July, 2020 - Mostly Dance

Holding Compassion in our Hearts

JoAnne Tucker / July 10, 2020 / dance liturgy, Dance Midrash, Dances on Biblical Women

It is with mixed feelings that I begin to write this blog because it is about a piece that I was so proud to have in Avodah’s repertory, and yet today I realize, as with many other pieces I choreographed between 1972 and 2000, a lot of my thinking has changed. It is also a strange day outside with no sun and very heavy fog. I am feeling weighed down. A bit of inspiration, much needed at the moment, came earlier today when I listened to a presentation by Christiana Figueres that is part of Awakened Action 2020 Resource Page at Upaya Zen Center. It’s entitled “Transforming Climate and Global Realities” and she shared the program with Jane Fonda. Among the things she spoke of were 6^ththings we can learn from COVID 19 that are very relevant to all the problems we are facing today. One of those is the success of feminine leadership. The countries led by women, with New Zealand being a prime example, are much better off. She contributes this to the fact that women are better listeners, are humble and are guided by collective wisdom. This certainly resonates a lot with me and perhaps in some small way was hovering in my mind back in 1984 when I created a piece for Avodah based on the M’Chamocha prayer. Reflecting back on the piece today, I can see some seeds there that I can relate to.

There are many places on the Internet to learn about the M’Chamocha prayer so I am not going to spend much time writing about that. Instead I want to share that the reason I decided to create this piece (which could be danced both in Shabbat services and in concerts) was that the prophetess Miriam is associated with the prayer and related text, and Exodus 15:20 says Miriam “took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with timbrels.” I was constantly looking to know more about biblical women at the time, and of course how appealing it was that the word “dance” is connected with Miriam here. But as many people have written, there are elements in the surrounding biblical text that are troubling. Particularly that the Israelites are celebrating while the Egyptians are drowning in the sea. Fortunately there is a midrash that says God told the angels to stop dancing and celebrating, as the Egyptians are “my children” too and they are drowning. This midrash inspired the middle section of the piece, where the women show compassion to each other and for the Egyptians, and that is the section I can still relate to today.

The piece was commissioned by Temple Emanuel in Cherry Hill, NJ with music composed by Cantor Deborah Bedor, then a cantor on Long Island. It was especially meaningful to be working with a woman composer on this piece. Later she would compose another piece for us based on the wedding ceremony.

What I remember most about this piece was how much I enjoyed the beautiful dancing of the three women. I loved the beautiful interpretation given by the many women who had roles in this trio through the years. For me the heart of the piece is compassion, and through compassion an appropriate kind of appreciation of freedom can come, not a celebration when someone else is dying. More than ever, leadership with compassion is the bottom line. May each of us hold compassion in our hearts as we struggle through our various challenges.

Please continue to scroll down and see some of my favorite pictures of the M’chamocha in rehearsal. One rehearsal outside by a lake and another while on tour in the San Francisco area.

These two pictures were taken when we were “in-residence” for a summer program and had some free time. I thought the lake made a beautiful setting to run the piece.

These two photos of Kezia were taken by Tom Scott in a rehearsal (onstage) of the piece.

Biblical quote that inspired the piece:

“Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing” (Exodus 15:20).

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Compassion: Learning and Remembering

JoAnne Tucker / July 18, 2020July 25, 2020 / Current Dance Events, Movement Workshops, Personal Life

In my last blog I mentioned how well the Prime Minister of New Zealand had handled the pandemic. Jimmy Levinson, friend/reader, sent me a picture of a woman hugging another and said he had just added the picture to his wall of heroes. I have to admit I didn’t know who the woman in the picture was, even though her name was printed underneath. When I said so, Jimmy wrote back that it was the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Oh… I thought to myself, that is what you get for not watching the news. Here is someone managing a country very well and you don’t even know her name. So I immediately googled Jacinda Ardern and began learning about her. And wow, if I had a wall of heroes she certainly would be there.

I learned that she is just 39 years old. Uri Friedman wrote in The Atlantic, April 2020:

Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis…. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing.
During a session conducted in late March, just as New Zealand prepared to go on lockdown, she appeared in a well-worn sweatshirt at her home (she had just put her toddler daughter to bed, she explained) to offer guidance “as we all prepare to hunker down.”
She introduced helpful concepts, such as thinking of “the people [who] will be in your life consistently over this period of time” as your “bubble.”

On June 9^th when she learned the country was free of COVID she is quoted as saying “I did a little dance.”

Picture of Jacinda Ardern — part of Jimmy’s Hereos’ Wall

I love that my friend has a wall of heroes, but that should not come as a surprise to me because Jimmy is a very unique and special person. Growing up in Pittsburgh, he was my next door neighbor. Through the years we have kept in touch. F. James Levinson, as he is known professionally, has had an outstanding career in Public Health and Nutrition projects throughout the world. Here’s a link to his bio as part of the Board of Directors of his son Noah’s organization, Calcutta Kids. Noah has won awards for his work with Calcutta Kids which is an organization “committed to empowering the poorest children and expecting mothers in the underserved slums in and around Kolkata, India.” I strongly encourage you to check out their website and even consider donating to Calcutta Kids.

I asked Jimmy to send me a photo of his Wall of Heroes and got 6 photos showing a diverse group of individuals, some I recognized and some I didn’t. The idea of a wall of heroes is quite wonderful and I am thinking how I might create that here in Costa Rica. It will not be quite as elegant as my friend’s, where each picture is carefully framed, but I am lucky to have a printer and can print out photos and maybe mount them on another piece of paper, and with my watercolors paint a frame. The first two will be Jacinda Ardern, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and I will call it my SHeroes’ Wall. I look forward to thinking about other additions and while I will be focusing on women I will certainly include some men too. If you were to create your wall who would be on it? Certainly the quality of empathy and compassion from a leader will be an essential qualification.

As I think about compassion and empathy and caring about people, I remember how I ended many workshops that I led. It was very important to me that we left caring about each other and wishing each other well as we continued on our journeys. So we ended with blessings in movement. If it was a large group that hadn’t worked together for very long, we would pass blessings around in a circle. One person (usually myself or a member of the faculty, for the purpose of modeling the instructions) would turn to the person to their right and, thinking a warm thought, would express that, through movement, to the person beside them (without touching). Perhaps they would circle their neighbor’s face or place one hand near the person’s heart and the other on their own heart. Or maybe they would encircle the person and then starting at the person’s head, gently move their circled arms down to the person’s feet. That person would then create their own movement blessing for the person next to them.

If it was a small group that had worked together for several days, each person would go individually into the center of the circle and then the other participants, one by one, would go in to offer that person a movement blessing. No matter which format we did, we ended by blessing ourselves.

With the very challenging world we are living in, we need every tool we can find to help us. May we bless each other and bless ourselves. And let us create our own wall of heroes or sheroes so we are reminded of how many caring and compassionate leaders there are, and have been, on our planet.

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Working with our Emotions

JoAnne Tucker / July 25, 2020 / Art, Costa Rica, Movement Workshops, Personal Life

When we planned on moving to Costa Rica, we had no idea of all the challenges we would face within the first 6 months of living here. I’m not talking about the adjustments to a new country, which we would have had moving at any time, or the surprise fire and earthquake. What I mean is COVID 19 and the heart failure that Murray is going through. Those are two things that are dominating day-to-day life and could not have been predicted back in November when we made the decision to move. A year ago this time, Murray and I were in the Tetons at Jenny Lake Lodge, and while we couldn’t do long hikes, Murray could do short hikes of a mile or so. Sometimes it is a challenge now for Murray just to walk from room to room and or spend 10 minutes walking in the garden.

View in our garden behind a tree that Murray walks to slowly.

And then there is COVID which has made it impossible for family and friends to visit. The borders are closed and it is unlikely that people from the U.S. will be allowed in anytime soon. We have no plans to return to the United States, as we feel safer here. So there is a real appreciation that we are able to communicate via FaceTime and Zoom, because no one knows when we will be able to do so “in person.”

Nearly every day here in Costa Rica, I find myself experiencing the four basic emotions that I sometimes explored when I led movement workshops. Sometimes one dominates more than another but generally in the course of any day I experience all four. They are: happy, sad, angry, scared. Dance and sometimes art have been wonderful vehicles for me to work through my feelings and in the process find appropriate outlets for my emotions. As I write this I am challenging myself to see what I can do here particularly using art as my means.

A few hours after writing these first two paragraphs a strong emotion began to surface so I got my watercolor pencils out and began expressing my feeling on paper. Soon the emotion began to pass and instead a deep fascination with the design elements dominated. Over the next day or so I totally enjoyed creating a small abstract design that had started with strong emotional feeling.

Watercolor exploring an emotion, June 20, 2020. Created by first using watercolor pencils and then adding water and other watercolors.

For years when I led movement workshops, exploring emotions through dance was often an important part of the program. The activities were carefully structured so that everyone in the group was safe both from getting caught up in the emotion and from interacting with another person in an unsafe way.

Confining space is a good tool to use. Ask each person to draw an imaginary circle around themself that gives them about three feet to move. For the duration of the exercise they are to stay inside their personal circle. Give them the following instructions, one at a time, giving them several minutes to improvise each one: 1) They are frustrated and angry at being confined to the space; 2) They have retreated to this space because they are afraid during a thunder and lightning storm; 3) They are very sad and this small space is safe play to express their sadness; and 4) It is during COVID 19 time and they have just received great news on their cell phone while outside with a friend practicing social distancing.

With an adult or teenage group, start by making a large circle. One person goes into the center of the circle and makes a shape (with their body) that expresses one of the four emotions. They hold that pose, while another person goes into the circle making a complimentary shape (relating to but without touching the first person) that also illustrates that same emotion. The first person leaves and the next person comes in making a shape of the same emotion, and so it continues with one person entering and another person leaving. This activity can be expanded by having the participants still enter the circle one at a time, but allowing a few participants to remain in place in the center at once, thus creating a larger “sculpture” of the given emotion. (If doing this, make sure participants take positions that can be held comfortably for a few moments.)

And of course exploring emotions can be taken to a whole different level as it was in the composition class that I took from Pearl Lang at Connecticut College Summer Program in 1960, where for the six weeks I created an anger study and a laughter study. Working from gestures, much as I had done in my first composition class with Helen Tamiris, the gestures were expanded into phrases and the phrases built into sections with Pearl coaching and insisting everything be believable. I remember being very excited to perform one of the studies in a Saturday workshop.

Recently we included exploring emotions as part of a film we made with women from a domestic violence program in Santa Fe. The film includes both leaders with a dance background and women who are exploring movement improvisation for the first time. Here’s a link to view it.

I feel so fortunate to have had practice in finding ways to express my emotions and not become overwhelmed by them. Indeed we are in very challenging times and we need to use all the resources we can!

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