RE: sher questions

[Helen Winkler <winklerh...>]

  It is interesting to think of the sher in comparison to contra dancing.
The one big difference though, is the shine.  The shine is so important to
many versions of the sher but I've never encountered anything like it in any
of the contra dances I've attended.  My gut feel is that the shine would
feel very strange to that community due to its improvisational nature.  The
same applies to the freylekhs.  It's totally improvised.  For that reason,
I'm not sure that the sher would take off in that sort of dance group,
although the set part of it would most likely be acceptable to them.

I also think the styling of eastern European Jewish dances is different than
typical squares and contras; it is the styling though, that really makes
these dances feel Jewish to me.  There's something very spirited in the
improvised Jewish dances, that doesn't happen in these other danceforms.

Helen 

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