get into what it is about, but supplies beginnings for the creative teacher/dancer, on many sections of the Bible.

I found it interesting that the book was finding an audience with dancers in the Christian community. In a publication in 1992 called Phoenix Rising, which celebrated the Arts in Religion and Community, Kay Troxell, who had been active in sacred dance for 20 years, wrote:

Our dances so often reflect the New Testament that we miss the many rich opportunities offered in these books of the Torah (the Christians’ Old Testament). Moving from words to movement can bring a whole new perspective to the original words and this is what Torah in Motion does. The fact that it is designed to be suitable for children as well as adults, dancers, would-be-dancers, and those at all levels of experience, makes this book valuable to persons wanting to find dance in biblical verses and wanting to stretch their creativity as well as their bodies.  

Dance Magazine in the February 1991 issue had a nice mention of the book.  And then in 1999, Attitude: The Dancers’ Magazine did a very informative piece on the book:

..the movement improvisations of Torah in Motion are focused on community without a barrier or division of spectator and performer. Here everyone is a participant: a thinking body if you will, filled with both movement possibilities and thoughts of contemporary relevance.  Dance Midrash has wide application possibilities in summer camps, senior citizen homes, settlement houses, day camps and various adult education settings and schools.

In 2000 when A.R.E. decided not to reprint the book, Susan and I explored the possibility of making it available “on demand” through a company called “E-rights.” A.R.E gave us permission to use the cover they had designed, and the Photographer of the photos in the book, Tom Brazil, also gave us permission to use them in the “on-demand” version.  In 2014 the book became available through Open Road Media and may be purchased on Amazon. The almost 30-year journey of the book is fun for me to remember and I am delighted it is still available and being used.  

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