Re: dance

[Alex J Lubet <lubet001...>]

I wouldn't think of weighing in on either question Sephardi or Ashkenazi
dance, and I certainly respect your opinion, but I think Judith's take on
this is different and I respect her opinion as well.  This strikes me as a
microcosm of the 'what is Jewish music?' (dance/visual
art/theatre/literature) question that comes up from time to time here and
elsewhere and I'm sure we'll never get universally satisfactory answers to
any of these.  Keeping that in mind, sampling the variety of learned
opinions is always interesting.

I would note that most of my life is spent in a far more 'mainstream'
musical world, where even defining 'music' fails to produce a universally
accepted definition, as I suspect you know.  This semester I taught a
history of rock music class for the first time and struggled with that
particular definition.  Since I also teach a Jews in American Music course
which barely touches on anything most folks would consider Jewish, but we
try to find threads of Jewish culture in everything we examine, I suspect
that looking for commonalities rather than universally accepted definitions
will probably always yield more positive results.

Be well and happy,



On 7 Dec 2002, Judith R Cohen wrote:
> 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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