Tag: Forgiveness in dance

The Forgiveness Residency at a New York Area Reform Congregation – Part I

JoAnne Tucker / / Forgiveness Project, Holocaust Repertory, New York Company

From April 9–13, 2002 the dance company was in residence at Westchester Reform Temple (WRT) in Scarsdale, New York.  The company had a longstanding relationship with the congregation,  as the senior rabbi, Rick Jacobs, had been a member of Avodah for six years in the 80’s.  JoAnne also regularly led workshops there, and the company’s week of exploration with Ulla (See blog) was held there.  

As with each residency, prior to coming, JoAnne met with the leadership to determine how to best serve the community.  Rick wanted to schedule the time around Yom HaShoah, (Holocaust Memorial Day). He wasn’t interested in members of the congregation participating in the Forgiveness Piece itself but thought that maybe congregants could participate in I Never Saw Another Butterfly instead and that could be part of the Friday night Shabbat service.  In addition, our new Holocaust piece Heroic Deeds (see Blog ) would also fit in very well.  A new piece I had just choreographed called Tent, Tallit and Torah also appealed to him. Now… when would we do the Forgiveness Piece?  He suggested we do it at his staff meeting time on Wednesday and I agreed especially if the full staff could be there which would include clergy, maintenance staff, teachers and secretaries.  The company would lead a workshop and then afterwards the company members would perform the Forgiveness Piece. This would be our only residency in which community members did not participate in the piece itself.  

Again, I am very grateful to Kezia for her notes of the very busy day on Wednesday, April 13that the congregation.  It included a workshop for staff with a performance, a lecture-dem for pre-schoolers, a workshop for 16-year-olds and participation in two Holocaust Memorial services for 6th, 7thand 11th/12thgraders.

Kezia described the forgiveness workshop with the full staff so beautifully that I include her notes here:

JoAnne began by instructing all participants (including the company dancers) simply to walk throughout the room.  As they did so, accompanied by percussionist Newman Taylor Baker, Tucker provided a continuous stream of movement instructions which were both fun and purposeful in directing participants’ exploration of elements of movement.  Moreover, the participants in the room quickly became peers in executing the assignments to navigate through imaginary peanut butter or jello, to move as quickly as possible, to make sudden changes of direction, or to focus on moving certain parts of the body. There was 100% participation, and smiles were plentiful.

Tucker gradually introduced interaction through movement, building from a simple greeting when passing, to structured mirroring in pairs (whereby one partner must become the mirror image of the other, as they move together). At Tucker’s direction, pairs were constantly dissolved and formed anew, so each participant worked with many others, creating partnerships that may not occur on a daily basis – rabbi with maintenance worker, cantor with secretary, pre-school teacher with high school teacher.  Additionally, within pairs, roles were rotated, so each participant experienced being both “a leader” and “a follower” within each of these distinct partnerships.

At this point, when movement skills were sharpened and the group appeared at ease moving, Tucker asked the group to verbally brainstorm “blocks to forgiveness.” A range of replies were offered and visibly considered by the group, as evidenced by nodding heads and comments such as “I never thought of that.” Using the tools they had just developed, the group explored the ideas suggested, through further mirroring and then through paired “conversations in movement.” All pairs were intently focused and, based on the coordinated timing and complementary style of their created movements, indeed appeared to be successfully “conversing.”  The Rabbi later revealed to Tucker and me that several of these participants, in their everyday interaction, refuse to speak to each other.

Avodah dancer Jessica Sehested and a member of the WRT staff having
a conversation together in movement.

The final participatory portion of the workshop was an activity by which participants, through movement, “shared a hurt” with others.  With insight and a sense of humor, the groups ended this exercise with the Rabbi on the floor, so overloaded with everyone’s “sharing” that the group had to lift him.  To resolve the overwhelming “hurt,” the group, at Tucker’s instruction, passed a “letting go” movement around the circle of participants, and the last person, at her own initiative, threw the “hurt” out of the circle.

Participants sharing a hurt.

The participants then watched a performance of the Forgiveness Project piece (without community involvement).  At the conclusion of the piece, there was no applause. The viewers attributed their silence to being stunned by the piece’s intensity, not to lack of appreciation. One participant asked whether she was supposed to interpret intellectually what she had just seen. A dancer pointed out that, just as the percussion instruments in an earlier activity had immediately invoked different emotions without requiring any intellectual articulation of “why,” so dance can deeply affect a viewer without requiring a verbal analysis. The Rabbi pointed out that “Forgiveness itself is not just intellectual.” Another participant noted that it was helpful to have done the movement exercises before seeing the piece.  The Rabbi was curious as to whether performing the piece regularly “heals” tensions with the dance company; in response, one dancer discussed dance as a levelizer”; another dancer pointed out that using movement allows any group, with any “issues,” to have a chance to communicate without having to talk – to be thrown into a new activity together, to have fun. A few of the participants nodded in agreement, and the Rabbi mused, “Maybe we should have all our staff meetings like this.”

I am very grateful to Kezia for keeping such careful notes of the workshop and have included them without any edits, as particularly the paragraphs before the last could serve as a model for someone leading a movement workshop on the theme of forgiveness. 

I found the workshop to be a very meaningful part of the residency at the congregation. However, I was disappointed that we were not able to involve more of the congregation in the theme of forgiveness, or involve community in a performance of the piece,as I found those performances much more meaningful for the audience.

Of course, it is important to respond to the needs of the community, and the leadership felt that focusing on Yom HaShoah for the balance of the activities was more appropriate. In Part II,  I will share how we engaged some members of the congregation in the Friday night service,  and describe the other pieces we integrated into the service.

Newman leading a section of the Workshop

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The Forgiveness Project – Incorporating Community Members into the Performance Piece

JoAnne Tucker / / Forgiveness Project, New York Company

The grant from the Nathan Cummings Foundation underwrote four one-week residencies at four contrasting sites.  Our first residency was held from February 25 through March 3 in Wilmington, Delaware.  Plans called for us to work with the community on many levels. Workshops were held for schoolchildren as well as adults, and community members participated in two performances – one at Temple Beth Emeth (as part of the Friday night Sabbath service) and the other at the Episcopal Church of Saint Andrews and Matthew (SAMS). (As mentioned in previous blogs, Canon Lloyd Casson of SAMS, a longtime supporter of Avodah, was instrumental in the development of the Forgiveness Project.) 

One of the requirements of the grant was to have good documentation of the residencies. A budget had been built into the grant to cover the cost of having two former members of the Avodah Dance Ensemble observe and take notes of what they saw.  Kezia Gleckman Hayman and Beth Millstein were super at doing this and I was thrilled when Kezia mentioned that she still had her notes about how we integrated community members into the performance.

The following description is from Kezia’s report about Congregation Beth Emeth, Wilmington, DE (March 1, 2002): 

I first observed the community members in a 6 p.m. rehearsal for the 8 p.m. temple service that evening.  All four participants had attended at least one workshop with the company during the preceding days.  Now the participants were to be incorporated into the performance piece with the company, using movement phrases they were about to create, themselves, based on workshop activities.  


JoAnne began by brainstorming responses to ”Forgiveness is… “ The group chose three images it wanted to use in this performance: “liberating a closed heart,” “transformation,” and “letting go.”  The ideas were translated into movement through sculpting. (One participant assumed a position expressing the given idea, and then other participants, one at a time, added to the sculpture.) This became the opening of the piece, before the entry of the company dancers.


One of the participants mentioned that she had particularly liked a workshop movement exercise in which Tucker had two lines of participants approaching each other . . .  Tucker built the next section on variations of “approaching,” assigning participants to interact with the company dancers.  Again drawing on images that had emerged during the workshops, one group approached as if to say “sorry,” another with the idea of returning, and the third incorporating a gesture of one’s face buried in one’s hands. This segued into the set choreography performed by the company.


At a subsequent place in the piece, the participants re-entered, interacting with the dancers in “sharing a hurt” through movement, and at the conclusion of the piece the participants joined the company by mirroring the professional dancers’ movements of comforting each other and “opening their hearts.”

I am so grateful to Kezia for saving these notes as it gives a very clear example of how we integrated the community with the professional dancers for the actual performance of the Forgiveness Piece.  I wish I had performance photos with community members but alas we don’t. I do have photographs from workshops.

In three of the four residencies, members of the community did perform with the dancers onstage as part of the piece, usually at similar places in the choreography but with different improvisations, based on what had been particularly meaningful to the workshop participants.

Once the structure for the community members’ improvisations was set, then the next stage was coaching.  From Kezia’s notes:

Tucker coached the participants to refine their original movements to the highest possible level in terms of expressiveness, clarity of movement, dynamics, use of space and interaction with fellow dancers.  With each urging, the participants’ movements improved, and their confidence grew, as evidenced by their lack of hesitation, the fullness of their movements, the development of their movements beyond the most obvious gestural representation of an idea, and the initiative they began to take . . . . 


At all times, movement came from the participants themselves, as they continually re-examined their impressions of the forgiveness process.  At one point, Tucker coached a participant moving from one place to another, “Transformation is not easy – it needs more tension,” and the participant reacted, “Right. I would have to WORK to get over there,” revising her movement accordingly.  At another point, Tucker coached, “Make sure ‘transformation’ and ‘letting go’ are not the same.”  The participant appealed, “Help me,” to which Tucker responded, “It has to come from you. Let your energy change.’’ It did, with a visibly expanded movement.


In one-and-a-half hours, the participants had been incorporated into the piece with movement both appropriate to their levels of technical ability and expressive of their individual explorations of forgiveness. The piece was performed with unified commitment and fluidity, and extremely well received by the congregation, many of whom noted the community participants with particular praise.

The time in Delaware continued with different community members joining the company when the Forgiveness Piece was performed at SAMS.

The first residency indicated that what we planned was indeed working.  If community members participated in a workshop earlier in the week then it was no problem to include them in the performance piece. Since Kezia was there as an evaluator for the grant she asked participants for feedback about effectiveness of the workshops.  Here are comments from two of the participants.

            Participant 1: “I’m usually intellectual, and movement is not.  In the workshop, I chose to explore my relationship with my daughter, and I discovered how angry I really was – I didn’t realize until I moved that it was anger I was feeling.”

Participant 2: “JoAnne had us do a movement exercise about sharing a hurt – it really lessened the hurt!”

Our second residency began just a little over a week later at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institution of Religion in New York City.  Workshops were very similar and participants included both rabbinic and cantorial students of HUC-JIR and people living in the neighborhood. I am delighted that we have some pictures from these workshops which were held in the very beautiful HUC-JIR chapel, a place we were very familiar with, as that was our home performing space.  

Community members in a workshop at HUC-JIR preparing 
to join the company in performance
Community members in a workshop at HUC-JIR preparing 
to join the company in performance

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Notes from February 2002 Newsletter –A Major Grant and a Major New Direction

JoAnne Tucker / / Forgiveness Project, New York Company

The grant from the Nathan Cummings Foundation enabled us to fully realize our plans for The Forgiveness Project.  We would have three full weeks of rehearsal time to create the new piece on forgiveness. That would be followed by four five-day residencies in four different places. I will be writing several blogs about these residencies.  For right now I want to look at the rehearsal period which began in mid-January, 2002.

My thinking after September 11th was first that it was hard to feel that dance, or the arts, had any significance at all.  As time passed I began to realize that the arts are extremely important to our healing as individuals and as a community.   

The repertory that I once felt was relevant and appropriate no longer felt congruent. As of a result of those feelings I found it exciting and affirming to be doing new and creative work. Not only would I be choreographing the Forgiveness Project piece, but I planned to do two other pieces.

Newman Taylor Baker was composing the music for the Forgiveness Project piece.  He would be playing it live for the performances as well as joining us for each of the residencies, available to accompany workshops.

The four dancers who had begun the work the previous year were not returning and so I was auditioning a totally new company for a season that would go from mid-January to mid-May.  Here are the bios of the four dancers I selected (as they appeared in the 2002 Newsletter). 

Andrea Eisenstein began her dance training in Houston, Texas at the Jewish Community Center. She graduated from the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in 1996 and then continued her training at Sam Houston State University receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the Fall of 1999.  Moving to New York she started her own company, Ironstone Movement Company, and performed with Bridgeman/Packer, Liz Keen and Teri Weksler.  She is also currently studying in the professional program at the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation.

Jessica Sehested was born in New York City and grew up in Atlanta, GA and Memphis, TN.  She studied dance professionally at Ballet Memphis, Wake Forest University, University of North Carolina in Greensboro and Dancespace Center in New York City.   After receiving her B.A. in dance from the University of North Carolina she returned to New York City to pursue certification in the Pilates Method. Involved in liturgical dance for over 13 years, Jessica has taught and performed at conferences and gatherings both nationally and internationally, including Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Canada.  (2019 Note:  Kezia remembers that Jessica had been a student at Wake Forest when Avodah performed there. As part of that short residency, the company had set “Kaddish” on a small group of students, one of whom was Jessica.) Kezia also remembers that during the Forgiveness Project residencies, Jessica often opened a session by masterfully engaging the participants and/or audiences – without any verbal introduction – in a call-and-response rhythmic clapping game, which immediately focused, charmed, energized, and unified the group.

Danielle Smith grew up in Harrisburg, PA where she began her study of dance and performed with the Cumberland Dance Company. She also performed and trained with the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet and at SUNY-Purchase, Conservatory of Dance. Among the summer programs she received scholarships for and attended were The Juilliard Summer Intensive, The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.  

Kerri Ann Thoma is a native of Chicago.  She has been teaching children and adults for the past 13 years in all levels and styles of dance. She has a BFA in dance performance from Northern Illinois University, and aspires to continue her teaching and choreographic endeavors. She looks forward to founding her own dance company in the future, sharing her enthusiasm and love for dance, and becoming an active part of the dance community in New York.

Putting together the right team has always been important to me, and it continues to be important even today with the non-profit film company Healing Voices – Personal Stories of which I am President and co-Director of Films.  I have learned to trust my instinct when considering a person to join the film company, as I did when I auditioned dancers.  For dancers, having a strong technique was of course very important to me, but equally important was the kind of energy each person brought into the room.  It was a wonderful creative adventure to work with these four dancers and I am very proud of the work we did together and the three pieces that we created.    

And so rehearsal began and it was a very satisfying creative journey.  The dancers enthusiastically risked both their emotional expression and technical skills as we wrestled with the complicated questions related to forgiveness. These four dancers with very different backgrounds quickly became a company.  As we rehearsed in Chinatown at the Mulberry St. studio of Chen and Dancers each day from 10 to 4 with a short break for lunch, the piece slowly began to develop, as did two other pieces we were working on.  Because of 9/11 and attending quite a few Buddhist workshops over the previous several months my approach was changing and I found this impacting the collaborative way I was working with the dancers.  We were designing the Forgiveness Piece so it could be performed either by the four dancers alone, or by the dancers joined by community members who would be incorporated into key parts of the piece.  My favorite part was the ending we planned, where community members joined the company members on stage doing a very simple movement of lifting the sternum as their arms traced down their upper body, representing the idea of opening one’s heart to each other and to community.

Danielle Smith leaping, Jessica Sehesed kneeling and holding onto Andrea Eisenstein.  Newman is in the corner of the photo, accompanying the piece.
Photo by Tom Brazil
From l to r: Jessica, Andrea, Kerri and Danielle in
The Forgiveness Piece close to the end.
Photograph by Tom Brazil

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Exploring German and Jewish Relationships and Forgiveness

JoAnne Tucker / / Forgiveness Project, Holocaust Repertory, New York Company

In the last blog I indicated that Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal had all mentioned the importance of looking at the question of forgiveness and German and Jewish relations.  It was important for me to wrestle with this difficult question too. I wanted to find a collaborator of my same age from Germany.  I reached out to contacts that I had and was referred to Toby Axelrod, Assistant Director of the Berlin Office of the American Jewish Committee.  She suggested Ursula (Ulla) Schorn, a dance and movement therapist very involved with second generation Holocaust survivors and perpetrators.   Ulla and I began emailing back and forth, sharing our backgrounds and interests.

I discovered that Ulla’s father was a Nazi and she was raised in Hamburg, Germany.  My father was in the United States army, a tank driver who saw heavy combat at the Battle of the Bulge.  Ulla and I were close to the same age.  I was born in 1943 and Ulla in 1942.  Ulla was and still is a dance and Gestalt therapist working in Berlin.  She studied extensively with Anna Halprin and is a Halprin practitioner. In fact in 2014 she, along with two other authors, published a book on Halprin called Anna Halprin: Dance-Process-Form.

I invited Ulla to come to the United States and to spend a week joining the four dance company members and myself in exploring the theme of forgiveness.  She agreed.  Now my thoughts turned to figuring out how to make that a very meaningful week.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs offered to provide a space for us to work in.  As part of the Westchester Reform Temple (WRT) he had created a very flexible space with a good wood floor that on the weekend was used for religious services for youth but during the week was free. The folding chairs could be removed and it was an ideal space for dance.  Separate from the main building, it provided privacy.  I invited composer-percussionist Newman Taylor Baker to join us and accompany our movement.  I also decided it would be helpful to have a guest theologian speak to us each day on forgiveness providing some of their favorite text for us to use as motivation.

For the season of 2000-2001 four dancers were under contract to work for 16 weeks.  Stacy Limon Cohen, Julia Pond, Becka Vargus and Candice Franklin had already been working together for over two months prior to the week in March when we gathered together to work in Scarsdale at WRT.

Two of the company members improvising on the theme of Forgiveness in a workshop.  Stacy Limon Cohen behind and Candice Franklin in front.

Ulla graciously agreed to accept home hospitality with Murray and me in our home in Jersey City. Each day we drove together from my home to and from WRT in Scarsdale giving us plenty of time to get to know each other as well as enjoy meals together.   I learned of the various feelings she had of growing up with a father who was in the military, the guilt connected with her father being a Nazi and the pressure he put on her and her siblings to have a certain level of excellence.   At my house and traveling we were two women simply learning about each other.  However when we were at WRT working with the dancers a different level of symbolism happened.  I felt I was representing a Jewish point of view and Ulla a German point of view.

On Monday, Rabbi Kenneth Chasen, the assistant rabbi at WRT, used the biblical Joseph story, particularly 45:1- 8 to motivate our thinking.  This text is about Joseph revealing himself to his brothers who had sold him to the Egyptians.  Joseph does not hold it against them.  On Monday, while Ulla and I both improvised with the four Avodah dancers we were not on the dance floor at the same time.  Clearly there was a level of discomfort for us to formally interact with each other.

On Tuesday, Nell Gibson, an Episcopal Lay Leader recommended by Canon Lloyd Casson (since Canon Casson was unable to be part of the week, due to other commitments), presented material from the New Testament.  She shared Luke 34 – “And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do.’”  Ulla and I both found ourselves on the dance floor at the same time but did not interact together.

Wednesday was the breakthrough day for me.  Rick Jacobs presented two different texts and since Rick had danced in the company from 1980-86, I requested, on the spur of the movement, that he come up with a movement idea for the text he was presenting.  He agreed.  He introduced text from Moses Maimonides – “Even if a person spent his entire life sinning, yet repents on the day of his death, and dies as one who has turned to God, all of his transgressions will be forgiven.”

The improvisation for the Maimonides text had one person at a time imagining that it was the last day of her life and that the rest of the group were people from whom she needed to ask forgiveness.  

The second text that Rick shared with us was even more powerful. It was from Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. “Known as ‘Rabbi Shlomo’ to his followers, Carlebach (14 January 1925 – 20 October 1994) was a Jewish rabbi, religious teacher, composer, and singer who was known as ‘The Singing Rabbi’ during his lifetime” (Wikipedia).

Carlebach was born in Europe before WWII and came to America from Vienna as a teenager because of the Nazis.  In the 1990’s he returned to Vienna and to several other cities in Austria and Germany to give concerts.  While there, he met with non-Jews as well as with Jews.  Someone asked him why he did it.  “Don’t you hate them?” he was asked.  His answer was, “If I had two souls, I would devote one to hating them. But since I only have one, I don’t want to waste it hating.  We have just one life, one soul – we shouldn’t waste it on hating: not the Nazis, most of whom are gone by now, not their children who are not guilty of the sins of their fathers and mothers, and surely not the people around us.”

The improvisation task for this quote was to respond in movement, interacting with each other, revealing the soul that does not hate!

Ulla and I were now interacting together in movement.  My notes from the day indicate the Ulla and I found ourselves dancing together with simple mirroring movement, naturally flowing back and forth in terms of who was leading. The empathy we felt for each other in this experience was powerful and very emotional for both of us.  

The rest of the week went well with more interacting with Ulla.  I don’t have any notes related to what happened on Thursday and Friday but I know that I began to understand more of the emotions she carried from being the daughter of a Nazi.  

After she left I found myself wrestling with new emotions related to forgiveness that I had not experienced before.  Things were no longer black and white and I was definitely on a new journey in both my own personal life and in what I wanted to express as a choreographer.

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The Forgiveness Project Begins: A Movement Presentation on Lines from Biblical Psalms

JoAnne Tucker / / dance liturgy, Forgiveness Project, Holocaust Repertory

Fortunately, I don’t have to rack my memory to figure out the beginning steps for The Forgiveness Project, as they are well documented in the February 2001 Avodah Dance Ensemble Newsletter.  Much of what I am sharing in this blog comes from the Newsletter’s opening article.

I did indeed read Desmond Tutu’s book No Future Without Forgiveness which Canon Lloyd Casson had suggested. Towards the end of the book Tutu has a paragraph related to the need for Israel to wrestle with forgiveness for Germany.  He is not the only one to point this out.  In January 2000, Elie Wiesel spoke of forgiveness in a speech he made on the German Day of Remembrance when he addressed the Bundestag. Simon Wiesenthal addressed this important question in his book The Sunflower. Certainly the question of forgiveness related to post-Holocaust German/Jewish relationships is one of the most challenging.  My plan was for the dance company to wrestle with this difficult question in a new way through movement. There was no goal to come up with any one definitive answer, just to wrestle with the question.

We would also look at forgiveness from a variety of perspectives – forgiveness of oneself, forgiveness within a relationship, forgiveness as it relates to God and forgiveness between communities.  We officially began our work on forgiveness for the project in the fall of 2000 when we presented a lecture demonstration on Yom Kippur afternoon at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion’s High Holiday Services for College and Graduate Students.  For this presentation I decided to focus on forgiveness between self and God. To prepare I read the Book of Psalms and jotted down any lines that related to forgiveness.  After much pondering I came up with four stages in the process of asking forgiveness of God: being aware of needing to ask for forgiveness; accepting the responsibility to do so; asking for forgiveness; and feeling certain expectations upon being forgiven by God.  Three dancers, including Beth Millstein who had worked with Avodah for over seven years, joined me, and we explored the four stages with related lines of text from Psalms.

Much to my delight I have notes from this demonstration and I share them now.  Readers who are interested in leading workshops on forgiveness are very welcome to use the text and ideas presented here.

Here are the stages of Forgiveness with supporting Psalm references

1.             Reflect or ponder our actions

“So tremble, and sin no more;
  Ponder it on your bed, and be silent  (Psalm 4:5)

2.            Take Responsibility

“For my iniquities have overwhelmed me:
  They are like a heavy burden, more that I can bear.”  (Psalm 38:4)
 
   “I recognize my transgressions
    And am ever conscious of my sins.” (Psalm 51:3)
 
   “I have considered my ways,
    And have turned back to your decrees.” (Psalm 119:59)

3.            Take Action

“Then I acknowledged my sin to you;
  I did not cover up my guilt;” (Psalm 32)

4.            Express how we feel/or anticipate how we will feel after taking action

“Happy is he whose transgression is forgiven,
  Whose sin is covered over.” (Psalm 32:1)
 
  “You are my shelter:
   You preserve me from distress:
   You surround me with the joyous shouts of deliverance.” (Psalm 32:7)
 
    “God redeems your life from the Pit,
    Surrounds you with steadfast love and mercy.” (Psalm 103:4)
 
    “Yours is the power to forgive
     So that You may be held in awe.” (Psalm 130:3-4)
 

We used some of these lines of text in our demonstration as part of the Yom Kippur afternoon service at HUC-JIR and I am most grateful for Rabbi Larry Raphael (of blessed memory) for inviting us to present.  In the formal presentation at HUC-JIR the dancers improvised to the lines of text while members of the congregation watched. 

As the Forgiveness Project continued we wove these lines from The Book of Psalms  into future workshops guiding groups of various ages to explore them.  Usually I started with the first stage, read the line of text and then asked each person to respond in movement to the imagery being expressed – for example, to imagine he/she is pondering on “his/her sins” and express what that would be like in movement. 

We added other texts into the Forgiveness Project, including biblical texts, writings of Moses Maimonides, lines from the New Testament, a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh and a passage from Wally Lamb’s novel I Know this Much is True.  I will be sharing more about these texts and how they fit into the Forgiveness Project in the next few blogs.

JoAnne, on tour in Florida in the fall of 2000, sharing text from the Book of Psalms
with a group of religious school students. 
Dancers improvising for the students, on lines of text from the Book of Psalms.

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