dance

[Judith R Cohen <judithc...>]

Hi, first, I didn't realize you hadn't read my post, so sorry about
that.

But again, why is this so complicated?

> various folks might have different takes on
> > whether Sephardic dance exists and what it might be

Sephardim dance in various ways, depending on where they live.
There simply IS no one phenomenon called Sephardic dance.

So anybody's skills, talents, knowledge (of Hebrew, dance traditions or
anything else) do not change this (Did I at any point question JB's
scholarly or ethnographic or performance work? No.) It isn't an opinion.
I'd LOVE there to be some identifiable thing called "Sephardic dance"
and if there were, I'd have been enthusiastically doing it a long time
ago.
Just the way I'd LOVE there to be manuscript survivals of medieval
Sephardic songs, but there aren't. And just as the prettiest, most
musically skilful, enjoyable re-interpretations of Sephardic songs from
various stages of the diaspora are NOT "medieval Sephardic music", so
this is not "Sephardic dance". It isn't an insult, as I seem to have to
keep repeating.

We all know the Yemenite Jews have their dance tradition (the women's
and the men's, quite different), the Kurdish Jews have theirs (not very
different, from what I've seen, from that of non-Jewish Kurds of the
same region), the Ethiopians, the Uzbekis, and so on. This is largely
related to the fact that they're also or were until recently, geographic
entities. 
There MAY have been some identifiable Sephardic dance in pre-Expulsion
Iberia. We don't know much about medieval Christian dance (our detailed
knowledge of early European dance comes from the Renaissance on, or in a
few cases the late MIddle AGes) and less so for the Jews of medieval
Iberia - whose MUSIC we don't even have and are unlikely to.

So, breaths and all, )and I'll breathe as I like, I don't need this
spurious advice), it is a mystery to me why you are so insistent upon a
skilled and quite lovely series of performances created by one
professional person and based on her knowledge of historical and
ethnographic sources is any but that .

ANyway,Alex, my question about whether you would call something put
together under similar optimal conditions "Ashkenazi dance" wasn't
rhetorical, it was a real question. I'm interested to hear your answer.

AL:
> I'm not sure how to deal with this, but I'd recommend you take a few slow,
> deep breaths.  First, my comments were not even in response to yours.  I
> didn't even read your post....  
> maybe, just maybe, years spent in Israel and fluent Hebrew just might be
> useful in this day and age for a non-Sephardic (or Sephardic) person who
> studies Sephardic culture, including dance......... 

JC:
> Let's
> look at the term "Ashkenazi". Let's say a talented dancer and trained
> researcher researched and learned the bulgar, the sher, Ukrainian dance,
> Polish dance, Lithuanian dance, and also some modern dance, did it all
> beautifully, and incorporated it into performances by a good music group
> whose musical but idiosyncratic interpretations of Yiddish song and of
> klezmer had gained them a large following and it turned out to be a
> lovely performance - would that somehow MAKE it "Ashkenazi dance"???

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