Workshops

hadar has facilitated varieties of workshops, seminars, and lectures at Yale, City College, Queens College, Whitman College, Brandeis, Hebrew College, ASU, AJS, Malta Festival, in Poznan, Poland, the 14th St. Y, and Ruach Community Health.

Art and Ritual as Tools for Social Change

hadar ahuvia is a dance and ritual artist using dance performance and jewish ritual as a vehicle to create pathways for intergenerational conversation and wholeness. Her decades of work deconstructing Israeli folk dance address anti-Semitism and internalized anti-Semitism, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, Ashkenazi whiteness, Jewish Zionism, Christian Zionism, American Exceptionalism and colonialism, and perceptions of the body in each of these movements. In this workshop she shares writing and video excerpts from her performances as points of departure to discuss how these pressing realities are moving through our current bodies. 

“I am still thinking about it. Now I want to look into dance…It is very very rare for me to have a holy smokes reaction. And I did. It’s a gift.” - Avodah Justice Fellow

Yearning Tunes 

Eastern European Ashkenazi Nigunim

Hasidic nigunim are a form of sacred labor. They are offerings that work with and through joy, mourning, and yearning to connect to being. In this workshop we’ll learn short and long nigunim from various traditions including Breslov, Rhuzin, and nigunim from the Carpathian mountains where orthodox and hassidic Jewish worlds mixed. We’ll learn to listen to the details that make this tradition of Eastern European Ashkenazi music distinct, rich and soul nourishing. No previous or religious experience necessary. As part of the course we listen to field recordings, read some texts to contextualize the role of the nigun in private and public worship, and most of all sing! 

hadar been studying with Hankus Netsky-multi- instrumentalist and ethnomusicologist, one of the figures who catalyzed the klezmer revival through the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and with Esther Leah Marchette, singer, songwriter, and organizer of the Boston Breslov Connection. hadar is passionate about recovering roots based Ashkenazi culture as a spiritual and political diasporic project.

“Thank you for leading lovely and transcendent worship. The chanting! And the version of Mikamocha! You created a wonderful, prayerful space for us to enter. I felt my Ashkenazi roots in a new way.”- Kolot Chayeinu Congregant

The people never stopped dancing! 

Yiddish Dance Now  

Come learn the basics of Yiddish dance! This repertoire of diasporic dances has been preserved and passed on by cultural bearers in the Klezmer music scene! We will learn the dances alongside the details of the music to which they are connected. We will also engage in improvisational practices to participate in the dances' continued evolution. We will dance freylekhs, zhoks, khussidles, bulgars -roots based repertoire to bring to your next joyous diasporic Jewish gathering. 

hadar has studied Yiddish dance with Avia Moore, Michael Alpert, and Sarah Meyerson. She has also had the honor of collaborating  with Jenny Romaine and Rosza Lang Levitsky and the Klezkanada 2015 performance workshop participants on accessible, seated versions of the dances. Having spent many years deconstructing Israeli folk dance, she is excited to reclaim this repertoire which Zionists choreographers rejected as a source for their state building dances. She is excited to share the old news that secular and religious Ashkenazi Jewish people have always been dancing.

(Title inspired by Jacqueline Shea Murphy)

Essential Adornments  

Contemporary movement inspired by Jewish mysticism 

Sound, vibration, energy and movement are essential to the jewish story of creation and creativity. In this workshop we’ll engage breathing, sounding and movement practices inspired by insights from Jewish mystical texts, liturgy, and midrash. We'll relish in the ornaments of texts, letters, and the sound of Eastern European Ashkenazi music, letting them shape our imagination and body. We will consider the political and social insight offered by the heterophonic mode of jewish practice, and the listen for the sometimes conflicting wisdoms held by the individual and collective body.