Cantor Benji Ellen Schiller

In 1997 or 1998, sitting with Canon Lloyd Casson in the study at SAMS (The Episcopal Church of Saints Andrew and Matthew, in Wilmington, DE) when the Avodah Dance Ensemble was performing there, I asked if he had any ideas for a new project for the company. Canon Casson suggested I read Desmond Tutu’s book No Future Without Forgiveness. I don’t remember much else from our conversation but I do know I went out and bought the book and indeed, it did lead to a new piece of choreography and teaching opportunities for Avodah that ended up changing the direction of the dance company for me.

Before I get into how just a paragraph in No Future Without Forgiveness set me in motion, this week’s blog and next week’s blog share what I would say were the preliminary seeds that enabled this project to develop so powerfully. This week’s blog is about an earlier piece on forgiveness, Selichot Suite, and next week’s blog, featuring a piece that Kezia Gleckman Hayman wrote for the Avodah Newsletter in 1997, will focus on Canon Casson and the depth of thought he brought to us.

Selichot Suite was commissioned by Temple Beth El in Jersey City to be included in the Selichot Service that year, 1987, ten years before my conversation with Canon Casson. At the time, Murray and I were living in Jersey City and were members of the congregation. In Jewish Reform congregations, a Selichot service is held the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, usually late in the evening. The word “selichot” means forgiveness and the prayers are the same as those recited on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Rabbi Bruce Block and Cantor Peter Halpern collaborated with us and we danced to Cantor Halpern’s chanting of the prayers.

We set four parts of the service to dance, integrating them at the time each prayer was recited in the service. The first one, Hanshamah Lakh (“The Soul is Yours”), used very slow, meditative, rocking and lilting walks entering into the sacred space. The piece was beautifully sung by Cantor Halpern. The choreography of the next piece, Hashivenu,didn’t work very well in the first performance except for an ending circle. The ending circle reminded me of a a piece I had choreographed before. It was the last section in a piece called Shevit Ahim Gam Yahad (“Behold how good it is when brothers dwell together”). This was a piece that I had choreographed in the late 70’s to music of Lucas Foss. It didn’t stay in the repertory long but I loved the ending section and realized it would fit beautifully to Hashivenu. I substituted it for the original choreography for Hashivenu in the next performance and loved seeing it as part of Selicot Suite.

The third piece was actually danced to a poem that I must have originally found in the Gates of Forgiveness prayer book. I was so pleased to have found it online as I was beginning to write this blog. It is by Denise Levertov. The dancers recited it as they danced:

Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads ….

Here’s a link to read the entire poem.

https://allpoetry.com/The-Thread

I found this poem so lovely and so representative of feelings related to the search for finding one’s spiritual center or home. Rereading it now I still find it very meaningful.

The last section of the piece was danced to the prayer V’al kulam. There is a traditional gesture of striking one’s chest softly with one’s fist, which accompanies the related Al Chet prayer, and we used variations of this movement in the piece. We also used movements of falling to the floor, and a dancer falling into the arms of others, for this deeply strong forgiveness prayer.

The dance company had just gone through a major change in dancers and I see in the Newsletter of September 1987 that there were seven dancers listed as performing that season. I think several of them were only with the company a short time. The original choreography was for seven dancers but by the next time that we performed the piece, it was revised for four dancers, the usual number of dancers in the company.

Selichot Suite was performed fairly regularly in Selichot services over the next 10 years. While several of the performances were in the NY area (Tenafly and Scarsdale) several bookings were out of town, with one in Bloomfield Hills, MI and another in Houston, TX. Often a concert with some of our other repertory preceded the service.

I have only one video of the piece and it is a wonderful one danced beautifully by Kezia Gleckman Hayman, Elizabeth McPherson, Beth Millstein, and Carla Norwood. They are so elegantly ensembled that it was a true example of what I hoped would happen when I named the company Avodah Dance ENSEMBLE. The video is from a program we did at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion on dance as part of liturgy. Rabbi Rick Jacobs spoke and Cantor Benji Ellen Schiller beautifully accompanied the dancers. Here’s a link to watch it.

These three pictures were snapshots taken from the video, and in a photo editing program I chose to do them in black and white.

From the opening of *Hashivenu*
Dancer standing – Kezia Gleckman Hayman, Dancer sitting – Elizabeth McPherson
Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller is standing in back in black

From the closing of *Hashivenu*
Dancers from l to r, Kezia, Elizabeth, Carla Norwood and Beth Millstein (with her back to us) and Cantor Schiller.

From *V’al kulam*
Dancers from l to r: Elizabeth, Kezia, Carla, Beth
Cantor Schiller is in the back.

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While not a very long flight or very far, our first international tour was to Toronto, Canada in October of 1995. I didn’t remember much about it until I mentioned to Kezia that I was planning to do a blog about the tour. She happened to be sorting through lots of old files and found a program from the performance, which she scanned and sent to me. (She also found a photo related to another recent blog, which we’ve included at the end here.) We then emailed about a fun shopping trip we had one afternoon during a break and she said she still had the beautiful barrette she had bought (yes, photo at end of blog). Having the program brought back all kinds of memories for me both about the repertory we did, the cantor we performed with, the company members on the tour and the unique congregation where we performed.

While I am most grateful for Kezia’s editing skills, what makes working on this blog all the better is the fact that she has been a part of so many of the things I am writing about. She was a member of the company for 13 years, and then an Avodah board member, and we have a 34-year friendship. She also saves things. After many years and a series of moves, I no longer have programs and now have only scanned material from scrapbooks and personal files. It is wonderful to read an email or hear in a Zoom or phone call that she has a program or a photo of something I am planning to write about. So a deep bow of gratitude to Kezia for her friendship, her memory and her wonderful editing skills.

Now let me share about this first international tour. First of all since it was prior to 9/11 and before passports were needed for travel to Canada, all we needed was appropriate ID such as a driver’s license. Traveling and going through Customs were very easy for us. The four dancers (Kezia, Beth Millstein Wish, Elizabeth McPherson and Carla Armstrong) worked well together and it was a fun and easy group to travel with. Our booking was at Holy Blossom Temple as part of the 1995-96 “Our Musical Heritage” Series. The booking had been arranged by Cantor Benjamin Maissner and he would be joining us in accompanying two of the pieces.

Holy Blossom Temple is the oldest synagogue in Toronto, dating back to 1856. It is also a very large congregation with 6,500 members. It is affiliated with the Union of Reform Judaism, which serves congregations in Canada and the United States. I don’t remember exactly how we got the booking except that Cantor Maissner might have been at a Cantorial Conference we performed at or heard about us from one of his colleagues. For us it was exciting to be collaborating with the Cantor in the opening piece Hallelu (music composed by Cantor Benji Ellen Schiller) and also in Binding which is a retelling of the Akedah – the biblical story where Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac. Our usual pattern was to send the music to the cantor several weeks beforehand and then spend an hour or so rehearsing — coordinating cues and tempos. Usually it went very well, as it did with Cantor Maissner. Then we would focus on staging the other four pieces, as concerts generally consisted of six pieces.

Other works in the program included: Shema, a Holocaust piece set to poems by Primo Levi; Kaddish, set to the first 8 minutes of Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony; Noshing, a comic piece about eating and gossiping; and Braided Journey, choreographed by Lynne Wimmer and based on the Ruth and Naomi story. Since I have written in previous blogs about all the other repertory except Hallelu and Braided Journey, let me share with you a little about these two pieces.

Hallelu was inspired by Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller’s beautiful setting of Psalm 150 (“Praise God . . . with the timbrel and dance.”) Our dance piece opens with a dancer circling the space and then calling out “Tekiah” — the first call for the blowing of the Shofar (ram’s horn) on the Jewish high holidays. Other dancers join her, calling out more Shofar calls accompanied by movement, leading into the opening section of the music. A rhythmic section follows in which the floor becomes a virtual drum for patterns beat by the dancers’ feet, leading into the final section of joyful movement to Schiller’s inspiring music. Cantor Schiller is Professor of Cantorial Art at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, and I knew her from our time as dance company in residence at the college. It was a delight to be able to choreograph a company piece to her work. In addition to her role at HUC-JIR she is Cantor at Congregation Bet Am Shalom in Westchester where her husband Rabbi Lester Bronstein is the Rabbi.

From *Hallelu*
l to r: Beth, Elizabeth and Kezia

Braided Journey, choreographed by Lynne Wimmer, tells the story of Naomi and Ruth and is divided into three sections. Section I is titled “Return unto thy people” (Naomi to Ruth). Section II is “Entreat me not to leave thee” (Ruth to Naomi), and Section III is “Thy People will be my people.” The piece is set to music by The Bulgarian Women’s Choir. Lynne and I have known each other for years and it is always an honor when I can collaborate with her. Lynne has a long dance history, including joining Utah Repertory Company full-time immediately after graduating from Juilliard. She has had her own company and been a professor of dance at University of South Florida. The tour to Toronto was shortly after Braided Journey joined Avodah’s repertory, and in this program it was performed by Elizabeth and Carla.

While this was not my first trip to Canada, as Murray and I had gone to the Canadian Rockies, it was my first trip to Toronto, as I believe it was for the four dancers. We were glad to have a leisurely afternoon to wander through one of the neighborhoods which reminded me of the East Village in NYC. Kezia and I hung out together and had great fun going in and out of shops, including one that kind of reminded me of a vampire type funky store and actually had some unique velvet hairpieces, which we both bought. Amazingly Kezia still has hers!!

Kezia’s barrette that she bought on tour in Toronto in 1995 and still wears!

In the Blog published on January 4, 2021, “Touring in the United States, Part I” I wrote about the challenging adjustments the dancers had to make in each unique performance space, particularly on temple bemas. Kezia kept this picture of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun (Short Hills, NJ). She had also made a note that when performing the piece Gimmel there (choreography with a lot of wave-like movement, including rolling on the ground), the dancers rolled down the stairs!

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Tag: Cantor Benji Ellen Schiller

The Forgiveness Project – Its Beginning

Avodah Dance Ensemble’s First International Tour