Moving to a different rhythm
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DEBORAH FRIEDES |
Seen on the way to my Hebrew lesson . . .
My friend CoCo Loupe has been posting some of her inspiration on her dance blog, and I’ve been loving this graffiti ever since it first caught my eye a few weeks ago. Nothing like a little message saying you’re on the right path . . .
After returning from Adama in Mizpe Ramon, I filled my week with classes (mostly Gaga, at the Suzanne Dellal Center), lots of correspondence, and audio editing. I was supposed to travel up north yesterday to visit the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company but sadly was knocked out by a 24-hour bug (spoiled soy milk? hummus gone bad?). Hopefully I’ll make it up there after the chag - the holiday. Passover, better known here as Pesach, begins on Saturday night with the festive seder meal and will continue for 7 days (as opposed to 8 in the Diaspora - 1 less day of eating matzah!). Even though people in Tel Aviv - and, for that matter, in the contemporary dance scene - tend to be secular, the words on everybody’s lips right now are “after the chag.” Can we meet? “This week is too hectic; maybe sometime after the chag.” When can I set up an interview? “Give me a call after the chag.” Right now people are gearing up for the big family get-togethers, and next week many Israelis take vacation. I guess it’s a good opportunity for me to slow down as well!
I hadn’t planned on turning this into a long analytical post, but as I’m writing, I realize that there is some meat to chew on here. Some of the questions I’ve been pondering are “What is Israeli about Israeli contemporary dance?” and “What (if anything) is Jewish about Israeli contemporary dance?” As in the rest of Israeli society, I’ve found that the rhythms in Israeli concert dance are tied to Jewish patterns. Right now I’m not talking about musical rhythms but calendar rhythms. Is it a coincidence that Suzanne Dellal’s main offering this week - while Israelis are preparing for Pesach - is not an array of Israeli companies but a festival of French dance (Connexion Francaise 2)? The link between programming schedules and Jewish schedules is evident on a weekly basis. On Friday evenings, at the start of Shabbat the pace of life slows down and many Israelis gather for family dinners, some with the religious traditions of the Sabbath and some without. There’s an amazing lull during Shabbat dinner even in secular Tel Aviv; public transportation is shut down, few cars drive through the streets even at the busiest intersections, shops are closed, and the restaurants which remain open appear to be frequented by family groups. Friday night is, of course, a prime evening to go to the theater - but here in Tel Aviv, Friday performances typically begin at 10:00 p.m. so that Israelis can attend after their family meals. There are occasionally matinee performances on Saturday, Shabbat, but far fewer than there are either Saturday or Sunday matinees in the U.S. (I should clarify that the weekend here is Friday-Saturday rather than Saturday-Sunday, and for some people, Friday is a 1/2 day of work or school which ends early because of the approaching Sabbath). I haven’t examined performance schedules in Jerusalem, but I would imagine that there are even fewer concerts over the course of Shabbat there than in Tel Aviv; it’s hard enough to find open restaurants on Friday nights and Saturdays in the city’s Jewish neighborhoods!
I don’t know how much Israelis think about this - after all, by now even I’m used to this schedule - but I remember just how strange it felt to peruse the performance calendars when I first arrived. Then again, I rarely used to consider how the Christian calendar influenced theater schedules in the U.S. I’ll leave you with a historical tidbit:
The 1879 Blue Law prohibited certain forms of entertainment on Sundays in America. Since theaters were typically booked during the week for musical and dramatic productions, Sundays were often the only days that venues were available for dancers. Four dancers (Margaret Severn, Paul Haakon, Harald Kreutzberg, and Yvonne Georgi) were arrested and fined after a Sunday performance in early 1930, but led by Agnes de Mille and Helen Tamiris, the Concert Dancers League successfully persuaded New York lawmakers that dance was not expressly forbidden by the terms of the 19th century law. Thus began the path to Sunday dance concerts in the U.S. Interesting, isn’t it?
