Collaboration with Rebecca Pappas
More info forthcoming
One of several engagements as an Artists in Residence at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies
Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows is a new exhibition on view at the Jewish Museum of Maryland from March 26 through June 11, 2023.
Featuring the work of 30 artists whose work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship (NJCF), the exhibit builds on the current renaissance in boundary-pushing, community-building contemporary Jewish art cited recently in Artforum.
Material/Inheritance seeks to help center the artist as beneficiary and generator of prophetic traditions, as elaborated by NJCF co-founder Maia Ipp in her widely-shared essay, “Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde."
For generations, Jews have considered what it means to reinvent our shared collective identity in order to meet the demands and conditions of the moment. When the structures we use to organize our lives–health, climate, home, politics, and schooling among them–are in constant upheaval, what do we need in order to endure, and where can we find those tools? What does the future hold, and how much of that is in our own hands? What does it look like to celebrate and rejoice alongside continual waves of mourning, discomfort, and despair?
Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows emphasizes resilience in contemporary forms of living and dialogue that find inspiration and foundation in ancestral Jewish texts, practices, histories, archives, and griefs. Each of the featured artists have been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship (NJCF), a national arts fellowship that advances the work of groundbreaking artists by offering material support, mentorship, peer feedback, and shared cultural investigation. These thirty artists work across and between genres in new media, video, performance, painting, poetry, sculpture, and more.
In line with the framing of NJCF, this exhibition and accompanying performances series holds open the generative tension between process and product, modernity and tradition, comfortable and unknown. Works address subject matter including chosen and biological family, queer and trans identities, embodiment and sexuality, diasporic homes, ritual reinventions, archival modalities, activist movements, political histories, and radical possibilities for regenerative and inventive survival.
Material/Inheritance was developed by Leora Fridman, Curator-in-Residence, in partnership with staff and leadership of the Jewish Museum of Maryland and the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, and with guidance from our curatorial committee: Gregg Bordowitz, visual artist, critic, poet, performer, filmmaker, writer, scholar, and teacher; Kendell Pinkney, Black-Jewish theatremaker, creative producer, founding Artist Director of THE WORKSHOP, and rabbi ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary; Mónica Gomery, poet, rabbi at Kol Tzedek Synagogue and faculty of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva; and Heidi Rabben, Senior Curator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
Nefesh is a performance project emerging from my exploration of Ashkenazi singing, rabbinic prayer, embodied spiritual practice and diasporic politics.
After years of researching and deconstructing the Israeli folk dances I danced with my mother, this work reaches back to my great-grandparents, lingering in the details of shuckling, krechtsing, unmetered singing and chanting that made distinct their eastern European Jewish soundscape.
Nefesh foregrounds the labor, sensuality, and life-giving nourishment of sacred service, and the wisdom of the body, our wandering - navenaden - altar.
Thank you to Ruach community health for hosting our showing!
This project is supported by a grant from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies Arts & Culture Community Impact Grant Fund. This presentation of Nefesh at Hebrew College received support from The Mass Cultural Council Festivals & Projects Grant
NEW YORK PREMIERE
FIST & HEEL PERFORMANCE GROUP
CHOREOGRAPHY BY REGGIE WILSON
PERFORMANCES
Thu, Jan 13 at 7:30pm
Fri, Jan 14 at 7:30pm
Sat, Jan 15 at 7:30pm
Mon, Jan 17 at 3pm
Click Here To Purchase Tickets
About POWER
Reggie Wilson brings his Fist & Heel Performance Group home to Brooklyn for a revelatory weekend of “moving into spirit.” In this kinesthetic, propulsive, rhythmic experience connecting American Black and Shaker traditions, Wilson explores the body as a radical tool for illuminating the internal and communal. Following his own visceral, obsessive curiosity, Wilson draws inspiration from Rebecca Cox Jackson, a free Black woman who became a Shaker eldress and formed her own community in Philadelphia—as well as the Shakers’ complex relationship to free and enslaved African-Americans. Through his framework of African formalism, applying postmodern, avant-garde movement with Black dance traditions, Wilson discovers what’s possible when ecstatic bliss meets structural rigor.
In POWER, developed at Jacob’s Pillow and the neighboring Hancock Shaker Village, Wilson imagines the mutual Black-Shaker influence as shaping experimental 19th-century American dance worship. Channeling the refusal of Anglo-Judeo-Christian limitations on the body, Fist & Heel makes that utopian energy manifest, whirling, stamping, and singing it alive. POWER coincides with BAM’s annual commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company founded in 1989. Drawing from the cultures of Africans in the Americas, in combination with postmodern elements and his own personal movement style, Wilson refers to his work as “post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances.” An inaugural Doris Duke Artist, Wilson is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has served as visiting faculty at universities including Yale, Princeton, and Wesleyan. He toured with Ohad Naharin before forming Fist & Heel and has lectured and has taught workshops and community projects throughout the US, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Fist & Heel has performed at Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, BAM, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Festival Kaay Fecc in Senegal, among other venues.
Dancers in Photo: Hadar Ahuvia, Gabriela Silva
Photo Credit: Christopher Duggan
Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum |Prayer of the Morning
Streamed live from the Ellen Stewart Theatre
On-Demand viewing through June
Prayer of the Morning is a collaborative performance by Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum grounded in multidisciplinary modes of their Ashkenazi Jewish lineages. Drawing strength from liberation struggles while interrogating collusion with colonial regimes, they weave and re-cast their cultural pageantries, composing new prosody for this moment.
Part of the 2021 La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature with additional support from the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Sequoia Foundation, and The Shubert Foundation.
photography by Maria Baranova
Thursday, May 13 and Saturday, May 15 at 7pm
Streamed live from the Ellen Stewart Theatre
Prayer of the Morning is a collaborative performance by Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum grounded in multidisciplinary modes of their Ashkenazi Jewish lineages. Drawing strength from liberation struggles while interrogating collusion with colonial regimes, they weave and re-cast their cultural pageantries, composing new prosody for this moment.
Text, Music, Choreography and Performance by Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum
Lights by Joe Lavassuer
Costumes by Zavé Martohardjono and Athena Kokoronis
Photography by Maria Baranova
CLICK HERE FOR STREAMING TICKETS
Part of the 2021 La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature with additional support from the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Sequoia Foundation, and The Shubert Foundation.
This week I will travel to Tatyana's home area of Northampton, MA / Nipmuc and Pocomtuck lands, for a mini residency with the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought. Tatyana was invited to SCDT by choreographer mayfield brooks through a curation project titled ACCESS / AXIS.
Our work is a prying open of our Jewish diasporic histories and inherited folklore- from Zionist Pageants to American Folklore. Together we are recasting our sonic and embodied jewishness.
All three of us will share body/voice work through a Zoom Event on Saturday, January 16 at 7pm. Tickets here.
Embodied Sound Practices for Diasporic Davening
Fridays, January 15 - February 19
10am-11:15am
We invite you to a collaborative minyan to share our practices—liturgy, niggun, folk song, vibrational mapping, embodied phonetic and textual play, and original compositions. This workshop is open to all. RSVP here.
YNY Theater and the YNY Kids’ Program
Theater: AM1 & AM2 (Sun, Mon, Tue) - Yiddish Theater Performance Workshop (Ahuvia, Gottesman, Horowitz, Kindermann, Levison, Magee, Schulman)
YNY Theater and the YNY Kids’ Program - together at last! Join us for an intergenerational puppet theater creation, based on the 1937 socialist marionette allegory, lyalkes (Puppets), by Motl Gilinski. Facilitated by puppet theater creators Hadar Ahuvia and Rowan Magee, Philly puppet and performance artist Marion Horowitz, Asya Schulman of the Yiddish Book Center, and YNY’s Esther Gottesman, Jeyn Levison, and Tine Kindermann. In this online workshop, we will co-create a piece of theater based on the source text about marionettes that rebel against their string-pullers. Drawing from the talents and interests of the people in the workshop—whether music, visual art, improvisation, research, Yiddish language, or turning everyday items into puppets. No prior acting or Yiddish experience is required. Participants should commit to coming to the class during both AM1 and AM2 - although we will *not* be on Zoom this whole time. The workshop will end with a video performance on Wednesday. This workshop is a 4-part intensive, requiring participants to commit to all prep, rehearsal, and performance sessions. In 4 days, we will co-create a piece of theater drawing on Yiddish folk texts, our own stories and experiences, puppets we already know and puppets we will make on the spot - and of course our imaginations. This workshop will take place remotely - with great care to not require workshop participants of all ages to be on screens, while still providing plenty of opportunity to interact with each other and the faculty. Final project will be on video.
You and I (working title) is an equal collaboration between Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum that makes space for repairing our Jewishness within the ongoing wreckage of colonialism. It is a prying open of our Jewish diasporic histories and ‘folklore’. For Hadar it is the collectivist Zionist project and its culture, song and dance; for Tatyana, her grandparents work as Broadway producers, sewing seeds of the American dream through musical theater. We are examining how our Ashkenazi families participated in projects that, though seemingly disparate, share an ideological root—the acceptance of the supremacy of the West and its advance. You and I searches for imagined evolutions without rupture, for poetry with weight, for a future grounded in past insight, for foresight.
Music, Text, Choreography and Performance by Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum
We are growing our collective work not as a corollary to our individual projects, but as a necessary sustenance. We have been serving as special eyes and ears for one another since 2014. Along the way we have amassed an archive of prose, letters, poetry, song, and observational filming that has woven its way into our individual works. We have shared generously and expansively, rejecting entrenched narratives of competition and scarcity in search of a collective liberation.
HADAR AHUVIA & SHIRA EVIATAR
Possessing brings together artists Hadar Ahuvia and Shira Eviatar to collaboratively question their shared, inherited trauma of the Israeli nation-state, asking “How do we move together?” Ahuvia, unpacking Ashkenazi heritage in institutionalized Zionist folk dance, and Eviatar, recentralizing Arab/Mizrahi aesthetics in contemporary performance, incite dialogue around appropriation, legacy, and settler-colonialism. After conducting research separately, they come together to deepen their questions and application of their respective forms.
Their search unfolds in movements that recall ancestors’ and institutionalized celebration and mourning rituals—extending far past their respective bodies and histories. They invite community engagement as part of this first iteration of performance research.
Please join us for a post-show Toast on November 21, and post-performance discussion moderated by Jen Abrams on November 22.
This performance contains nudity.
Shira Eviatar examines the transmission of embodied cultural knowledge, calling on her Moroccan Jewish heritage. She researches traditional forms of gathering and celebration. Her work considers the body as both material and coded, reflecting the collective values, states of mind, sensations and feelings in cultural practice. It makes visible and nurtures spaces for excluded forms, recentralizing Mizrahi/Arab Jewish aesthetics and subjectivities.
Eviatar is an independent choreographer and dancer based in Jaffa. She was a 2015 DanceWeb Scholarship Program participant (2015), holds a degree in dance theatre from Kibbutzim College. She studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York and at Kelim – a program for choreographic research. She has performed her works in festivals throughout Israel and Europe, such as Rencontres chorégraphiques Festival, Fabbrica Europa festival, SPRING festival, EPOS Film Festival / Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and more. She was invited to present her works Body Roots and Rising at Theater De La Bastille in Paris and by the Bat-Sheva Dance Company. Eviatar has lectured and led workshops about her work in Israel, Europe, and the US.
Eviatar was a guest artist at SEAD and at the International Cumplicidades Festival in Portugal with the AADK in Spain, a project which aimed at generating dialogue between artists of the Mediterranean area. She recently collaborated with the international tap dancer Josette Wiggan to co-create Tapping into Self, which premiered in Intimadance Festival, 2018. Some of her works include Body Roots, Body Mandala, Rising, Eviatar/Said, Three Generations: One Body, Kosher and De-Port Workers.
ACCESSIBILITY
Gibney 280 Broadway is accessible via elevator from the main entrance at 53A Chambers Street.
For access requests or inquiries, please contact Elyse Desmond, Director of Operations and Facilities, by completing our Access Requests and Inquiries Form, or at 646.837.6809 (Voice only).
Working with a diverse group of dancers with various relationships to Zionism, Israeli folk dance, and other classical and folk traditions, The Dances are for Us investigates the instrumentalization of dance by nation-states. Through the work, we model accountability to our own heritage, histories, and to each other.
http://www.danspaceproject.org/calendar/hadar-ahuvia/
photo by Maria Baranova of Jules Skloot and Mor Mendel
Choreographer, performer, and educator Hadar Ahuvia will collaborate with a group of dancers who have various relationships to Zionism, Israeli folk dance, and other classical and folk traditions. They will develop The Dances are for Us, a performance work that breaks from a Zionist cultural legacy and models accountability to one’s own heritage and history.
There will be a showing open to the public April 11. Time TBD
Featuring new choreographies by a Hadar Ahuvia and dance faculty Renée Archibald and Peter de Grasse. Created in collaboration with and performed by Whitman students, each dance embodies the histories and relationships to place.
Showing new and old excerpts of song and dance, rewritten folk songs, and new ritual chants.
The Dances Are For Us- a solo in process showing of material being developed for a premier at Danspace Project May 2019.
The Dances Are For Us proposes a way of breaking the cycles of transmission, appropriation, and theft- across vast plains of ideological manifestations and technological advancements- that have present-day consequences for Palestinians, Israelis and Americans.
Israeli folk dances have been choreographed since the 1930s. Started by secular Ashkenazi women in Palestine, to embody Zionist ideology. Their use of European dances and the appropriation of steps from many sources- Jews of Middle Eastern origin, Hasidic communities, Druze, Palestinian Arabs- reflect the socialist aspirations and colonial tactics at Israel's formation. While offering practitioners a sense of liberation, collective connection, and affiliation with Israel, they can also be studied to trace the contradictions and conflicts within Israeli society and in Israel-Palestine.
We will learn dances from the cannon and read primary and secondary sources that highlight the dances' context and impact.
Hadar will participate in this worldwide conference on Jewishness in the dance world at Arizona State University. Activities will include a conversation about Israeli folk dance, and performing an excerpt of her solo Joy Vey
At this celebration of art and activism, Hadar will perform songs excerpted from Joy Vey and "Everything you have is yours?" - transforming Zionist anthems for the Anti-Zionist movement.
Hadar Ahuvia and LABA Present:
"Everything you have is yours?"
"Everything you have is yours?" This was the question an Israeli security official asked Ahuvia when she went to renew her passport. The question resonated with her as she considers her relationship to her Israeli heritage. "Everything you have is yours?" explores the construction of Israeli identity through the performance of Israeli folk dance — with attention to gestures appropriated from Palestinian and Arab Jewish traditions. Ahuvia’s investigation also explores the double-appropriation of Israeli dance by American Christian Zionists in their own pursuit of “authenticity.”
Performances by Hadar Ahuvia and Mor Mendel, Lili Bo Shapiro, Projections Gil Sperling, Sound Design Avi Amon, Dramaturgy Lily Bo Shapiro, Dramaturgical support Stacy Grossfield, Rowan Magee
Running Time: 60 Minutes || No Intermission
Tickets: General Admission: $20
LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture is a program of the 14th Street Y that uses classic Jewish texts to inspire the creation of art, dialogue and study. Everything I have is yours? was developed through the LABA Fellowship at the 14th Street Y. The LABA program is supported, in part, by public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. LABA is a program of the 14th Street Y.
This artist-scholar collaboration panel aims to show how performance practice and academic research contribute to an original understanding of the embodied mechanisms that regulate the formation of Jewish, Israeli, Arab, and Palestinian identities. How can dance reveal the political strategies of identity formation? How does choreography as a theoretical framework contribute to the field of Jewish Studies? How to integrate performance practice in the political and historical analysis of Jewish lives?
The participants are artists and scholars that investigate Israel/Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora through performance, literature, and politics, in academic and public discourses. Hadar Ahuvia is an Israeli-American choreographer, fellow of LABA – Laboratory for Jewish Culture. She will present EVERYTHING YOU HAVE IS YOURS?, a duet performed with dancer Mor Mender, which investigates how Israeli folk dance informed by Zionist ideology appropriates Arab culture. Ahuvia questions the core principles of Israeli nation-building and its legacy in the American Diaspora, by deconstructing folk dances by Yishuv “pioneers” and contemporary folk dance instructional videos circulating among American Jewish communities.
Melissa Melpignano, doctoral candidate in Culture & Performance at UCLA, is completing her dissertation on the conceptualization of “livability” in Israeli choreography. She will offer a choreographic analysis of Ahuvia’s performance in dialogue with the artist, and contextualize Ahuvia’s work in relation to the global premises of the construction of a Hebrew dance culture.
Shir Alon is graduating with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her dissertation analyzes what she calls “literature of stasis” in order to reassess modernist aesthetics in 20th c. Hebrew and Arabic literary works. Through Affect Theory, Alon will illuminate how movement and bodily impassivity inform Ahuvia’s choreography, and how they manifest in contemporary discourses on Israel/Palestine.
Elazar Elhanan is Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in the Jewish Studies Program at CUNY. Starting from Ahuvia’s choreographic tactics, Prof. Elhanan will discuss how Zionist cultural politics for the definition of a Hebrew/Israeli culture impact the way American-Jewish and Israeli Diaspora relate to Israel/Palestine. The participants’ diverse backgrounds will enable a nuanced conversation on core issues in the fields of Jewish, Middle Eastern, and Dance Studies.
$15-$20
“Everything you have is yours?” investigates the construction of Israeli identity through gestures appropriated from Palestinian and Yemeni culture. Hadar Ahuvia and Mor Mendel imitate and translate instructional videos of Israeli folk dances by Israelis and American Christian Zionist, embodying distance and proximity to Israel, Israeliness, and enacting the feedback loop through which national ideology is disseminated and sustained. In their performative mirroring of these videos, they reveal the subtext of dances, making explicit the Otherness at the kernel of Israeli identity.
$15-$20
“Everything you have is yours?” investigates the construction of Israeli identity through gestures appropriated from Palestinian and Yemeni culture. Hadar Ahuvia and Mor Mendel imitate and translate instructional videos of Israeli folk dances by Israelis and American Christian Zionist, embodying distance and proximity to Israel, Israeliness, and enacting the feedback loop through which national ideology is disseminated and sustained. In their performative mirroring of these videos, they reveal the subtext of dances, making explicit the Otherness at the kernel of Israeli identity.
Friday only, post show conversation facilitated by Ali Rosa-Salis.
$15, $10 Artist/Low Income Rate
Israeli folk dances have been choreographed since the 1930s. Started by secular Ashkenazi women in Palestine, to embody Zionist ideology. Their use of European dances and the appropriation of steps from many sources- Jews of Middle Eastern origin, Hasidic communities, Druze, Palestinian Arabs- reflect the socialist aspirations and colonial tactics at Israel's formation. While offering practitioners a sense of liberation, collective connection, and affiliation with Israel, they can also be studied to trace the contradictions and conflicts within Israeli society and in Israel-Palestine.
We will learn dances from the cannon and read primary and secondary sources that highlight the dances' context and impact.
$15, $10 Artist/Low Income Rate
Israeli folk dances have been choreographed since the 1930s. Started by secular Ashkenazi women in Palestine, to embody Zionist ideology. Their use of European dances and the appropriation of steps from many sources- Jews of Middle Eastern origin, Hasidic communities, Druze, Palestinian Arabs- reflect the socialist aspirations and colonial tactics at Israel's formation. While offering practitioners a sense of liberation, collective connection, and affiliation with Israel, they can also be studied to trace the contradictions and conflicts within Israeli society and in Israel-Palestine.
We will learn dances from the cannon and read primary and secondary sources that highlight the dances' context and impact.
$15, $10 Artist/Low Income Rate
Israeli folk dances have been choreographed since the 1930s. Started by secular Ashkenazi women in Palestine, to embody Zionist ideology. Their use of European dances and the appropriation of steps from many sources- Jews of Middle Eastern origin, Hasidic communities, Druze, Palestinian Arabs- reflect the socialist aspirations and colonial tactics at Israel's formation. While offering practitioners a sense of liberation, collective connection, and affiliation with Israel, they can also be studied to trace the contradictions and conflicts within Israeli society and in Israel-Palestine.
We will learn dances from the cannon and read primary and secondary sources that highlight the dances' context and impact.
OLD BREWERY NEW DANCE AT MALTA FESTIVAL 2017
Poznan, Poland
http://www.artstationsfoundation5050.com/dance/wydarzenie/old-brewery-new-dance-at-malta-festival-2017/3144
