Bob Smith, 59

Bob Smith, Groundbreaking Gay Comedian, Is Dead at 59
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, January 25, 2018

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Hadar Ahuvia: The Dances Are for Us

Dance artist Hadar Ahuvia (left) with Mor Mendel
(photos, above and below: Cory Antiel)

Guest writer Hadar Ahuvia writes about the inspiration for her new hour-long dance work, 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.'”

Hadar Ahuvia
(photo: Corey Antiel)

The Dances Are for Us

by guest writer Hadar Ahuvia

“Everything you have is yours?” he asks. “Kol ma she’yesh lach, hoo shelah?”

I empty my pockets—wallet, iphone, change—and pass my bag through the scanner. I say yes.

I was at the Israeli embassy to renew my Israeli passport. I needed it to return to the Holy Land—that sacred and pockmarked land--one my homes.

I would visit family, yes, but also join a delegation of Jews doing solidarity work with Palestinians in the West Bank.

In Hebrew, the irony of the familiar questions hit more forcefully.
Hebrew is my mother tongue, but waning usage does something naive and sometimes fruitful to my comprehension.

I know he’s asking “Did you take something, knowingly or unknowingly that might not be yours?’” I hear: Everything you have, that is for you, is yours?

There is an Israeli kids song:

“My land of Israel is beautiful and blooming.
Who built and planted it? We all did!
So we have a country, and we have a street, we have a song in the land of Israel.”

But grammatically it holds the meaning:

There is for us a country, the street is for us, the land is for us, this song is for us.

I add: the dances are for us.

And I did grow up believing it was for us, for me. The fruits at the market were for me to pick up smell and taste. The security was for me. The roads were for me to travel with my uncle, the archeological park was for us. So the gate and closure hours didn’t matter. The Roman ruins were for us, as we hopped the fence to walk down 2,000- year-old streets with disregard to the Palestinian villages that have survived in this frequently-hostile land for hundreds of years. The Romans are the ones who kicked us out anyway. That my students in the US have little connection to these enslaved and expelled Israelites of 2000 years ago still surprises me. It’s a testament to the diasporic focus of our Jewish pedagogy, and to the resilience of my Zionist upbringing.

I am the granddaughter of Eastern European settlers who founded Kibbutz Beit Hashita, where my parents and siblings grew up, a place we call home. It is also where the Palestinian village of Shatta used to be. We spent holidays on the kibbutz, where pageants of song and dance originating in the 1930s still took shape in the agricultural fields and the dining hall.  When we moved to Florida and then Hawaii, we continued celebrating and gathering with these particular Socialist Zionist symbols and Israeli folk dance choreographies.

Increasingly our home began to mimic the Arab essence that is claimed as fundamentally Israeli. Hummus, tahini, olive oil zaatar, pita, baklava. And beside the Palestinian shepherd salad, the syncopated dabke and Yemenite steps, Turkish and Druz inspired melodies of early Hebrew songs and their synchronous dances. These kept us marinating in a Mediterranean Israeli identity, our distinction from the American Ashkenazi diaspora encroaching on us-- ameripoop-- treacherously symbolized by applesauce on latkes.

We had the political freedom to enter and leave Israel and the US as we liked, though not the economic ability.  And because even this produced a profound longing, I could later easily empathize with the indefinite and ongoing exile of Palestinians.

On Israel’s Independence Day--May 15, 1948--Israeli folk dances seemed to “spontaneously” break out, thanks to the organizing of the Israeli Folk Dance movement and support from pre-state political organizations.  At Biet Hashita, the dancers had to overcome my grandfather’s faction, who refused to celebrate a partitioned Israel, who they thought of as “a stillborn child.”

Today, there are more than 8000 Israeli “folk” dances (most often not called “folk” any longer, but simply Israeli). They have been choreographed and disseminated continuously since the 1930s, mainly in white Jewish spaces. I danced them in Israeli elementary school and with family at far flung “outposts”--the Altamonte Springs JCCs and the Ala Wai Golf Course Center in Honolulu.

The Israeli folk dance movement was the enterprise of modern dancers, contemporaries of my grandparents, Jewish women of European descent, also known as Ashkenazi, who sought to become “Oriental” and native to their new surroundings. To embody Zionist/Israeli identity in Palestine, they appropriated steps from Arab Palestinians and Druze they observed in the valley where my family settled, and Yemenite Jews at relocation camps to which they were brought. The “new Hebrew dances” they made were used in the socialization of later Jewish migrations--Jews coming primarily from Muslim countries. They are known today as Mizrahim, literally meaning “Easterners,” treated as inferior by the Ashkenazi establishment. Today, the dances are choreographed mostly by Mizrahi men to Mizrahi pop songs--pejoratively called by some “songs of the central bus station.” The Mizrahim have been allowed to ascend within this social sphere, completing the self-orientalizing maneuver of the Israeli physicality. The dances still contain the vestiges of translated steps, steps that don’t just metaphorically mirror the appropriation of land but operate to justify the claim to land, to create and celebrate a national identity rooted in the spaces we depopulated and conquered.

One deadly claim of 18th- and 19th-Century European anti-Semitism was that European Jews had no culture of their own, no connection to land. No blood on soil. No authentic folk. And this soullessness, true of homosexuals and gypsies too, justified their extermination.  The chants at Charlottesville share a lineage with this race theory.

They would concur--nothing you have is yours.

European Zionist internalized these ideas and imagined that the recreation of ancient Israelite polity would solve the conundrum.

But here we are still posing the question--Everything you have is yours?--while grasping for the sense of security, ownership and belonging we coveted, that we obtained, and continue to violently maintain with the choreography of bodies, bombs, and borders.

So yes, this is all mine; it is on my person.

Each time I remake this dance--and I do each time we perform--I understand a little more clearly what our next steps might be. To ask what decolonizing the dances could be not just as a metaphor, but alongside the fight for Mizrahim and Palestinians to have the space for their steps to survive and thrive.

Hadar Ahuvia
(photo courtesy of the artist)

BIO:

Hadar Ahuvia is a performer and choreographer who makes work grounded in physical research and political consciousness. Raised in the US and Israel, she trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been presented at Judson, Dixon Place, CPR, BkSD, Danspace DraftWork, Movement Research Fall Festival, AUNTS, Catch, Roulette, NYLA and Eastport Art Center, and SPACE Gallery, Maine. Ahuvia has worked with Sara Rudner, Jill Sigman, Donna Uchizono, Molly Poerstel, Anna Sperber, Jon Kinzel, Stuart Shugg, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Kathy Westwater. She is currently performing Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group. Ahuvia was 2012 DTW/NYLA Fresh Tracks Artist, a 2015 Movement Research AIR, a LABA Fellow at the 14th St. Y, and a 2016 Grace Paley Organizing Fellow at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and the recipient of 2017-18 CUNY Dance Initiative Residency.

*****

See Everything you have is yours?, presented by LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture at 14th Street Y, Thursday, February 8 through Saturday, February 10, all at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

14th Street Y
344 East 14th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Frederic Morton, 90

Frederic Morton, Author and Essayist, Dies at 90
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, April 21, 2015

Alastair Reid, 88

Alastair Reid, a Restless Poet and Essayist, Is Dead at 88
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, September 25, 2014

Of margins and sticky fingers

Let’s talk about margins
We’re making a book. The margins are important. Do you know how important?
by Craig Mod, Medium.com, August 18, 2014

U of Oregon: Arts help shape response to climate change

College Classes Use Arts to Brace for Climate Change
by Richard Perez-Pena, The New York Times, March 31, 2014

José Emilio Pacheco, 74

José Emilio Pacheco, Mexican Author, Dies at 74
by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, January 27. 2014

Writing of Afghan women to be presented at Queens library

The Friends of Richmond Hill Library

and The Afghan Women’s Writing Project

present

Readings from the Afghan Women’s Writing Project
featuring novelist and founder Masha Hamilton

at Richmond Hill Library, Queens

Monday, January 13, 6:30pm

Admission: Free

A selection of poems, essays, and stories by participants of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project will be read by audience members, AWWP staff and volunteers, and special guests. AWWP believes that to tell one’s story is a human right, and this work testifies to the bravery of Afghan women and to the power of their words. Author and AWWP founder Masha Hamilton will also read from her latest novel What Changes Everything.  Admission is free.

Masha Hamilton is the author of five acclaimed novels, most recently What Changes Everything, which the Washington Post praised for its “elegantly wrought prose (which) conveys terror as well as tenderness” and 31 Hours, which the Washington Post called one of the best novels of 2009. In October 2013, she finished sixteen months working in Afghanistan as Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy at the US Embassy. She is currently working as Communications Director for Concern Worldwide. She also founded two world literacy projects, the Camel Book Drive and the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

Masha is the winner of the 2010 Women’s National Book Association award, presented “to a living American woman who derives part or all of her income from books and allied arts, and who has done meritorious work in the world of books beyond the duties or responsibilities of her profession or occupation.” She began her career as a full-time journalist, working in Maine, Indiana, and New York City before being sent by the Associated Press to the Middle East, where she was news editor for five years, including the period of the first intifada, and then moving to Moscow, where she worked for five years during the collapse of communism, reporting for the Los Angeles Times and NBC-Mutual Radio and writing a monthly column, Postcards from Moscow. She also reported from Kenya in 2006, and from Afghanistan in 2004 and 2008. 

Richmond Hill Library
118-14 Hillside Avenue, Queens
Train: J or Z to 121 Street
Bus: Q10, Q55, Q56

Wendy Perron reads from "Through the Eyes of a Dancer," Saturday

Wendy Perron
(photo by Cliff Roles)

In her just-published Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings (Wesleyan University Press), noted dance artist and journalist Wendy Perron surveys the dance world since 1960, from downtown experimental performance to major ballet troupes at the Metropolitan Opera House. Her extensive history as a student of dance, professional performer, critic and editor informs these perceptive essays, articles, reviews and interviews.

Hear Wendy Perron read at Barnes & Noble (82nd Street and Broadway) on Saturday, December 14, 6pm.

Book information here

Barnes & Noble
2289 Broadway (at 82nd Street), Manhattan

212-362-8835

(map/directions)

Start the Car: DUMBO series for multimedia storytelling

Start the Car

Multimedia Storytelling Series

presents

Getting Lost

October 10, 2013

 Galapagos Art Space

Getting Lost features storytelling from Zefrey Throwell (Whitney, MoMa), Hollis Witherspoon (Comedy Central, The PIT, WBAI), Elena Megalos (The Moth), Jenny Zhang (LMCC, Rookie Mag), Chris Stackhouse (Poet, Art in America), Benaifer Bhadha (Narativ), and Nathaniel Sullivan (Flux Factory, This Red Door).

Start The Car is a multimedia storytelling series featuring a diverse panel of writer/artist/performers at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The event brings together artists, writers, and performers that may utilize various creative multimedia to support an "alternative presentation" of a narrative structure. A rotating line-up of storytellers offer up diverse essays, non-fiction and fictionalized stories based around a loose theme and are encouraged to use sound, pictures, written and spoken word, video, music, images, collaboration and any other modes to creatively enhance the narrative.

Tickets are $8 in advance ($12 at the door) and can be purchased at ticketweb.com. Doors open at 7pm, and stories will begin at 8pm. This event is 21 and over; seasonal drink specials will be available for purchase.

Galapagos Art Space

16 Main Street, Brooklyn

(map/directions) 

LA poet Wanda Coleman ill, needs funds for care

Wanda Coleman needs your help
by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2012

Call for submissions: "Her Saturn Returns," Queer Women of Color

Her Saturn Returns | Queer Women of Color Life Transitions seeks essays, prose, poetry, interviews, and other forms of documentary writing for an upcoming Anthology on women’s experiences turning 30, and/or turning 60 – when Her Saturn Returns.

Deadline: October 15, 2012

Submit on the Submissions Page or email hersaturnreturns@gmail.com for more information.

In memory of David Rakoff, 47

Postscript: David Rakoff
by Hilton Als, The New Yorker, August 10, 2012

David Rakoff's 'Half Empty' Worldview Is Full Of Wit
transcript of interview from NPR's Fresh Air with host Terry Gross

This American Life contributor page for David Rakoff (audio links)

David Rakoff, Morantly Comic Essayist and Actor, Dies at 47by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, August 10, 2012

Nora Ephron, 71

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss. ― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. ― Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron, Essayist, Screenwriter and Director, Dies at 71
by Charles McGrath, The New York Times, June 26, 2012

Susan Rethorst: A Choreographic Mind

I've just finished reading essays by a dancemaker who, while pressing words to fine use, celebrates quiet, visceral intuition over verbal, intellectual modes of being that are usually more highly prized. Susan Rethorst's A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings (Teatterikorkeakoulu: Kinesis 2, 2012) takes her readers deep into the sensibilities of an artist who chooses to embrace "not knowing, not quite controlling," honoring what her body tells her and what the dances she makes tell her, too.

The book presents two strands for us to follow: Rethorst's life-altering experiences in youth and her application of personal transformation to creative process. In a custody dispute, her father kidnapped her and her brother Johnny when they were quite young. Two years later, he kidnapped the boy again and, this time, she would not see Johnny until he was 21. I get the impression that while Rethorst must relate this disturbing history--which left her, into adulthood, disinclined to speak but inclined to watch people intently and read the subtle currents and language of bodies--she does so only to set the stage for a calm exploration of how dances are made, how they reveal and present themselves and how they might best be perceived by maker and witness alike.

Rethorst's discussions could benefit fellow choreographers; clearly, she hopes to share her ideas with young artists who frequently stumble over treacherous piles of shoulds and shouldn'ts--what this favored artist does, what that prominent critic appears to reject or champion, what Teacher says is the right thing to do, what's trendy among peers or presenters this season. To these artists, she offers her trust in the unconscious, the body, the ongoing conversation with the dance itself.

The mainstream dance critic, picking up this book, will feel his/her ears burn:

Basically, they tell you what they want to see, and how the piece before them does, or does not, answer to that. It is rare to hear people try to cut through their own taste to try to examine what the dance maker is doing with the form.

Elsewhere, she writes,

What it, the dance, is doing is a door to see what it is valuing, what its goals are, how it functions. Talk about dance is too often, in my opinion, full of implied lack, and the lacks reveal what the particular talker desires to get out of dance.

For someone who grew up not caring to talk much--and, in this and in Rethorst's talent for intuitive perception of people, spaces and things, I strongly identify with her--she certainly enlivens these pages with an impressive, persuasive voice. But, she advises, "don't take my word for it." (Word. There's that word, again....) Yes, your mileage may vary at times, but the journey will take you places you could never anticipate.

Order this book online.

Adrienne Rich, 82 [UPDATE]

Adrienne Rich
(Photo: Robert Giard/Norton)

Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died
Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2012

A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism
by Margalit Fox, The New York Times, March 28, 2012

Driving at night

The Writer as Detective
by Roger Rosenblatt, The New York Times, July 8, 2011

Short Documentary: Art from Adversity on Vimeo

Short Documentary: Art from Adversity on Vimeo
by Robert Penn

One of the many New York City community organizations that formed in response to the AIDS epidemic is a writers group for Black Gay Men. In honor of James Baldwin's signature work, Another Country, the group selected the name Other Countries. It held its first writers workshop on June 14, 1986. Over the next year, it developed a three pronged program of peer critique, performance and publishing. In its 25 years, Other Countries has published three volumes of work by Black gay men and women. The most recent VOICES RISING came out in January 2007. The workshop continues each 2nd and 4th Saturday at NYC's LGBT Community Center from 6pm to 9pm. Many past and current members have gone on to publish work that "went through" the workshop. Several have developed their craft and have worked in publishing, arts management and television. Though many of its founding members died twenty years ago, their spirit of affinity continues to nurture and foster creativity and appreciation of the life we have, here and now.

Watch this documentary here.

LGBTQ Poetry from Poets.org

LGBTQ Poetry: Poetry, Poems, Bios & More from Poets.org

Some X-men MIA

You Left Out the Part About ...
by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New York Times, June 8, 2011