Canon Lloyd Casson: Exploring Spirituality
//Tag: Kezia Gleckman Hayman
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An Intercultural Harmony Grant Funds a 2004 Summer Workshop
//Avodah began to do week-long summer dance training programs in 1997, but I want to share memories of our final one, at Perry-Mansfield in August 2004. We were very fortunate to have a grant from the Laura Jane Musser Fund. This fund, which began in 1989 upon the death of Laura Jane Musser, is devoted to her interests, which included the arts and helping children. One of the areas funded is Intercultural Harmony and we applied for a grant to provide a five-day workshop teaching how to use movement, music and storytelling to create multicultural programs in schools. The grant enabled me to put together a stellar faculty and to help provide scholarships to participants.
This was not the first Avodah workshop at Perry-Mansfield in Steamboat Spring, CO. The first one was in 2001 when Amichai Lau Lavie and Libbie Mathes joined me as the faculty with our week focused on Yoga, Dance and Sacred Text. Libbie was my next-door neighbor in Steamboat Springs and we quickly discovered our common interest in dance and sacred text from both a Jewish and a Buddhist perspective. This was a great opportunity for us to work together. Libbie is a highly trained and gifted teacher of Yoga, having studied in India in both Asana (posture) and Pranayama (breath work). Amichai is now a rabbi, but at the time of the workshop he was a student, extremely knowledgeable about Jewish text. Libbie remembers “loving his analysis and insights into the Moses sagas.” The workshop was part of Avodah’s training program for leaders of dance midrash, and at least one person who had done workshops with me in NYC made the trip to Perry-Mansfield in Colorado.
Libbie and I did another workshop the following year focusing on Meditation, with Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg joining us. And then in 2004 we had a faculty of five, all people that I had a long history of working with. As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, we focused on training teachers to use multicultural programs in the schools. Libbie continued providing the Yoga section and insights from her explorations of India and Yoga’s traditions. Regina Ress, an international storyteller, had a huge number of relevant stories to share and had taught in schools at all levels. Kezia had both an education degree and a dance degree, and had danced and taught with Avodah for 13 years. She and I had led many workshops related to dance midrash and multicultural work that grew out of our piece Let My People Go. Newman Taylor Baker is a percussionist I had worked with since 1989 as part of Let My People Go and then in other teaching situations along with our prison programs. He had years of experience presenting school programs and had the most amazing collection of percussion instruments from all over the world. In addition we invited Julie Gayer to join us, as she was taking on the role of director of The Avodah Dance Ensemble in the fall of 2004, since I was no longer living in New York City and was retiring from heading the dance company.
We not only had participants from throughout the United States, but two members of the Steamboat Springs community, as well. Libbie remembers a chemistry teacher and also an administrator. We were thrilled that we could offer scholarships to participants. Having all worked together before, this was a sheer teaching joy where we could just easily flow from one leader to another. As Libbie and I were next-door neighbors and luckily the townhouse on the other side of mine was vacant, we rented it for the week, and everyone had fun hanging out together after teaching. I remember that Newman introduced me to quinoa and showed me how to rinse it first before cooking it. And then the weekend following the workshop, we had a wonderful time hiking two of my favorite trails.
Storytelling, movement, and music are all ways to connect to others and learn about different cultures, finding common threads and celebrating differences. For me on a personal note it was a wonderful way to complete my work with the Avodah Dance Ensemble as its founding director. Avodah had begun with my exploration of my own Jewish roots and my relationship to Jewish text. Now over thirty years later, I had changed and my focus was on building bridges between people and seeing intercultural harmony (the beautiful phrase used by the Laura Jane Musser Fund). And how wonderful to be able to hold this workshop at Perry-Mansfield in the Louis Horst Studio. It was like so many pieces of my life coming together…nature, spirituality, dance history, personal history, deep friendships and artistic collaborations.
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Performance in Pitigliano
//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.
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.
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.
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.
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