JoAnne Tucker shares her experiences in dance from directly a modern dance company to leading movement activities for women in prison and domestic violence survivors.
For seven years Deborah Hanna was a part of The Avodah Dance Ensemble. If you skim through the blogs of Mostly Dance you will see lots of pictures of her, as she played a key role in collaborating on pieces that became an important part of Avodah’s repertory. In particular, Deborah was in the original cast of Let My People Go, and she and Kezia collaborated on Sisters. At some point, I shared her with the Martha Graham Ensemble and loved how well trained she was in Graham technique, which I totally adored! When she decided it was time to leave the company and move to Italy with her husband I was both sad to see her go and also excited for her new adventure. We might even have joked a bit about Avodah coming to Italy, as she did not intend to stop dancing.
Two years later, in 1995, I saw Deborah on a trip to Italy. My husband, Murray, had a business trip to Rome, related to his job as economist with the IRS. I was able to go with him and we decided to travel a few days early so we could spend some time visiting Deborah.
A day or two after arriving in Rome, Murray and I took the hour-and-a-half train ride to Tarquinia, where Deborah and her husband, Jeevan, were living. Tarquinia is an old city in the province of Viterbo, Lazio, known mainly for its ancient Etruscan tombs. We stayed in their sweet country cottage and loved going sightseeing in the area with them. Tarquinia is Jeevan’s hometown and his family owned a wonderful restaurant there.
Top Picture: Deborah and I have fun posing at one of the Etruscan Tombs. Lower Picture: Deborah and Jeevan, Murray and I, enjoying being together.
Deborah had begun to teach dance shortly after she arrived in Italy in February of 1993. She taught Graham technique and choreographed for the end-of-the-year concerts in her local community. Deborah shared with me that “The Graham Technique made a big hit as quite a novelty and the first piece I did for them to the music of Carmina Burana received a loud “ANCORA” from the audience – which I just took as a wonderful sign of appreciation, but quickly found out meant we had to repeat the piece again immediately – which we did.”
Deborah choreographed for this group of dancers when she first arrived in 1993.
By the time of our visit with Deborah she had not only continued teaching but had expanded with in-school performances and workshops in the local grade schools and middle schools and had won best choreography awards at the Viterbo Dance Festival.
Before we left Italy Deborah joined us in Rome and ended up going out to dinner with us and charming some of Murray’s business colleagues with her excellent Italian. We talked about projects between Avodah and Italy, and the seeds were planted for what would happen several years later.
In one of the many Jewish newspapers or magazines that I followed I saw a notice about a Jewish Film Festival in Pitigliano, Italy, organized by Michela Scomazzon Galdi, who lived in Rome. I thought maybe they might be interested in adding a dance event. I sent Deborah information about it, along with Galdi’s contact information, and much to my delight Deborah was able to get in touch with her and even headed into Rome to meet with her. Later Deborah would travel to Pitigliano to see the space and figure out theatre technicalities. There was much correspondence between all the parties in Italy as well as between Deborah and me figuring out details for our participation for the opening night of the festival, October 31, 1999.
Deborah also wanted us to have more than one performance and began working with some school contacts to see if she could arrange a workshop and performance in nearby Tuscania.
I knew that our budget would be extremely limited, so there was no way that the whole Avodah company could go, and part of the fun and challenge would be working with Deborah’s dancers. It would be ideal if Kezia could go too. Kezia could help teach as well as perform in the concert and an added bonus was that it would be fun to travel and tour a bit too.
Deborah remembers, “In the summer before you and Kezia came to Italy, I headed home to the US with a long stop in NYC to rehearse with you. As I was planning my trip, several of my dancers – Anna, Cinzia and Francesca wanted to tag along and visit NYC. I said sure and they came and so we had rehearsals there in Chinatown – getting them into some of the pieces for Pitigliano. Also, Silvia Manciani happened to be in New York studying at Graham for an intensive and she came to rehearse with us as well, I believe.”
At the same time I had also been in contact with an enthusiastic dancer from Israel who had attended a Monday night Dance Midrash Class I led regularly in New York City. (These were improvisation classes based on Biblical text. For more information check out Torah in Motion: Creating Dance Midrash which I co-authored with Rabbi Susan Freeman.) The dancer in Israel very much wanted me to go there and teach dance midrash and she was willing to arrange it. She followed through with an email as we were beginning to organize plans for Italy and I thought that the timing would be a perfect fit. I could fly to Italy, have one or two rehearsals with the dancers and then fly to Israel to teach. Kezia could meet me on the return to Italy and we could finish rehearsing, perform in Tuscania and at the Festival, and have a little time for sightseeing before returning to New York.
Deborah did a super job of arranging things and I remember so clearly a rehearsal before I flew to Israel. At that time Deborah had stopped running her own studio. After spending two years trying to do so, and building a small ensemble that traveled to do school performances and festivals, she had realized that the economics were just not in her favor. In fact, after teaching for two years in a studio that her Uncle Enrico had built for his ballroom-champion son, she realized she hadn’t earned a penny for herself after paying rent and the two other teachers in classical and jazz to round out the curriculum. Her husband was a dedicated documentary filmmaker and so she decided that two working artists in the family was one too many and therefore she would teach English. So when I got to Italy, Deborah was teaching English full time for the Italian Military.
I remember well the first rehearsal that I had with the dancers in the lovely studio that her Uncle Enrico had built. I was totally taken aback when someone’s cell phone rang and the person stopped dancing in the middle of the piece to answer the call. I looked at Deborah aghast and she explained that this was the custom in Italy and to just be patient. That never happened in NYC, as cell phones are turned off and only in breaks do people use a phone unless of course someone has an emergency and needs to keep it on! I soon adjusted to this more informal rehearsal style although it did leave a very clear memory in my mind. In terms of the dancing I could see the excellent progress Deborah had made with the dancers and that they would be ready for the upcoming performance.
With Deborah in Italy, October 1999.
After just a few days I returned to Rome for my short flight to Israel. Once inside the airport, I couldn’t find El Al listed anywhere. I wandered around the airport a bit and finally asked a policeman where to check in for El Al. He pointed down the hall to the farthest part of the airport. I continued walking down to an unmarked area where I soon realized there was a temporary place to check in.
I was interviewed for quite a while before being able to proceed to the next waiting area. When I got inside I was taken aback to realize that a balcony surrounded the room, and stationed at quite regular intervals were army members with machine guns. When I had traveled to Israel from the US, while security was tight it was nothing like this.
I knew that there had been an incident in the past that had warranted a high level of security, and a bit of Googling brought up the event which happened on October 11, 1982. The following description is from Wikipedia:
The attack took place at the Great Synagogue of Rome in the historic district of Rome on Saturday morning, at 11:55 AM. As the families of the local Jewish community began leaving with their children from the back entrance to the synagogue, five elegantly dressed armed Palestinian attackers walked calmly up to the back entrance of the synagogue and threw at least three hand grenades at the crowd, and afterwards sprayed the crowd with sub-machine gun fire. Eyewitnesses at the scene stated that the hand grenades bounced off the steps and exploded in the street.
A 2-year-old toddler, Stefano Gai Tache was killed in the attack after being hit by shrapnel. In addition, 37 civilians were injured, among them Stefano’s brother, 4-year-old Gadiel Tache, who was shot in the head and chest.
Great Synagogue of Rome (photo from Wikipedia)
I found it meaningful to continue reading and learned that the event was remembered as recently as 2015.
On 3 February 2015, during the message to the Italian Parliament following his taking the oath as President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella remembered the attack with these words: “(Italy) has paid several times, in a not too distant past, the price of hate and intolerance. I want to remember only one name: Stefano Tache who was killed in the cowardly terrorist attack on the synagogue in Rome in October 1982, He was only two years old. He was our baby, an Italian baby.”
Once through security and check-in, we were bused in groups to the far end of the airport where we boarded the plane. It was an easy, uneventful flight to Tel Aviv and I looked forward to my teaching adventure in Israel, which will be the subject of the next blog.
This was not my first trip to Israel. For my 50th birthday Murray and I traveled to Israel, staying first with friends at Kibbutz Lotan located in the South and then taking a small minivan tour of the country for about a week. While it was a very positive experience and I especially liked Tel Aviv and have vivid memories of watching large groups of people gathering by the beach to folk dance on Shabbat, I did find not myself in a hurry to return. As I flew into Israel on Friday morning to begin this nine-day trip with five workshops scheduled I wondered how my work would be received particularly among traditional orthodox Jewish participants. The five workshops were scheduled throughout the country and I had no idea who the attendees would be.
I am very glad to have written about the trip, shortly after it happened, in an Avodah Newsletter, and the majority of this blog comes from the newsletter. As was my regular practice when leading dance midrash workshops, they were always based on that week’s Torah portion and I had a particularly rich and easy one to work with. I decided to focus on two specific lines in the portion “Lech Lecha”: Genesis 12:1, “The Lord said to Abram, ”Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” and Genesis 16: 1-16 where Hagar bears a child for Sarah.
Arriving in Israel on Friday I would have Saturday to spend with friends who offered a place to stay where they lived on Kibbutz Tzora. They had originally lived at Kibbutz Lotan, where Murray and I had visited them six years ago. Now, along with two adorable twins, they lived on Kibbutz Tzora which had a much more urban feeling than Lotan. I was also able to use time to review the Torah portion I would be working with. Even though I had worked with many Torah portions many times I often found new insight depending on my life events and world happenings. This particular week I decided to address the question of what quality in Abram triggered God to select him to “go forth.”
For the section on Sarah and Hagar, I decided to find moments of interaction between them that are not described in text, such as what Sarah might have said to Hagar to convince her to bear a child for her, or what Hagar might have said to Sarah when Hagar knew she was pregnant. In other words, I wanted to make the relationship very real between these two women.
All five workshops were built from these two scenarios, and each workshop had the same outline: movement warm-up, introduction of ritual movement (i.e. movement already existing in our tradition, such as putting on a tallit or bending and bowing), exploration of text in movement, questions, and feedback. Each workshop took on its own character and emphasis based on the participants, and there was a huge range!
As I reviewed my write-up in the Avodah Newsletter I noted that I only mentioned four workshops. Actually a fifth one stands out in my mind and I hunch that I decided not to write about it for the newsletter. For this blog I will just share one very strong memory of that workshop (the first), which I led in Jerusalem. I remember my friends driving to and from the location, and that I felt a huge relief to be leaving Jerusalem, as I felt the energy from both the workshop and in the streets to have been somewhat frantic!!
While each workshop had the same outline, each one definitely had its own character and emphasis based on the participants. The second workshop, in Tel Aviv, like the one in Jerusalem, was attended by all non-dancers and thus my main job was in motivating movement and leading the group to be comfortable with movement as a way to explore text.
The third workshop was in the city of Beit She’an which is located in the northern part of Israel in the Jordan Valley. It was held in a beautiful dance studio, part of the region’s cultural center, and had the highest level of dance participants, with several professional dancers and advanced dance students. I also seem to remember this was the home community of Elisabeth, the person who had visited my dance midrash class in New York City and arranged for me to come. A single sentence was enough to motivate rich movement, and sophisticated improvisational dance challenges quickly became an important part of this workshop. A particularly memorable improvisation occurred on the letters in God’s name (yud, hay, vav, hay). I taught a simple movement phrase based on a meditation related to these letters and then asked the participants each to think about her own God image and to incorporate that in her improvisation. The intensity in the room was incredible and while I was dancing with the group I sensed an extraordinary energy happening, with amazing movement interactions taking place in my own improvising. One person had chosen to observe and was mesmerized by what she saw. Not surprisingly, in the feedback section, this exercise was commented on the most. From an orthodox woman came the statement that she was apprehensive when asked to do this activity but found it profound. A secular woman also shared the same reaction – an initial reluctance to dance the letters in God’s name, but then a discovery of great meaning to the exercise. I felt a certain affirmation in having been able to provide such an experience for women coming from such different backgrounds.
From there I traveled to Yeroham which is in the Southern District – Negev Desert. The workshop was held in the Bamidbar Creative Beit Midrash which had been built in 1990 following the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, and which serves the local community as well as visitors. It is also an unusual space in that it has served as a bomb shelter. Put to happier use, all the furniture had been removed for our dance workshop, and there was also an art exhibit by oil painter Anna Andersch-Marcus, a world-renowned artist living in Yeroham. This was the only time my teaching in English created a few moments of tension, when some debate arose about how to translate what I said. Luckily several bilingual participants were able to assure the group that the differences were insignificant to the assignment, and the 15 women ranging in background from secular to traditional worked together sharing nonverbally our interpretations of biblical text.
My own improvisations that day were influenced by the fact that we were near a site called Hagar’s Well and I was reminded of the challenges that the environment presents. It made a big difference in my own movement to keep the harshness of the desert landscape in mind as I danced interactions between Sarah and Hagar.
The final workshop was at Kibbutz Lotan. The Kibbutz was further south located in the heart of the desert about 40 minutes north of Elat which is on the Red Sea. I had very pleasant memories of the Kibbutz from my earlier trip to Israel. The reform Kibbutz had developed further with bird-watching trails, sand dunes and the intimacy of a small lush Kibbutz surrounded by the barren desert mountains. I thoroughly enjoyed being there and even discussed with the leadership of the Kibbutz the possibility of doing an intensive five-day workshop to train dance midrash specialists as well as individuals who just wanted to explore text through dance stimulated by the beautiful desert environment and guest facilities of the Kibbutz. I never put much energy into organizing it and so it never happened. Being at Kibbutz Lotan was a wonderful way to end a very full nine days and return to Italy to continue getting ready for our October 31 concert.
The only picture I could find that I took on this trip to Israel. Clearly I was fascinated by the harsh environment of the desert!
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