September 2019 – Mostly Dance

Residency at York Correctional Institution for Women – Part I

JoAnne Tucker / September 27, 2019 / Dance Programs in Prison, Forgiveness Project, New York Company

Just a few weeks after our residency at the Jewish congregation in Westchester we were off to Niantic, Connecticut for our final residency in a women’s prison. I was still wrestling with an uncertainty of my own beliefs as well as what I saw as the future direction of the dance company, when we arrived on Sunday evening and gathered at a local church to meet our host families for the five nights we would be in Niantic.

Monday morning, 8:30 a.m. the dancers, Newman and I gathered in the waiting room of the prison. I am pretty sure that Joe Lea, who was handling all the details of the residency and had invited us, met us and guided us through the process of entering the facility. Following a brief orientation we were guided to the school which was in the maximum security side and entered the large classroom that had been cleared of most furniture except chairs along one side. While not an ideal space it was certainly large enough and even had its own private bathroom.

Twenty-four women and one of the staff teachers soon joined us. To be part of our program the women had to be enrolled in school, have permission from a teacher and have successfully taken two dance classes led by a teacher on staff who had a dance background. Joyce, the teacher who had led the classes, explained that the criterion for the women’s participation in our residency was that they could follow directions and make it through an elementary jazz-like dance class. Women of all sizes and ages, with or without any dance background, were welcomed.

Once everyone was in the room I asked them to make a large circle, and the four company members and I spread out joining the circle. Newman was busy setting up his instruments at the far end of the room. Usually I begin with a warm up led by one of the company members and that was what I had planned to do… but looking around the room I turned to Joyce and asked her to start the class and we would follow along. She did and we followed her warm up for about 10 minutes. Then she said they had created a dance and asked if I wanted to see it. Indeed I did. The company members joined me as we watched a short jazz-style dance of about a minute. Then I asked Joyce and the women to teach it to the four Avodah company members. They did and everyone was enjoying having the company members dancing with them. I asked if I might coach it a bit and was greeted with enthusiasm. They quickly responded to the few suggestions I gave.

Then I asked the women to sit on one side of the room and said that I would share a little about the style of dance we did. Accompanied by Newman we shared some of the elements of modern dance focusing on different qualities of movement, floor patterns, and changing dynamics. I then asked the group to give us a theme to dance about. One woman raised her hand and I called on her. She said the feelings of a sad baby crying. Kerri, Andrea, Jessica and Danielle responded beautifully, creating a heartfelt movement improvisation. You could have heard a pin drop in the room and the women were so clearly with the dancers. I knew we were off to a very good start and that the women in the room and the four Avodah dancers would have no problem working together. They had become a company of 28 women who would work on The Forgiveness Piece together to perform for other women at the facility on Friday. Joe was also inviting some outside guests to the join the audience and we had scheduled two performances, one in the morning and one in the early afternoon.

As the week continued each of the company dancers had a small group of women that they worked with developing dances on different stages of forgiveness. We also taught them some ensemble sections and I remember coaching them on the ending movement of the piece where I suggested that as each person brought their arms down they lift their sternum at the same time thinking of their hearts opening. When I asked them to do that section again I was stunned to see the change and that each person in the room had taken that instruction to heart. I remember looking over at Newman and we nodded at each other. The women had gotten it and the result was very powerful.

We did not know any of the reasons the women were incarcerated. That is something one doesn’t ask. We were taken by how attentive they were and incredibly responsive to suggestions. It was a very diverse group of all ages and sizes. There was even a mother and daughter who were working together and really expressing how much they were glad to have this time together. Sometimes we would watch teachers observing through a small glass window at the door, and occasionally they would have tears in their eyes.

It was a pretty exhausting week as in addition to the daily work for two-and-a-half hours in the morning we were doing other afternoon workshops and a regular Avodah Dance Ensemble concert one evening in the minimum security side for women who wouldn’t be able to attend the Friday performances.

I seem to remember meeting with the women who would be performing with the company on Thursday afternoon as well as the morning so they would have a chance to run through The Forgiveness Piece from beginning to end. I also staged curtain calls at that time. Very rarely do I do individual curtain calls but this time I did and the women had great fun figuring out their unique way to enter, take a bow, and exit.

In next week’s blog I’ll share some memories of the actual performance. Before I close this blog, I want to mention that earlier that year York formed a Forgiveness Project Committee made up mainly of teachers in the school and put together a full program of guest speakers related to the week’s theme. It included a child of a Holocaust Survivor, a discussion about the “plight of the Native Americans as it relates to trust and forgiveness” and meditation related to Tibetan nuns and how the Tibetan people pray for their captors and continue “good works” in the hope that life will get better.

The School Committee also offered afternoon workshops that women could sign up for. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we led workshops. There were also other workshops with topics such as “Building Bridges,” “Is Forgiveness Possible?” and “Oral Storytelling.”

The Committee designed an excellent 8-sided brochure describing Avodah’s role and the goals for participants. In addition, the brochure gave the 400 women who were enrolled in the school program a chance to sign up for the guest speakers and the workshops. I am so glad that I saved the brochure, and below is the cover.

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Our Third Residency, at a New York Area Reform Congregation, Part II

JoAnne Tucker / September 20, 2019September 27, 2019 / dance liturgy, Forgiveness Project, Holocaust Repertory, New York Company

Each residency took on its own quality based on the needs of the community. The planning discussions with the senior Rabbi, Rick Jacobs, indicated how important it was to him to have focus on Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Day of Remembrance, particularly in the Friday Evening Shabbat service. He asked if instead of members of the community joining in the Forgiveness Project, they might do something related to Yom HaShoah as part of the Friday night service. I agreed and figured that I Never Saw Another Butterfly could easily be done with community members as part of it. (Here’s a link to learn more about this piece.)

I don’t remember exactly how many congregants joined the dancers but each of the four solos had one or two community members joining the company. It was easy to teach with each dancer working with a person or two and fitting them into their solo. They learned the ensemble parts that were not technically hard, but required some concentration. All the community members were older teenagers or adults so they learned quickly and the piece went well in the service.

We did two other pieces that evening: Heroic Deeds, (here’s a link to Blog about this piece) and Tent, Tallit and Torah, both pieces that were created new for this season. Tent, Tallit and Torah was inspired by seeing The Lion King. I was fascinated by and absolutely loved how props had been so effectively woven by Julie Taymor into the piece. I wanted to try something like that. So each section involved the dancers working with material in a new way. For music I selected a classical piece by J.S. Bach. I have always loved his music and had always wanted to use his music. I thoroughly enjoyed creating the piece with Jessica, Andrea, Keri and Danielle and was only sorry that it didn’t get more performances. I don’t remember even restaging it with dancers the following season, although two of the sections, in particular, are among the favorite things I have choreographed. I am thrilled to have some excellent pictures and am glad to share them here.

From l. to r. Kerri Anne Thoma, Jessica Sehested, and Danielle Smith
Photo by Tom Brazil

From l. to r. Andrea Eisenstein and Danielle Smith. Photo by Tom Brazil

That particular Friday night service was unusually hard for me. On Wednesday night two beams of light were shonefrom where the World Trade Center had been. Seeing them from my home in Jersey City was quite emotional and I found my eyes filling with tears quite often over the next several days. Usually I am happy to speak in Sabbath Services but that particular Friday night I found it very hard.

We also participated the next morning in the family service in the alternative space and while I made it through the service OK I found myself quite emotional afterwards. Some of the prayers were becoming increasingly hard for me to hear following 9/11 and I found this was even true at a congregation that I felt was most aligned with how I saw myself practicing Reform Judaism. It was clear I was moving in a new direction.

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The Forgiveness Residency at a New York Area Reform Congregation – Part I

JoAnne Tucker / September 13, 2019 / Forgiveness Project, Holocaust Repertory, New York Company

From April 9–13, 2002 the dance company was in residence at Westchester Reform Temple (WRT) in Scarsdale, New York. The company had a longstanding relationship with the congregation, as the senior rabbi, Rick Jacobs, had been a member of Avodah for six years in the 80’s. JoAnne also regularly led workshops there, and the company’s week of exploration with Ulla (See blog) was held there.

As with each residency, prior to coming, JoAnne met with the leadership to determine how to best serve the community. Rick wanted to schedule the time around Yom HaShoah, (Holocaust Memorial Day). He wasn’t interested in members of the congregation participating in the Forgiveness Piece itself but thought that maybe congregants could participate in I Never Saw Another Butterfly instead and that could be part of the Friday night Shabbat service. In addition, our new Holocaust piece Heroic Deeds (see Blog ) would also fit in very well. A new piece I had just choreographed called Tent, Tallit and Torah also appealed to him. Now… when would we do the Forgiveness Piece? He suggested we do it at his staff meeting time on Wednesday and I agreed especially if the full staff could be there which would include clergy, maintenance staff, teachers and secretaries. The company would lead a workshop and then afterwards the company members would perform the Forgiveness Piece. This would be our only residency in which community members did not participate in the piece itself.

Again, I am very grateful to Kezia for her notes of the very busy day on Wednesday, April 13^that the congregation. It included a workshop for staff with a performance, a lecture-dem for pre-schoolers, a workshop for 16-year-olds and participation in two Holocaust Memorial services for 6^th, 7^thand 11^th/12^thgraders.

Kezia described the forgiveness workshop with the full staff so beautifully that I include her notes here:

JoAnne began by instructing all participants (including the company dancers) simply to walk throughout the room.  As they did so, accompanied by percussionist Newman Taylor Baker, Tucker provided a continuous stream of movement instructions which were both fun and purposeful in directing participants’ exploration of elements of movement.  Moreover, the participants in the room quickly became peers in executing the assignments to navigate through imaginary peanut butter or jello, to move as quickly as possible, to make sudden changes of direction, or to focus on moving certain parts of the body. There was 100% participation, and smiles were plentiful.
Tucker gradually introduced interaction through movement, building from a simple greeting when passing, to structured mirroring in pairs (whereby one partner must become the mirror image of the other, as they move together). At Tucker’s direction, pairs were constantly dissolved and formed anew, so each participant worked with many others, creating partnerships that may not occur on a daily basis – rabbi with maintenance worker, cantor with secretary, pre-school teacher with high school teacher.  Additionally, within pairs, roles were rotated, so each participant experienced being both “a leader” and “a follower” within each of these distinct partnerships.
At this point, when movement skills were sharpened and the group appeared at ease moving, Tucker asked the group to verbally brainstorm “blocks to forgiveness.” A range of replies were offered and visibly considered by the group, as evidenced by nodding heads and comments such as “I never thought of that.” Using the tools they had just developed, the group explored the ideas suggested, through further mirroring and then through paired “conversations in movement.” All pairs were intently focused and, based on the coordinated timing and complementary style of their created movements, indeed appeared to be successfully “conversing.”  The Rabbi later revealed to Tucker and me that several of these participants, in their everyday interaction, refuse to speak to each other.

Avodah dancer Jessica Sehested and a member of the WRT staff having
a conversation together in movement.

The final participatory portion of the workshop was an activity by which participants, through movement, “shared a hurt” with others. With insight and a sense of humor, the groups ended this exercise with the Rabbi on the floor, so overloaded with everyone’s “sharing” that the group had to lift him. To resolve the overwhelming “hurt,” the group, at Tucker’s instruction, passed a “letting go” movement around the circle of participants, and the last person, at her own initiative, threw the “hurt” out of the circle.

The participants then watched a performance of the Forgiveness Project piece (without community involvement). At the conclusion of the piece, there was no applause. The viewers attributed their silence to being stunned by the piece’s intensity, not to lack of appreciation. One participant asked whether she was supposed to interpret intellectually what she had just seen. A dancer pointed out that, just as the percussion instruments in an earlier activity had immediately invoked different emotions without requiring any intellectual articulation of “why,” so dance can deeply affect a viewer without requiring a verbal analysis. The Rabbi pointed out that “Forgiveness itself is not just intellectual.” Another participant noted that it was helpful to have done the movement exercises before seeing the piece. The Rabbi was curious as to whether performing the piece regularly “heals” tensions with the dance company; in response, one dancer discussed dance as a levelizer”; another dancer pointed out that using movement allows any group, with any “issues,” to have a chance to communicate without having to talk – to be thrown into a new activity together, to have fun. A few of the participants nodded in agreement, and the Rabbi mused, “Maybe we should have all our staff meetings like this.”

I am very grateful to Kezia for keeping such careful notes of the workshop and have included them without any edits, as particularly the paragraphs before the last could serve as a model for someone leading a movement workshop on the theme of forgiveness.

I found the workshop to be a very meaningful part of the residency at the congregation. However, I was disappointed that we were not able to involve more of the congregation in the theme of forgiveness, or involve community in a performance of the piece,as I found those performances much more meaningful for the audience.

Of course, it is important to respond to the needs of the community, and the leadership felt that focusing on Yom HaShoah for the balance of the activities was more appropriate. In Part II, I will share how we engaged some members of the congregation in the Friday night service, and describe the other pieces we integrated into the service.

Newman leading a section of the Workshop

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The Forgiveness Project – Incorporating Community Members into the Performance Piece

JoAnne Tucker / September 6, 2019 / Forgiveness Project, New York Company

The grant from the Nathan Cummings Foundation underwrote four one-week residencies at four contrasting sites. Our first residency was held from February 25 through March 3 in Wilmington, Delaware. Plans called for us to work with the community on many levels. Workshops were held for schoolchildren as well as adults, and community members participated in two performances – one at Temple Beth Emeth (as part of the Friday night Sabbath service) and the other at the Episcopal Church of Saint Andrews and Matthew (SAMS). (As mentioned in previous blogs, Canon Lloyd Casson of SAMS, a longtime supporter of Avodah, was instrumental in the development of the Forgiveness Project.)

One of the requirements of the grant was to have good documentation of the residencies. A budget had been built into the grant to cover the cost of having two former members of the Avodah Dance Ensemble observe and take notes of what they saw. Kezia Gleckman Hayman and Beth Millstein were super at doing this and I was thrilled when Kezia mentioned that she still had her notes about how we integrated community members into the performance.

The following description is from Kezia’s report about Congregation Beth Emeth, Wilmington, DE (March 1, 2002):

I first observed the community members in a 6 p.m. rehearsal for the 8 p.m. temple service that evening.  All four participants had attended at least one workshop with the company during the preceding days.  Now the participants were to be incorporated into the performance piece with the company, using movement phrases they were about to create, themselves, based on workshop activities.

JoAnne began by brainstorming responses to ”Forgiveness is… “ The group chose three images it wanted to use in this performance: “liberating a closed heart,” “transformation,” and “letting go.”  The ideas were translated into movement through sculpting. (One participant assumed a position expressing the given idea, and then other participants, one at a time, added to the sculpture.) This became the opening of the piece, before the entry of the company dancers.

One of the participants mentioned that she had particularly liked a workshop movement exercise in which Tucker had two lines of participants approaching each other . . .  Tucker built the next section on variations of “approaching,” assigning participants to interact with the company dancers.  Again drawing on images that had emerged during the workshops, one group approached as if to say “sorry,” another with the idea of returning, and the third incorporating a gesture of one’s face buried in one’s hands. This segued into the set choreography performed by the company.

At a subsequent place in the piece, the participants re-entered, interacting with the dancers in “sharing a hurt” through movement, and at the conclusion of the piece the participants joined the company by mirroring the professional dancers’ movements of comforting each other and “opening their hearts.”

I am so grateful to Kezia for saving these notes as it gives a very clear example of how we integrated the community with the professional dancers for the actual performance of the Forgiveness Piece. I wish I had performance photos with community members but alas we don’t. I do have photographs from workshops.

In three of the four residencies, members of the community did perform with the dancers onstage as part of the piece, usually at similar places in the choreography but with different improvisations, based on what had been particularly meaningful to the workshop participants.

Once the structure for the community members’ improvisations was set, then the next stage was coaching. From Kezia’s notes:

Tucker coached the participants to refine their original movements to the highest possible level in terms of expressiveness, clarity of movement, dynamics, use of space and interaction with fellow dancers. With each urging, the participants’ movements improved, and their confidence grew, as evidenced by their lack of hesitation, the fullness of their movements, the development of their movements beyond the most obvious gestural representation of an idea, and the initiative they began to take . . . .

At all times, movement came from the participants themselves, as they continually re-examined their impressions of the forgiveness process. At one point, Tucker coached a participant moving from one place to another, “Transformation is not easy – it needs more tension,” and the participant reacted, “Right. I would have to WORK to get over there,” revising her movement accordingly. At another point, Tucker coached, “Make sure ‘transformation’ and ‘letting go’ are not the same.” The participant appealed, “Help me,” to which Tucker responded, “It has to come from you. Let your energy change.’’ It did, with a visibly expanded movement.

In one-and-a-half hours, the participants had been incorporated into the piece with movement both appropriate to their levels of technical ability and expressive of their individual explorations of forgiveness. The piece was performed with unified commitment and fluidity, and extremely well received by the congregation, many of whom noted the community participants with particular praise.

The time in Delaware continued with different community members joining the company when the Forgiveness Piece was performed at SAMS.

The first residency indicated that what we planned was indeed working. If community members participated in a workshop earlier in the week then it was no problem to include them in the performance piece. Since Kezia was there as an evaluator for the grant she asked participants for feedback about effectiveness of the workshops. Here are comments from two of the participants.

Participant 1: “I’m usually intellectual, and movement is not. In the workshop, I chose to explore my relationship with my daughter, and I discovered how angry I really was – I didn’t realize until I moved that it was anger I was feeling.”

Participant 2: “JoAnne had us do a movement exercise about sharing a hurt – it really lessened the hurt!”

Our second residency began just a little over a week later at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institution of Religion in New York City. Workshops were very similar and participants included both rabbinic and cantorial students of HUC-JIR and people living in the neighborhood. I am delighted that we have some pictures from these workshops which were held in the very beautiful HUC-JIR chapel, a place we were very familiar with, as that was our home performing space.

Community members in a workshop at HUC-JIR preparing
to join the company in performance

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