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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