dance – From Under the Fig Tree

On your feet

joselitJanuary 29, 2017November 16, 2017Leave a comment

As nearly everyone has acknowledged by now, the march in New York, much like its sister demonstration in DC, heartened and uplifted the spirits. Even though it fell on Shabbat -- or, better yet, precisely because it coincided with the traditional Jewish day of rest -- amcha, the people in all their variegatedness, myself included, were on the move, bringing their collective values into the public sphere and onto the street. A memorable experience, from start to finish.

On the heels of the march, while back in DC a few days later, I tripped over my own feet, landing in the emergency room at GW’s hospital where I, along with many, many others, spent the better part of an entire Tuesday awaiting treatment. All I could think of as I sat there, just a few blocks away from the White House, was the chip, chip, chipping away of our health care system.

While subsequently nursing my wounds, I had occasion to make my way through Radical Bodies, the catalog that accompanies a brand new exhibition in Santa Barbara, at the University of California’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum. Focusing on the contributions of Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer to post-modern dance, Radical Bodies argues, among other things, that the experience of being Jewish in postwar America -- displacement and loss on the one hand, the plasticity and adaptability of Jewish values on the other -- inspired all three women.

I look forward eagerly to seeing this exhibition when it comes to New York’s Public Library for the Performing Arts later this year and to thinking further about the relationship between Jewishness and dance. In the meantime: On your feet, everyone!

On your toes

joselitJune 30, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Now and again, I make a point of encouraging my students to venture beyond the precincts of their digital universe and to take in a film, attend a live performance or visit a museum. There’s something about the immediacy of the experience that will lift your spirits, say I to them, promisingly. In response, they nod their heads dutifully, muster a fleeting smile and then, pronto, return to their iPhones and tablets.

Léon Bakst, costume for The Firebird/Wikipedia

They’re not alone. I freely confess that I don’t always follow my own advice, either. When it comes to practicing what I preach, I often fall short and end up reading about rather than actually experiencing the latest ballet, concert or exhibition. In my case, what keeps me away from the cinema, the concert hall and the museum is not so much a matter of being tethered to digital devices as it is a matter of work. I can’t seem to break free of its demands.

But the other day, I did and, leaving my academic responsibilities to fend for themselves for the time being, I took off for the National Gallery and its exhibition, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced with Music. Spending several hours in its company left me happy and even exhilarated -- so much so that I can’t stop thinking about it.

With a dazzling panoply of costumes, set designs, paintings, posters, photographs and two immense stage curtains whose impact is nothing less than jaw-dropping -- how, I wondered, did they ever manage to survive the passage of time, let alone the rigors of the stage? -- the exhibition highlighted the immense array of talents critical to the success of the Ballets Russes. Even if you were well steeped in the company’s history, the material on display seemed like a revelation.

You needn’t be a balletomane, an artist or an historian to appreciate, and benefit from, the exhibition. What makes Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes so memorable is the way it quickens the imagination, giving rise to all sorts of expansive thoughts about life’s possibilities.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who left the National Gallery with a lift in my step.

Show biz

joselitJanuary 2, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Much has been written of late about the ways in which celebrated American musicals such as "Oklahoma" or "South Pacific" carry considerable Jewish freight. While most audiences come away humming rather than thinking, the American musical, many scholars suggest, is actually where American Jewish playwrights, lyricists, choreographers and designers set to rights their relationship to America.

muses — Muses Dancing with Apollo, by Baldassare Peruzzi. Source: Wikipedia.

But what of those on the other side of the footlights: the audience? I've always wondered what accounted for the longstanding affinity that so many American Jews, as well as their European counterparts, have had for the theater and the arts in general. Was this an accident of history? An artifact of demography? Or a deliberate strategy of modernization?

A recent article in the real estate section of The New York Times provides something of an answer.

Training its sights on 466 Grand Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side, it focused on what was once known as the Neighborhood Playhouse but is now the Louis Abrons Arts for Living Center.

Whatever its name, the organization was first established in 1915 by two of the great unsung heroines of modern New York: Alice and Irene Lewisohn. The nieces of Adolph Lewisohn, himself a great benefactor of Jewish institutions, among them the Hebrew Technical School for Girls, they introduced the residents of the immigrant Jewish neighborhood to the magic of the performing arts.

Joining forces with Lillian Wald, another indomitable American Jewish woman of the early 20th century who founded the Henry Street Settlement, the "misses Lewisohn," as they were called, sought to enlarge the imaginative capacity of America's newest citizens through an active program of theater, dance, pageantry and a better, more wholesome, class of movies.

After about a decade, the Lewisohns decided to close the Neighborhood Playhouse, explaining, somewhat cryptically, that "in view of our geography and the psychology of our audience, our present system is not conducive to the further development of creative expression." What they meant by that is anyone's guess. In fact, if there are any students out there looking for an exciting research paper, this could be it.

Fortunately, the Henry Street Settlement continued to support what developed over time into one of the city's most accessible and lively cultural venues. Under its aegis, thousands of Jewish children -- my mother, among them -- cultivated an appetite for the arts, or what Alice Lewisohn called the "stirring of their emotional inheritance."

I grew up on my mother's adventure stories of travelling all by herself, week after week, from the far reaches of Brooklyn to the Lower East Side to take a class in tap dancing, of all things. Somewhere, I even have a picture of my teenage mother, her tap shoes glistening, her body encased in a satiny costume and her face aglow, as she tap, tap, taps her way into history.