Dancing Klezmer: Performance Pedagogies (POD)

Course Description

Summary

This course will be taught in collaboration with Joseph Alpar’s Klezmer Ensemble. Both courses result in shared public performances in May.

“Klezmer is a musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe. With its breakneck dance tunes, soulful strings, and wailing horns, Klezmer has been an ever-evolving fixture of Jewish cultural life since its beginnings in the sixteenth century, incorporating elements from Ottoman Turkish music, Baroque music, Slavic and German folk dances, and the sounds of Jewish prayer.” -Joseph Alpar

In Dancing Klezmer we will develop original choreographic responses to the wide variety of Kelzmer music we will be dancing with. We will also learn historic and contemporary Yiddish dance forms; these diasporic dances range from celebratory to mournful, moving through states of ecstatic abandon and soulful recovery. Practices of deep listening will anchor our work. How do we listen from our different cultural contexts? How do we hear the echoes of past and present lifeworlds and lineages? What stories of cultural and linguistic transformation, assimilation and exchange does this music both contain and evoke? We will explore all the ways in which the sonic worlds of Klezmer call us into expressive action. 

Ultimately, we will develop a series of dances that will be performed as part of the BFA production in Martha Hill Dance Theater and in a full evening event alongside the Klezmer Ensemble. This will be a collaborative creative project that will involve learning some set movement material as well as individual and collective improvisation/movement research.