tanz!

[Bloom <bloom...>]

Dozens of terrific community dances?  Tell me more!  I'm making it my
mission to revive the dancing, but there's more I need to learn, and it's
hard to find a source for the dances.

The Sher is a fine example of a community dance, but at this point I've
collected several distinctly different versions of it.  This is good,
because it means that I have no problem coming up with a version that is
suitable to teach to any given crowd, and no qualms about adapting them
into a new version to suit the occasion.  But it also means that, if a
group of people at a wedding have all learned to do a Sher, but learned it
at different places, they will still have trouble agreeing how to dance
together.

Jacob Bloom

---------------------------------------------------
From: MaxwellSt (at) aol(dot)com
Message-ID: <d2590b04(dot)36a777d5 (at) aol(dot)com>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 13:54:13 EST
To: World music from a Jewish slant. <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>

>In a message dated 01/21/1999 8:45:26 AM Central Standard Time,
physchem (at) earthlink(dot)net writes:

<< At klezmer concerts and other events where klexmer bands play, I see young
 people and older ones get up and dance.  They don't know the traditional
 steps, but the music says "dance!!". >>

>I certainly wasn't suggesting that people need to be taught the
hora/freilechs!  I was saying that one hora/freilechs does not a simcha make.
But beyond the grapevine step, there are dozens of terrific community dances
which people don't know how to dance, so that when a klezmer band plays them,
nothing happens on the dance floor.   In addition, practically speaking, the
rambunctious chassidic-style hora/freilechs that throws people around a circle
at high speeds is too aerobic for all but the frummies to do for more than
five or ten minutes at a stretch.

>By comparison, when we used to play at a restaurant, a group of Serbs came in
one night.  They knew--and danced--everything we played: Rumania horra,
Terkisher, and on through the night.  A mechayeh to see...and sad, because it
made me imagine how the Jews must have once had such grace and gusto as I saw
these folks dance before me.  You see it in Israel in folk dance circles, but
it's not common to the whole community anymore, and doesn't bring us together
at simchas as it once must have.



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