April, 2021 - Mostly Dance

Pitigliano

JoAnne Tucker / April 9, 2021 / Touring

Continuing my blog entries on my international teaching, I’m sharing for this blog a section of the beautiful piece Kezia wrote in February 2000 for the Avodah Newsletter about Pitigliano, the town in Italy where she, Deborah, three Italian dancers and an actress performed Avodah repertory on the opening night of the Second Annual Pitigliano Festival of Jewish Film and Culture.

From Kezia (in February 2000):

Known as “Little Jerusalem,” Pitigliano sits on the edge of a cliff of volcanic rock, out of which it appears to have risen. Nearly mystical is the sudden sight of the town as one rounds a curve in the winding mountain roads. (The cartoon-like zigzags of these roads begged for more Dramamine than the entire New York-London-Rome flight.)

The beautiful stone streets with their ancient stairs are layered upon one another like an Escher drawing, with flowered courtyards tucked into odd corners, and arresting slashes of light between buildings – through which one glimpses what appear to be sheer drops from the mountainside; and everywhere, garlands of laundry decorate the facades.

In 1799, the Christian community of Pitigliano sheltered its Jewish inhabitants from attacks by neighboring Christians, who had forced Jews from their homes in nearby towns. In 1850, the Jewish population constituted at least 10% (and perhaps as much as 20%) of Pitigliano – exceptional in Italy. Around 1870 many Jews left for new opportunities in larger cities (due to an easing of ethnic restrictions), but some remained in their comforting home of Pitigliano. In the 1930’s the Christians of this town once again protected their Jewish neighbors. But in about 1938, when the Fascist anti-Semitic laws became overpowering, the Jewish community of Pitigliano dissolved. Two websites devoted to this special town note, “During the Holocaust, people of Pitigliano risked their lives to hide and save Jews that were escaping from the Nazi terror” (Eytan Kahn), and “By lucky circumstances and also by the help of gentile Italians, who risked their lives, apparently all the Jews of Pitigliano survived” (Peter Petri). Elena Servi, who was a young girl in 1938, is the only member of Pitigliano’s early Jewish community living there today. Maintaining their proud tradition of shared lives, the Christian community in Pitigliano and Ms. Servi have joined together and created a small museum of Jewish history, and restored the synagogue, the Jewish cemetery and the communal baking ovens where the Jewish community gathered to bake Passover matzoh. (We were graciously given a private, unscheduled tour of the baking site by curator Luigi Cerroni, to whom we extend our appreciation.)

The bicentennial of the heroic events of 1799 coincided with the Second Annual Pitigliano Festival of Jewish Film and Culture, a festival created by Michela Scomazzon Galdi, an Italian film aficionado who chose to integrate her love of film with her appreciation of and interest in the Jewish culture of Pitigliano. It was as part of this Festival that we had the great and moving honor of performing in this town so enriched by its history of rare cooperation and compassion.

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Performance in Pitigliano

JoAnne Tucker / April 19, 2021 / Touring

Continuing the blog entries on my international work, I flew from Israel back to Italy, and Kezia arrived there from the U.S., and so rehearsals began in earnest for the upcoming performance for the Pitigliano Festival of Jewish Film and Culture.

In the February 2000 Avodah Newsletter, Kezia reported:

Our trip to Italy came about in great part through the extensive organizing efforts of former Avodah dancer and dear friend Deborah Hanna Leoni, who had been living in Italy (and teaching dance there) since 1992. It was Deborah and two of her delightful advanced students whom I joined to form Avodah’s Italian company. Deborah and her husband Jeevan generously housed JoAnne and me in their country cottage in the very beautiful Tuscan village of Tarquinia, a center of ancient Etruscan life, about 45 minutes from Rome and 15 minutes from the Mediterranean Sea. With stone streets and buildings tinted in warm fresco shades of gold and orange and green with castle-like wooden doors, Tarquinia is a hill town with an expansive view of velvety green countryside. For people who teach, as we do, I believe it is a good reminder to return periodically to being a beginning-level student of anything – to remember just how bare – and frustrating – beginning knowledge is. Since neither JoAnne nor I speak Italian, we had a good dose of “beginnership,” but we found that people determined to find a common understanding are reassuringly able to do so.

We also figured out puzzling light switches, door latches and toilet mechanics, learned to wash dishes using the least possible amount of water (start with that handy pot of water left from boiling pasta) and functioned for periods (common) when the water was turned off or the electric was out. (The cottage was perfectly and appropriately lovely in candlelight.) Our Italian alarm clock each morning was the gunshot chorus of local men hunting for small birds on the property. We deciphered money and purchased groceries (everything FRESH), ate pine nuts from the ground and gourmet mushrooms picked by Jeevan’s family, and watch his mother make us homemade gnocchi. We learned that, like nearly everything else in life, there is a skill to hanging wash on a clothesline – and we did not have it. We were made sharply aware of how luxuriously we usually live, particularly in terms of the use of water, electric and gas, and I felt downright wealthy when I returned home and was able to wash and dry all my clothes at the laundromat. We learned that in Italy, concepts of “efficient” and “businesslike” do not exist as we know them in New York; “casual,” “social” and “personal” are the critical elements of life, as is “generous.” And they do make for a charming, if drastically different, life. For a high school workshop, the students each contributed a sum toward our booking, and we were paid with an envelope of small bills and coins, like the collections I remember for elementary school “milk money.” I – who am still surprised each time JoAnne pays me for dancing – have never felt such a direct connection between my work and my pay.

From JoAnne’s scrapbook: Scenes from Deborah and Jeevan’s land.

The theatre in Pitigliano had a historic feel to it. The stage was just large enough but it did present a bit of a challenge as it was a raked stage (meaning that it sloped upward away from the audience). Fortunately the dancers were able to adjust quite quickly.

Back entrance to the theatre where we performed

The performance consisted of six pieces, and one of them was created for this special event. Entitled Generations,it was inspired by the Hebrew phrase “L’dor V’dor” (“from generation to generation”) and focused on the Jewish woman’s role of carrying on tradition. In seeing a video of the piece, I wasn’t sure at all what I was really trying to say. How I was able to watch a video of the piece was an interesting story in itself. Deborah reminded me that there was a video of the performance and thought that Kezia had a copy of it. It was a VHS which is very outdated and most of us no longer have VCR machines that can play such tapes. Kezia however does still have a VCR, but she doesn’t have the means to transfer a VHS into a format such as an mp4 which would be easy to send over the Internet. So, resourcefully, Kezia played the video on her VCR and filmed it on her phone and sent it to me.

Screenshot of the piece Generations. Kezia is on the floor and Deborah is behind her. In the background are our Italian company members Sylvia Manciani and Anna Compagnucci (two of Deborah’s advanced students at the time).

The other pieces were: Hallelu – a setting of the 150^th Psalm; Negro Spirituals – four solos from Helen Tamiris’s work (danced by Kezia) which had been reconstructed by Elizabeth McPherson from the Labanotated score; M’Chamocha – a piece celebrating the crossing of the Red Sea; Kaddish – a work set to 8 minutes from Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish symphony, and Shema – a setting of Primo Levi’s writing. Search this blog site for entries describing some of these pieces more fully. In the Avodah Newsletter Kezia described performing Shema:

Most memorable in this performance was the inclusion of our repertory work Shema based on the writings of Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. JoAnne insisted on performing this work, defying suggestions that Italian dance audiences prefer lighter pieces. In Shema the dancers speak excerpts from the writings of Primo Levi. In this performance the text was recited (by our Italian actress, Elisabetta Irrera) in its original Italian. The impact upon the audience was powerful, earning the longest applause of the program.

Deborah Hanna in Shema, with Elisabetta Irrera (the Italian actress who spoke the text in Italian) behind her.

Curtain call following the last piece, Kaddish.

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Last Thoughts on International Touring

JoAnne Tucker / April 27, 2021May 8, 2021 / Personal Life, Touring

In this concluding blog about our Italy tour Kezia and I share some of our favorite non-dance memories. Certainly one part of touring is when we have a free day or two. On the tour to Pitigliano, Kezia and I arranged to have several days to sightsee after the performance before returning to New York.

One of Kezia’s favorite memories is having to stop the car for a significant time on our way to Pitigliano to allow a flock of sheep to cross the road. She remembers that their bells made wonderful music, and that Deborah spoke to the shepherd and translated for us. He was carrying a little lamb because he said she was tired and kept lying down in the road and crying when she couldn’t keep up with the other sheep.

View from the car when we encountered the sheep in the road. If you look carefully
you can see a figure in the very back carrying the lamb.

A favorite memory of mine was watching Deborah’s mother-in-law make gnocchi from scratch and of course getting to enjoy eating it afterwards.

Deborah and her mother-in-law. We all watched enthusiastically
as Jeevan’s mother make the gnocchi!

I also loved our time soaking in a hot spring,

In the February 2000 Avodah Newsletter, Kezia wrote about some of our adventures sightseeing:

As tourists in magical Florence, we strolled into innumerable churches, each graced by masterpieces of art, so much a part of their surrounding spiritual home and purpose that often no nameplate is even provided to identify the artist. And regardless of one’s religion, when the church bells ring at twilight in Florence, one is filled with joy. In stark contrast to the gentleness of Florence, the astounding massiveness of Rome was like walking at the feet of elephants. Surprisingly, St. Peter’s, even more enormous than it appears on television, by genius of design, offers an undeniable sense of embrace, even to these two Jewish visitors.

On Shabbat, JoAnne and I attended services in the old Jewish section of Rome. The architecture of the temple was of a style similar to that of churches we had visited, and the unexpected acoustical effect of this kinship was that the chanting in the service took on a nearly Gregorian quality. The text of individual prayers and readings was indistinguishable, replaced by an engulfing hum. The women’s section, up a long flight of stairs, was separated from the downstairs men’s section by an iron gate so densely and intricately patterned that one could barely see through it – as intended. But I suffered no shortage of spiritual sustenance in this country where religion has been the inspiration for glorious architecture, serene and achingly sad painting and sculpture, heart-soaring music and people of deep warmth and courage. When I looked out my window during the flight back to New York and saw how easily the Italian Alps reach right above the clouds, I was not in the least surprised.

Closing thought from JoAnne: I am so grateful for the dedication of the dancers who were part of Avodah, both when they were in the company and afterwards. In particular, to Deborah — who organized and made this tour possible, including rehearsing her dancers and performing in the concert — and to Kezia — who shared this experience with us, helping in staging and performing, and then sharing time together sightseeing with me – a deep bow of gratitude.

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