Artists’ Memories and Managing Dance and Music Now

Reflecting back on the April 21st telephone call when 11 of us gathered on Zoom to remember choreographer Louis Johnson who died on March 31, I am struck by two main areas I want to write about:  memories I had not heard before, related to Louis Johnson and Let My People Go; and ways the participants are continuing with their work during the pandemic.  

While lots of memories were shared, many of which I have written about in earlier blogs, these are a few new ones. 

Cantor Mark Childs shared what it meant to go down to Henry St. Settlement House where rehearsals and a performance of Let My People Go were held.  That was a place where his grandparents and great-grandparents went, and he said it was “such a special experience in my heart” to be able to be there.

Elizabeth McPherson taught at Henry St., where Louis was head of the dance program.  Louis was known for his high standards and even had the same high standards for 4-year-olds as for professional dancers.  Getting ready for a performance involving students, Louis was yelling at a 4-year-old boy to go to his right.  The child wasn’t understanding, so Elizabeth explained to Louis that “4-year-olds don’t know their left from their right.”  Louis threw up his arms and said, “You teach them.”  Elizabeth did that gladly, telling the young boy to go toward the window. 

Freddie Moore shared how meaningful it was to have a chance to work with Louis directly in the Avodah projects because when Freddie was a certificate student at Ailey, the historian Joe Nash would bring Louis in regularly to the dance history class and Louis was such a kind, sweet spirit and always passionate about whatever he was doing.

Jeannine Otis reminded us that when Louis would see her, years after she had performed the cantor’s role in Let My People Go, he would shout out, “There’s the black cantor!!”

As our gathering continued I asked each person to share what they were doing now.  Part of each person’s sharing was how they were coping with COVID – 19.

Elizabeth McPherson, Director of the Dance Division and Coordinator of the MFA in Dance at Montclair State University, reported that they have a program with 120 undergraduates and 14 graduates.  She has published two books and is now working on a book on Helen Tamiris. She also shared that she was just reading a Master’s Thesis Project that quotes Freddie Moore. ( A common element to our gathering was the intersecting paths that we all have in each other’s lives.)  Elizabeth is in current discussions with the dean about changes that the college President may make for the fall semester (including perhaps starting the semester in October, having everyone wear masks, and having students alternate weeks on campus so classes would be smaller and students would have more space between them).  Currently she is reviewing video auditions of students for the freshman class.  She loved one creative video where the student did the barre in her kitchen, petit allegro in her living room and grand allegro in the street. 

Beth Millstein is a psychotherapist and now seeing patients on Zoom and hearing their experiences of how they are handling staying at home.  She is taking dance classes on Zoom and performs once or twice a year.  

Jeannine is as busy as ever as Music Director at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan. Now with the pandemic she is working from home and doing online services.  Each week she and her partner Larry feel like they are producing a radio show, finding the location, setting up the keyboard and doing the service from home.   She is also involved with Theatre for Social Change, working with kids, and her book A Gathering has been turned into a theatre piece.  

Kezia Gleckman Hayman is still doing administrative work at the same law firm she joined when she joined Avodah.  She is currently busy working from home, while keeping an eye on her 12-year-old son, who is also attending school remotely and trying to sneak in video games simultaneously.  She takes adult ballet classes (now Zoom) with Kathy McDonald, who was in Avodah’s first New York company.  Kezia has recently joined some of her adult classmates in studying pointe, 33 years after she last performed in toe shoes. 

Kezia trying her new pointe shoes in her Zoom dance studio — her small kitchen.

Freddie Moore has been at Ailey for 35 years now.  A graduate of the Certificate Program and dancer with Ailey II, he has also had his own company, Footprints Dance Company, for 30 years.  For the past eight years he has been running the Certificate Program and is Rehearsal Director of the Ailey student group, preparing juniors and seniors for performance. In addition he works with churches all over the world, building liturgical dance ministries.  He is also raising two of his granddaughters, ages 6 and 8.  Right now he is challenged by home schooling and live Zoom classes. In April when we were talking he was planning a graduation program for Ailey.

Deborah Hanna has just moved back to Italy after 7 years in South East Asia where she taught English and some dance.  One experience she shared was introducing Martha Graham to a community in Myanmar that had no idea what modern dance was, let alone the Graham technique. Now in Italy she and her husband are working on family property to create a holistic art and cultural center.  She can be found having coffee with three chickens, chopping down a tree and painting fences.  She hopes once the pandemic is over we will come and visit.  

Deborah (looking like a Graham performer, says Kezia) working on the family property in Italy during COVID 19.

Candice Franklin has been teaching with the Joffrey Ballet since 2007. She was caught right as the pandemic began to lock down things in the US when she was on tour holding auditions for the Joffrey Ballet.  One day they had a room full of eager dancers and the next day there were just two dancers.  She got on a plane in Kansas to return to NYC. She is doing a lot of teaching on Zoom and she finds it much harder to teach on Zoom then when it is a live class.  She has to prepare extra carefully and really focus to get everything done in the hour.  She had been training to teach ballroom dance.  But that will need to be on hold, although someone in our Zoom group suggested using a broomstick for a partner!!

Newman shared that he had a gig on March 6th at the Folk Museum in NYC with a hundred people attending, and just 5 days later he had a gig in Brooklyn with only 2 people attending.   He pointed out that he has spent a lot of his life not knowing where the next gig is, but now the whole world doesn’t know where the next gig is.  He is particularly focusing on how to perform on the Internet.  His whole experience has been with live audiences and the Internet is a totally different experience, which he doesn’t like. He knows he has to change and he is particularly inspired by Yo Yo Ma, who in Newman’s words, “gets to the same place” when performing on the Internet as when performing with a live audience. Newman is working to reach that point as well.  Newman also shared his new instrument –  the washboard.  He came to it by accident when he was substituting for another musician.  Changing the way the previous musician played it, Newman puts the washboard in his lap and plays it with shotgun shells covering 4 fingers on each hand, which creates a totally different sound.  Playing the washboard has also led him to explore his family history, particularly his paternal grandfather who was born a slave and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale in 1903. 

Newman noted something important for all of us to keep in mind.  After 9/11 most of the places he used to play as a musician were gone.  It took a year until people went out again.  Newman concluded by saying we will all have to do what jazz musicians do — improvise.     

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Reflection on the “Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World” Conference

Let me begin by sharing the history of how and why I decided to go to this conference.  I saw a notice about it posted by Naomi Jackson on the National Dance Education Association bulletin board about a year and a half ago.  Shortly after seeing it, I received a copy of the notice from Elizabeth McPherson, who danced in Avodah for seven years and with whom I have kept in regular touch, often meeting on my occasional trips to NYC.  She wanted to make sure I saw it and wanted to encourage me to apply. What followed was a series of emails with Naomi, as I wondered what kind of presentations she had in mind, and then later emails with Elizabeth.  The conference seemed to be very broad, looking at “Jewishness” and dance from many different angles.  Since I have moved on from The Avodah Dance Ensemble and using Jewish themes as motivation for creating choreography or doing workshops, I wanted to share something that felt current to me now.  In discussions with Elizabeth the idea of presenting on Helen Tamaris came up.  She was a pioneer modern dancer, and Jewish, and most important to me, her work is the thread that influenced both the work that I did with Avodah and the work that I do now.  Perfect.

So we came up with the idea that Elizabeth and I would submit together.  She would share the history of Helen Tamiris, teaching one or two sections of Helen Tamiris’s Negro Spirituals, (see Blog Honoring Helen Tamiris on how we added Negro Spirituals to Avodah’s repertory) and I would share some ideas from studying composition with Tamiris. I was thrilled and while still feeling a sense of reluctance to attend, I felt very good about the presentation I would be part of.  And what a surprise I received.

Elizabeth presenting her paper on Tamiris.

Elizabeth teaching “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” from Tamiris’s Negro Spirituals

Naomi set up a Google Drive where we could all share information from books published related to Jewish dance, choreography by Jewish choreographers or pieces on Jewish themes.  Lots of sharing went on as well as discussions on a logo for the conference and individuals’ memories of important influences in their work.  I followed and did post a little.  My husband and good friend Regina commented to me that every time I mentioned the conference I made a strange face that clearly lacked enthusiasm.  I wondered what three days of the conference would mean for me and didn’t have high hopes.  And clearly I was not alone in feeling this way, as once there, this questioning came up in quiet conversations.  But the thank you’s after the conference, again using our connection through Google Drive, were unanimous in sharing how good and meaningful the conference was and hoping there would be more.

In addition to Elizabeth, my good friend and dance/film collaborator Lynne Wimmer decided to go to.  (See Blog on “In Praise” in Pittsburgh and watch the film “Through the Door” which we co-directed in 2016.) Lynne and I would be roommates and we looked forward to catching up on our recent adventures.  So I went knowing that at least I would be hanging out with people I really enjoyed. I also decided to drive so that I would have a car to make it easy to get around and do other things in the area should the conference be “boring.”  It wasn’t at all boring, but the car was helpful in enabling us to select restaurants that weren’t in easy walking distance.

The overall energy of the conference was a genuine sharing of who we are and our role in dance and how it might relate to our “Jewishness.” From presentations on key historical figures (such as ours about Helen Tamiris), to panels on dance therapy or how one’s choreography related to social justice, participants shared enthusiastically and audience members listened carefully and respectfully.  For the majority of the time slots of an hour and fifteen minutes we had to select which one of four presentations we wanted to attend and it was often hard to choose since all looked good.

The opening evening program on Saturday  was a selection of dance films curated by Ellen Bromberg, Professor at the University of Utah who teaches Screendance. I loved seeing an early film of Daniel Nagrin and the fun film techniques used in 1953 when the film was made.

Sunday night was a concert curated by Liz Lerman and Wendy Perron.  Outstanding moments from the concert were: a piece beautifully performed by college-age Maggie Waller; Send Off performed by Jesse Zarrit to a recorded text of Hanoch Levin focused on the Akedah (the binding of Isaac) from Issac’s point of view; and The Return of Lot’s Wife by Sara Pearson in which Lot’s wife finally confronts God in her 1950’s Brooklyn kitchen.  All pieces were beautifully danced and the last two I mentioned had a wonderful sense of humor to them.

A photograph from Torah in Motion: Creating Dance Midrash that I co-authored with Rabbi Susan Freeman in 1990 was included in the Exhibition of “Reimagining Communities Through Dance” curated by Judith Brin Ingber and Naomi Jackson.

From Torah in Motion: Creating Dance Midrash. Rabbi Susan Freeman working with students from Brooklyn Heights Synagogue.  Photo by Tom Brazil

I found the panel on Dance Therapy to have a lot of historical information and loved the presentations by two of the women, Miriam Berger and Joanna Harris. An intense panel “Exploring the Complex Relations Between Jews and non-Jewish Arabs through Dance” followed and stirred some interesting reflections on whether dance events can help build relationships.

Perhaps the most meaningful moments came the last day and were both experiential movement moments. One was leading the experiential part of our presentation on Helen Tamiris. Tamiris’s composition class focused on the use of gesture to build movement.  I chose to share a way I use this idea with non-dancers.  I asked each of the 15 participants to say one or two words of how they felt at the moment and then we went around with each sharing a gesture that fit their word.  It was an intergenerational group all with a strong dance background and as we built a phrase of our 15 gestures a warmth and community developed.

Later that day I attended a workshop by Victoria Marks and Hannah Schwadron called “Dancing Inter-connections.”  Again it was an intergenerational experience with over 30 participants.  One improvisation featured us finding the way to move in the space between us.  The weaving was fun to do and we had to be inventive to find the space between us. The ending improvisation focused on the word “lingering” in movement interactions. That was particularly rich and beautiful.  In the feedback afterwards one of the young college-age dancers mentioned how meaningful it was to dance with the older generation.  How she felt nurtured and empowered.  And how wonderful that felt, to hear it come from a young woman.

As I reflect back on the experience I am of course very glad to have gone. I loved the many new and renewed connections.  And I wonder whether it was the Jewishness or the dance that so resonated for me, or the combination. I am most grateful to Naomi Jackson for her leadership in maintaining an openness and inclusiveness within the intent of the conference.  Once again I am reminded of the important spiritual connection for me in dance, both by moving, myself, and being inspired by watching dance.

    Closing ceremony dance. Photo by Tim Trumble