Tag: Jewish Film Festival in Italy

The Beginning of the Tour to Italy

JoAnne Tucker / / Touring

In one of the many Jewish newspapers or magazines that I followed I saw a notice about a Jewish Film Festival in Pitigliano, Italy, organized by Michela Scomazzon Galdi, who lived in Rome. I thought maybe they might be interested in adding a dance event. I sent Deborah information about it, along with Galdi’s contact information, and much to my delight Deborah was able to get in touch with her and even headed into Rome to meet with her.  Later Deborah would travel to Pitigliano to see the space and figure out theatre technicalities.  There was much correspondence between all the parties in Italy as well as between Deborah and me figuring out details for our participation for the opening night of the festival, October 31, 1999.

Deborah also wanted us to have more than one performance and began working with some school contacts to see if she could arrange a workshop and performance in nearby Tuscania.

I knew that our budget would be extremely limited, so there was no way that the whole Avodah company could go, and part of the fun and challenge would be working with Deborah’s dancers.  It would be ideal if Kezia could go too. Kezia could help teach as well as perform in the concert and an added bonus was that it would be fun to travel and tour a bit too.

Deborah remembers, “In the summer before you and Kezia came to Italy, I headed home to the US with a long stop in NYC to rehearse with you.  As I was planning my trip, several of my dancers – Anna, Cinzia and Francesca wanted to tag along and visit NYC.  I said sure and they came and so we had rehearsals there in Chinatown – getting them into some of the pieces for Pitigliano.  Also, Silvia Manciani happened to be in New York studying at Graham for an intensive and she came to rehearse with us as well, I believe.”

At the same time I had also been in contact with an enthusiastic dancer from Israel who had attended a Monday night Dance Midrash Class I led regularly in New York City. (These were improvisation classes based on Biblical text.  For more information check out Torah in Motion: Creating Dance Midrash which I co-authored with Rabbi Susan Freeman.) The dancer in Israel very much wanted me to go there and teach dance midrash and she was willing to arrange it.  She followed through with an email as we were beginning to organize plans for Italy and I thought that the timing would be a perfect fit.  I could fly to Italy, have one or two rehearsals with the dancers and then fly to Israel to teach.  Kezia could meet me on the return to Italy and we could finish rehearsing, perform in Tuscania and at the Festival, and have a little time for sightseeing before returning to New York.

Deborah did a super job of arranging things and I remember so clearly a rehearsal before I flew to Israel.  At that time Deborah had stopped running her own studio.  After spending two years trying to do so, and building a small ensemble that traveled to do school performances and festivals, she had realized that the economics were just not in her favor. In fact, after teaching for two years in a studio that her Uncle Enrico had built for his ballroom-champion son, she realized she hadn’t earned a penny for herself after paying rent and the two other teachers in classical and jazz to round out the curriculum. Her husband was a dedicated documentary filmmaker and so she decided that two working artists in the family was one too many and therefore she would teach English.  So when I got to Italy, Deborah was teaching English full time for the Italian Military.

I remember well the first rehearsal that I had with the dancers in the lovely studio that her Uncle Enrico had built. I was totally taken aback when someone’s cell phone rang and the person stopped dancing in the middle of the piece to answer the call. I looked at Deborah aghast and she explained that this was the custom in Italy and to just be patient.  That never happened in NYC, as cell phones are turned off and only in breaks do people use a phone unless of course someone has an emergency and needs to keep it on! I soon adjusted to this more informal rehearsal style although it did leave a very clear memory in my mind. In terms of the dancing I could see the excellent progress Deborah had made with the dancers and that they would be ready for the upcoming performance.

With Deborah in Italy, October 1999.

After just a few days I returned to Rome for my short flight to Israel.  Once inside the airport, I couldn’t find El Al listed anywhere.  I wandered around the airport a bit and finally asked a policeman where to check in for El Al. He pointed down the hall to the farthest part of the airport. I continued walking down to an unmarked area where I soon realized there was a temporary place to check in.

I was interviewed for quite a while before being able to proceed to the next waiting area.  When I got inside I was taken aback to realize that a balcony surrounded the room, and stationed at quite regular intervals were army members with machine guns.  When I had traveled to Israel from the US, while security was tight it was nothing like this.

I knew that there had been an incident in the past that had warranted a high level of security, and a bit of Googling brought up the event which happened on October 11, 1982.  The following description is from Wikipedia:

The attack took place at the Great Synagogue of Rome in the historic district of Rome on Saturday morning, at 11:55 AM. As the families of the local Jewish community began leaving with their children from the back entrance to the synagogue, five elegantly dressed armed Palestinian attackers walked calmly up to the back entrance of the synagogue and threw at least three hand grenades at the crowd, and afterwards sprayed the crowd with sub-machine gun fire.  Eyewitnesses at the scene stated that the hand grenades bounced off the steps and exploded in the street.

A 2-year-old toddler, Stefano Gai Tache was killed in the attack after being hit by shrapnel.  In addition, 37 civilians were injured, among them Stefano’s brother, 4-year-old Gadiel Tache, who was shot in the head and chest.

Great Synagogue of Rome (photo from Wikipedia)

I found it meaningful to continue reading and learned that the event was remembered as recently as 2015.

On 3 February 2015, during the message to the Italian Parliament following his taking the oath as President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella remembered the attack with these words: “(Italy) has paid several times, in a not too distant past, the price of hate and intolerance.  I want to remember only one name: Stefano Tache who was killed in the cowardly terrorist attack on the synagogue in Rome in October 1982,  He was only two years old.  He was our baby, an Italian baby.”

Once through security and check-in, we were bused in groups to the far end of the airport where we boarded the plane.  It was an easy, uneventful flight to Tel Aviv and I looked forward to my teaching adventure in Israel, which will be the subject of the next blog.

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Performance in Pitigliano

JoAnne Tucker / / 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 150th 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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