Re: Mitzvah music and dance

[Helen Winkler <winklerh...>]

" I  don't think we musicians and dancers are creating a revised folk
culture out of wholly new cloth, but we are recreating it from shreds
and pieces."

There's a quote just like that in Judith Brin Ingber's article "Jewish Dance
in Poland between World War I and World War II"

In the article, Jacek Luminski, a Polish dancer who took an interest in
Yiddish dance and conducted fieldwork in Poland with Judith, compared the
process to  "trying to eat a wedding cake when only crumbs were left on a
plate from festivities held years before."

Some of the  elderly informants were so feeble that they were
unable to show the dances to Jacek and Judith.  Instead the researchers had
to try to reconstruct the movements using verbal  instructions and
corrections given by the informants.


Helen

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