Re: Dancing

[Ari Davidow <ari...>]

At 10:01 AM 12/29/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I need some help.  I am working on publicizing the dance event, led by Erik 
>Bendix, that will take place here in Cleveland on February 24th, 2002.  I 
>was talking with the head of the Cleveland Yiddish Cultural Committee who 
>took me to task for using "Yiddish Dance".  He instists that the word 
>Yiddish cannot be used with
>dance.  I told him that this is what some people are calling it.  He also 
>nixed "Klezmer Dance".  The phrase "Traditional Eastern European Jewish 
>Dance" is correct, but unwieldly.  Who has a good suggestion, or some 
>convincing rationale, for a good name?

Well, given that this is dance outside of its traditional context (weddings and 
simkhas), why would it bother someone to give it a name that associates the 
dancing with the correct culture? Yiddish dance, or klezmer dance, both sound 
fine to me as ways of indicating to people that this is a style of dance 
familiar to Jews of Eastern and Central Europe.

I mean, "klezmer music" wasn't known as "klezmer music" until the 
revival--until Zev Statman and Andy Feldman used the term (from Beregovski) on 
an album title. For that matter, "klezmer" was a term for a lousy musician too 
incompetent to play anything but traditional gigs--badly--until recently. Ask 
oldtimers at klezkamp what they would have thought of someone who called them 
"klezmers" or "klezmorim" fifty years ago.

On the other hand, you also can't use too broad a brush. Old-timers, especially 
at the workmen's circle or similar Jewish organizations might have called this 
"Jewish" dance, just as old-time musicians with whom I have talked referred to 
"Jewish" music, thinking of their own way of "Jewish" as universal (and seeking 
to differentiate from, say, "American dance"). But "Jewish" encompasses a whole 
world. Michael Alpert and fellow-organizers held a festival a couple of summers 
ago of the various Jewish cultures represented by recent immigrants from the 
former Soviet Union: Ashkenazi crooners to klezmer to Mountain and Bukharan 
Jews and a few more stops on the way. That's significantly more territory than 
most of us consider when we're thinking of the dance performed by Eastern 
European Yiddish speakers over half a century (and more) ago.

Just my two cents,
ari


Ari Davidow
ari (at) ivritype(dot)com
list owner, jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org
the klezmer shack: http://www.klezmershack.com/

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+