Who gets to dance?

Dance Exchange asks and answers that question very directly.

Who gets to dance?

"Dance is a birthright...
1) We all have knowledge about how to move;
2) We all have stories to tell;
3) We all can learn from witnessing each other’s movements and listening to each other’s stories."

I want to record with whom I've danced and whose dancing I've witnessed during the time I've been here. The variety is part of what's exciting and part of why as a rabbi I feel comfortable here.

• Watching the professional company in rehearsal for Origins at University of Maryland.
  
• Witnessing and participating in the Dance Composition J-term intensive Sara and Ben taught for a dozen students, Dance majors and others (one a Criminal Justice major) at Towson University.
• Dancing and sharing experience with thirteen LGBTQ High School students. We were guests at a queer youth group.
  
• Dancing and sharing experience with residents at Vinson Hall, a retirement community in McLean, Virginia.
  
• Teaching the Aleinu prayer with Shula, at Temple Micah in Northwest DC.
  
• My own dancing (and truly, if I get to dance, then, baby, anybody gets to dance) with Shula's witnessing my work, watching me make choices about movement, choreography.

In all the contexts -- my dancing alone, professionals rehearsing for performance, our dancing with seniors or queer kids -- the same tools and techniques found application. It wasn't that one experience was dance and the other was therapy, or that one was artwork and the other was social work. It's all art and all spirit and all community, in each instance.

At the rehearsals for Origins, with science and religious text in the work, and I saw and was introduced to the company community, its own rituals, language, and ways of being.

At Towson and Vinson Hall and with the Queer teen group the processes of creating, learning, and rehearsing movement became methods for creating community. Trust grew among the participants who became increasingly willing to work with each other and with us.

At Vinson Hall I found myself partnered in a mirroring dance with Clara, age 92.

The Queer teen programming was guided by 3 teens from Teen Exchange (teens who study both dance and group facilitation) and led into conversation and dance around the question "When have you been misunderstood?" That experience is still percolating for me. One important aspect was the sense of comfort in a multi-generational, multi-gendered, and multi-orientational Queer group. I'm 50. Some of them were...16? In my experience of the Queer world, we rarely establish much sense of community across generations. This workshop gets points for that achievement alone.

At Temple Micah, Shula and I watched and coached 5th and 7th graders in their search for personal connection to a traditional ritual of bowing before God. Some of them went deeper than others into the religious moment. Some of them found an opportunity to dance at Hebrew school. Dayeinu! in either case.

I have much more to say about my own experience of dancing than I want to address right now. Some of it, from today's rehearsal with Shula, was so surprising, so personal, and so spookily profound, I'm not sure how to talk about it yet. I will share that after our first work session, I was insecure enough to ask her, "Aren't you bored?" She responded with how much she enjoys working with adult non-dancers. Even a non-dancer is a dancer.

I associate that with my experience leading Torah study. I often get impatient, not with someone's lack of experience in Torah study but with someone's dismissal of their own insights because of their lack of experience. Even a first-time Torah student is a teacher. (Rabbi Bea Wyler of Germany told me once, "If you know one word of Torah, you have a word of Torah to teach someone else.")

Dance is a birthright; Torah is a birthright; the ability to interpret text is a birthright. Torah study can invite the whole self -- body, spirit, mind -- into a personal and passionate dance. Leading people into confidence in their bodies and their own unique knowledge and perspective is spiritual work. Same job.

As I wax ecstatic about all this, I feel obligated -- in order to remain credible -- to declare there are mundane moments here, too. It's not Disneyland; not everything is magic. That said, there is some serious magic to be had here. I definitely recognized the sacred in all the different scenarios above. I'm a rabbi; I often look for the sacred element in life experience. It happens to be very easy to spot here.

More about movement and story (or lack thereof)

Worked/played for two hours in a rehearsal studio with Shula on Thursday, using elements of two dance phrases I had created earlier (the one from the Heisenberg principle, and one based on a sentence from a Towson University student magazine) and different techniques from the Toolbox (http://www.danceexchange.org/toolbox)

The process around creating both phrases began with "equivalents" -- a tool of translating one word or one visual symbol into a single dance moment with a clear beginning, middle, and end. In the process, then, movement grew out of meaning. Once the movement/dance/gesture has been shaped, though, it exists independent of the meaning that initiated it. Then we bring a range of possibilities -- a tool labeled "theme and variations" -- to the movements of the dance phrase, changing the speed, the scale, the emphasis, the direction, level, sequence (the list goes on). Once the act of variation begins, the meaning changes or simply falls away.

As an artist, as a rabbi, I have always been very "why" dependent. Needing to know why. Rabbinically, I treat it as part of my ethical responsibility, not to be random or sloppy when dealing with people's lives and with texts they hold sacred. When I directed plays and operas, I was careful to know why I blocked an actor to do something. If I had an instinct of how something was to be staged or played, I spent hours tracing the instinct to an understanding, to a why. Over the years, I have put energy into connecting the dots. I'd list it as one of my talents, in fact: "Connects dots well." It's an important talent when interpreting a fragmented or problematic text, when creating a eulogy, when counseling, when directing big shows in a short space of time.

Part of the improv style of the Dance Exchange is not connecting the dots too early in the creative process. Play for a while, use theme and variations, transfer a movement to a different height or a different body part, see what happens next. Once I started working like that with Shula, it became fun, discovering a new logic that could link one posture or gesture to the next, but had nothing to do with 'meaning.' In the abstract, though, and before we got into the work, it made me nervous: What was I doing simply moving in space, without a story to tell or a logical sequence to complete?

Eventually a dance can comprise a mix of geometrical shapes, a sense of continuity and momentum sustained by the body of the dancer (or, in this instance, the non-dancer), narrative moments a split second in length. All that in once dance. In this moment I'm reminded of pointillism (definitely thinking "Sunday in the Park") where a single dot of paint has no logic, no narrative content of its own, but constitutes an integral part of a larger system or story. Artists and viewers both have to decide how far away they want or need to stand in order to hold the larger shape and to select but not constrict the details.

And just there, I suddenly thought, oh, I'm back to religion again, after all. Huh.

Movement, shape, gesture, story, community

Spent yesterday with DX dancers Sarah Levitt and Ben Wegman at Towson University where they are teaching a week-long J-term intensive in Dance Composition. The class is entirely undergraduate women, some dance majors, some not, all of whom have experience and skill in both movement and choreography. They were perhaps confused by the presence of the 50-year-old non-dancing rabbi in their midst, but they were open to including me.

The structure of the day gave me exactly what I came to Dance Exchange for -- to see the company's "Toolbox" in action. What are the games and exercises they use in creating art but also in the creation of a company? How do you generate collaboration among a group of individuals who don't already have a dynamic connection beyond a shared interest? That could mean a class of college students each of whom wants to dance or choreograph, but in my mind it just as easily could be members of a congregation or a retirement community or folks on retreat, who share an identity (Jewish, gay, senior, or on vacation). Powerful potential exists to create together, and a mandate exists for some groups (congregations, certainly) to interact, learn, and build. What are the methods we'd use to accomplish those goals?

Kenji Oshino in his book Covering quotes Marvin Bell's teaching that to become a writer is to become "less and less embarrassed about more and more." That challenge presented itself strongly within the workshop yesterday. I could feel myself making choices about what I'd reveal through words or movement, and what I wouldn't -- and I have nothing to lose in this context. The students want to look good in front of each other and the glamorous guest teachers (although Sarah and Ben create as comfortable and relaxed a class atmosphere as one might wish for). So each person's choices to be audible and visible in the room are not simple; and some of the exercises pushed us strongly to be both.

Eventually, after a number of hours of exercises, Sarah and Ben had given everyone a vocabulary of individual technical elements in a dance that included: focus, proximity, transitions, shape, speed, architecture, leading/following, weight, contact, and relationship. For those creating a dance, within the big picture, there are always these choices, and they may be the most important ones at a given moment of the process -- not the larger concept.

That feels familiar from my theatre work. Sometimes we need to respond to the smallest component of the moment -- the picture isn't right, the lighting needs adjustment, that x from left to right should go faster. Occasionally we feel stuck and we need to shake up the pieces even if only to be reassured afterwards that things were well ordered to begin with.

Rabbinically, that instinct often gets trumped by some larger issue: the Tradition, the Law (even in a Reconstructionist community), shalom bayit (keeping everybody happy and peaceful), maintenance of momentum. Can't we, in the task of preserving and enlivening a millennia-old tradition, allow ourselves more often the freedom to "play," to examine and experiment with the purely structural sub-components of an experience, to see if that process more brightly illuminates the sacred?

I think I'm dancing. Am I dancing?

Starting in the middle, because that's how it seems to have started.

The company is working on a piece called "Origins," that engages with theories and stories of the origin of the universe and the laws of physics, as well as the theories and experiments behind the creation of atomic weaponry.

As part of today's rehearsal and creative work, I was assigned a random equation from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to embody the symbols in movement and shape.

[When I can figure out how to snag the original and paste in here, I will.]

In a room full of dancers living out similar shapes and patterns, engaged in the same basic challenge, it wasn't hard to be another moving body in the space. I retain nearly nothing from the IPS (Introduction to Physical Science) I took in 8th grade because my father insisted that everyone needed to learn some basic physics (hence why I never took Latin), so the symbols meant little to me. I think I remember delta indicates change; I can recognize basic math symbols like an 'equals sign.' I gave myself the motivation of having to smuggle and preserve a text I didn't understand: the equation was important, even if I didn't understand it. I translated the equation.

It was harder later to show Shula Strassfeld what I'd done. I'd been fully visible to the room when I created the sequence, but it was embarrassing or revealing to show what I'd done to one person individually.

We worked and cleaned up my sequence, and then I asked what it was I'd done. The answer is I'd used the symbols of the equation to create movement new to my body, perhaps new to the world. The structure of the exercise had pulled from me much more than if I'd just been told to create an eight-beat phrase. I asked if what I'd done reflected the page or me. Answer: both. Some of the meaning, some of the shapes from the page were there. Some of my personality and narrative, emotional instincts were there.

Creation not ex nihilo, but using a little tohu, a little vohu.