Holocaust Memorial dance

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

JoAnne Tucker / September 13, 2019 / 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 13^that 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 6^th, 7^thand 11^th/12^thgraders.

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.

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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Heroic Deeds – Honoring Righteous Gentiles

JoAnne Tucker / July 5, 2019 / Holocaust Repertory, New York Company

In 1993 when I first visited Israel, I remember a very emotional day spent at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. Among its many remembrances, Yad Vashem honors over 11,000 Righteous Gentiles. These are individuals who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. I knew that someday I would choreograph a dance to honor them and that happened during the 2001-2002 season. That was a particularly creative season since I choreographed three pieces on four talented dancers: Andrea Eisenstein, Danielle A. Smith, Jessica Sehested, and Kerri Thoma. The Avodah Dance Ensemble had moved from a part-time dance company operating throughout the year to a full-time company operating for 16 weeks of the year. The opportunity to work so intensively for about six hours each day was very stimulating.

As I began choreographing Heroic Deeds I began to realize that something else was motivating me as well. Living in Jersey City, right across from the World Trade Center, I had witnessed, only a few months before, the collapse of the second tower as I stood about three blocks from our home and looked across the river with our neighbors. And I remembered that our youngest daughter had been working in the World Trade Center in 1993 when a truck bomb detonated inside the parking garage. Her company was located on the 97^thfloor and she had walked down. She talked about how people were helping each other. There were no lights and so people were counting stairs and eventually as she got lower the NYC Firemen were coming up and providing additional guidance. As I began choreographing Heroic Deeds I found I was not only thinking of the Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives but how people can help each other in emergency situations, such as what my daughter experienced, and of course of the many first responders on 9/11 who risked their lives.

Part of both the fun and the challenge of choreographing is finding just the right music. I did, in a piece by the American composer Charles Ives. In a review by Jennifer Dunning in The New York Times (April 10, 2002) of a concert we did at the 92^ndStreet Y on the previous Sunday afternoon she pointed out, “Heroic Deeds distilled community need in a quartet as stark as its score by Ives.”

Once I had the music and had begun choreographing with the collaboration of the dancers my attention turned to costumes. Finding gray tops and ¾ length pants in gray I decided to paint silver, black and lighter gray spots on them to symbolize ashes and destruction of property in an abstract way.

Tom Brazil, a dance photographer who had previously photographed Avodah, beautifully captured the energy of the piece. Here are some of my favorite photos, with the four dancers who helped to create the work. All of the following photos are by Tom Brazil and copyrighted by him.

From l. to r. Jessica Sehested, Kerri Thoma, and Danielle Smith

From l. to r. Danielle, Jessica, Andrea Eisenstein, Kerri

From l. to r. Jessica, Andrea, Kerri, and Danielle

From l. to r. Danielle, Kerri, Jessica and Andrea

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Adding Kaddish to Avodah’s Repertory

JoAnne Tucker / June 7, 2019June 7, 2019 / Avodah's Early History, Holocaust Repertory, New York Company

It’s February 5, 1981, and we are premiering a new piece in Avodah’s repertory for a Holocaust Memorial Program at The Savannah College of Art and Design. It is part of a program entitled “Light Through The Darkness,” which has been organized and planned by Congregation Mickve Israel for February 5^ththrough 12^th. It is part of a three-part program which includes a dance performance, an art exhibit, and a lecture by a prominent collector. We have decided to create a new piece for the program, to the first eight minutes of Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony.

This was not our first performance in Savannah. This was our third. An article on February 4,1981, in the Georgia Gazettesums up our special relationship with Savannah very well:

The company has performed on several occasions to standing-room-only crowds in Savannah, and Tucker credits Rabbi Rubin (Saul Rubin) with encouraging her efforts during the company’s early years.

The first time we performed in Savannah was in March 1976 using female dancers from the congregation and bringing a male dancer from Tallahassee. I went in a week before and totally enjoyed my time there working with the dancers, who were lovely. Temple Mickve Israel is an old congregation with an historic sanctuary. It is located on a beautiful square, and a March 17, 1976 article in City Beat mentions that “while traffic circled about the verdant oasis, the dancers kicked off their shoes, and in leotards and jeans ran through their paces, barefoot in the park.” The publicity, with several articles and pictures of myself and composer Irving Fleet, was excellent for the Friday night service. In fact, when Irving joined me to rehearse the musicians and we had some time off to stroll along the river walkway and wandered in a shop, the owner recognized us from the newspaper. The Friday night service was indeed packed and standing-room-only. We performed Sabbath Woman and In Praise as part of a creative service that Rabbi Saul Rubin wrote.

We returned to Savannah in the fall of 1976 to repeat the two pieces as part of a regional Biennial Convention of the Southeast Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now called Union of Reform Judaism). That helped us become better known with congregations in the Southeastern part of the country. (My favorite memory from the performance in the Shabbat service is that I met a cousin and his wife that I hadn’t seen in years.)

We had a special relationship with Rabbi Saul Rubin and Temple Mickve Israel and I was really pleased to have an opportunity to be part of the Light Through The Darkness Holocaust Program. I also liked the fact we would have a good space to perform in at the Savannah College of Art and Design. This was a great opportunity to create a new piece to go with I Never Saw Another Butterfly. I remember listening to lots of music and giving much thought to what to create. I stumbled across Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony and loved the first 8 minutes. The piece opens with about a four-minute reading by a solo voice, with some music. The recording I first found, and originally choreographed to, featured Leonard Bernstein doing the vocal part. So I created the solo on Michael Bush, the male dancer in the Tallahassee company at that time. What follows the vocal section is a wonderful burst of music during which the solo dancer joins the other dancers in one of my favorite phrases, which we often used for auditions over the years. With hands fisted, the dancers rise slowly as a group into a suspended relevé in simple parallel, from which they explode into a skip and leap, and a fan kick into a knee walk into a tilted attitude turn.

The performance in Savannah went well but more important to me was that the new piece Kaddish became a signature part of the repertoire for over twenty years, regularly performed before the Kaddish prayer in services and ending many concerts. Shortly after that first performance I discovered a recording with a female voice (Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre) doing the part, and when I returned to New York, I used that recording and taught the solo to Lynn Elliott who did a magnificent job with the part.

We used the female recording from that point on except when Rick Jacobs performed the solo. (I obtained the permissions I needed to use the music and each year reported the number of performances so I could pay the appropriate royalty.)

Over the years so many wonderful dancers performed the solo part, and it was great fun for me to see how each dancer made it their own. Kezia continued to teach the group section to new dancers even when she was no longer in the company. She adds the following note:

One of my proudest moments, both as Assistant Rehearsal Director and as ensemble member, was during a performance at an arts festival, when the music suddenly disappeared in the middle of the group section of Kaddish – a tricky section with changing tempos. We continued dancing without pause. Our ensemble work was so reliable that when the music resumed, we were exactly where we should have been, as if nothing unusual had happened.

Another one of my most memorable performances was in that same festival, a rain-or-shine, mainly-outdoor event. Let it never be said that we ever performed with less than our full focus, technique, heart and soul – not even when we performed under that LEAKING tent top, for that ONE audience member sitting under his umbrella in the pouring rain to watch us. We laugh at these memories, like other touring mishaps, but they don’t detract from the pleasure of being part of such festivals. This particular occasion also gave us the rare opportunity to enjoy performances by other artists, including most memorably the lovely music ensemble Voice of the Turtle.

Lynn Elliott inKaddish. Photo by Amanda Kreglow.

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Poetry and Art Inspire I Never Saw Another Butterfly

JoAnne Tucker / December 14, 2018December 15, 2018 / New York Company

In the last post I mentioned the piece I Never Saw Another Butterfly. It was actually created in 1977 in Tallahassee, Florida receiving its first New York performance at Temple Israel in 1978. This was the first of four pieces that I created between 1977 and 2002 to remember the Holocaust or as memorial pieces for the Holocaust. The book I Never Saw Another Butterfly first came out in the early 60’s. By 1977 there was a lot of interest in the poems both in music and in dance. In fact, I was not the only choreographer that year to set some of the poems. Pearl Lang created her I Never Saw Another Butterfly in 1977, as did Wendy Osserman collaborating with composer Peter Schlosser.

Pearl Lang was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company from 1942 to 1952. When she left the company to form her own company in 1952, one of the first pieces she did was Song of Deborah, and she continued to often create works related to her Jewish background. In a radio interview in 1977 she referred to the piece I Never Saw Another Butterfly as a memorial to the Holocaust. I did not get to see Lang’s Butterfly but I did see an earlier piece she created in 1960 called Shirah, which I found hauntingly beautiful. I also had the opportunity to study with Pearl in 1960 at the Connecticut College Summer Dance Program. For six weeks in an hour-long composition class a small group of students, maybe four or five of us, worked on studies. I was assigned to do a laughter study and an anger study. Another older member of the class created a piece inspired by the fragile character Laura in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I don’t remember the dancer’s name but the delicate way she wove movement together left a lasting impression.

In dance classes with Louis Horst at Juilliard, particularly his second year class called Modern Forms, he often encouraged us to visit museums and to even develop pieces inspired by the art that we saw. The Museum of Modern Art was one of my favorite places to go and there was one picture that I was strongly drawn to. Titled Hide and Seek, it was painted by Pavel Tchelitchew in 1942. The picture is a tree made up of children. There are arms reaching for each other, faces calling out, hands and toes as roots of the tree. Standing in front of the painting I felt life and death captured in the same moment. The painting seemed to cry out to me just as the poems in I Never Saw Another Butterfly did. In studying the painting I saw five particular parts that stood out and so I decided to limit the piece and only set five of the poems. Each dancer would recite a poem as they moved based on the five images that stood out.

In my file on I Never Saw Another Butterfly is a postcard of the painting, sent to me by Nanette Joslyn, a dancer in the NY Company in the early 80’s who also shared that she was dancing at the time with Pearl Lang in a spoof on the Esther–Modecai story.

Postcard of Pavel Tchelitchew’s painting *Hide and Seek* sent to me by Nanette Joslyn.

A description of the book tells us that 15,000 children under the age of 15 passed through the concentration camp of Terezin. Fewer than 100 survived. The poems and also pictures that they drew shared both the daily misery as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism.

There are only a few pieces of my choreography that I could get up and do now or at least set with only limited help of a video, and I Never Saw Another Butterfly is one of them. I also think it had the longest history of performances in the company, being performed through the early 2000’s. It opens with the group of dancers close together doing a random number of steps and stops as if they were bundled in a train car that stopped and started in no particular pattern. 1 hold 2 walk 3, 4, 5, hold 6 walk 7 and so the piece starts. Later they peel off and take shapes related to the poem and it is from these shapes that each dancer emerges to begin his or her poem.

Bea Bogorad and Randy Allen rehearsing *I Never Saw Another Butterfly* at the Creative Dance Center Studio in Tallahassee, Florida. Can you see the arms reaching for each other in Pavel’s painting that inspired this moment?

I was still performing with the company and my poem began:

I'ld like to go away
Where there are other nicer people,
Somewhere in the far unknown
Where no one kills one another.

After the first performance in Tallahassee, a member of the audience that I only knew casually came up to me and said he was very moved by the piece and that he was about to close out a bank account and wanted Avodah to have the balance left of $600. That was a large contribution for our little company back in 1977 and we were most grateful.

The title poem captures both the optimism and the despair:

The last, the very last
So richly, brightly, dazzling yellow
Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing
Against a white stone.

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly way up high.
It went away I'm sure
Because it wished to kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto
But I have found my people here
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut candles in the court
Only I never saw another butterfly.

As I write this, I have a sinking feeling in my stomach, aware of the current news where we in this country are separating immigrant children from their parents and putting them in large detention camps behind barbed wire and bars. Maybe this piece needs to be revived and seen again with the backdrop of current day pictures reminding us that we cannot be silent and allow this to continue.

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