Re: Dancing

[Lori Cahan-Simon <l_cahan...>]

Thanks Ari.  Lucid, as usual.  Anyone else have a couple of spare pennies to 
contribute?  I need all the ammunition I can get to convince this guy.  Does 
anyone have a preference, by the way, as to Yiddish Dance or Klezmer Dance?  If 
so, why???

Lorele


Ari Davidow wrote:

> 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/
>

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