Yiddish/Jewish NYC Dance
I have the honor of having my artwork included in the amazing show “Urban Stomp: Dreams and Defiance on the Dance Floor,” curated by Derrick León Washington, at The Museum of the City of New York! This six-foot-long papercutting intersperses song lyrics in Yiddish (mainly) with images of dancers, iconic places and names, and other symbols of the pieces of Yiddish dance in New York City, as brought by Jewish and Eastern European as well as Spanish, Latinx and other immigrants to our beloved and insanely diverse city from the beginning to now!
The piece is organized into five areas, anchored by four papercut “rosettes” (royselekh, “little roses,” a traditional form of papercutting used for home decoration on Jewish holidays like Sukkot, Passover (Peysach), Purim, and especially, in Galitsia, Shavuos, the first-fruits festival in May–the rosettes were so often associated with this first-fruits spring/summer festival that they are also known sometimes as shavuoslekh, “little Shavuos-decorations.”
Each rosette focuses on one piece of Yiddish dance history:
- [ top rosette] Lower East Side in the 1910s to 1930s: Large numbers of immigrants, among them many young Jewish women from Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, worked in clothing / sewing sweatshops by day but attended dance halls like the Webster on off evenings to practice the newest social dances–The lyrics cut into the paper are from a popular song of the time, “Kum, Leybke, Tantsn!” (“Come Dance, My Love!”), by Mordechai Gebirtig, famous Yiddish composer: “My dear, I can tell a man’s character from how he dances: so come dance tango and Charleston with me!”
- [second rosette ] Weddings: Some of the most well remembered Jewish dances were performed together in wedding contexts–where people of all classes might dance a freylekhs or scher line or circle dance, girls (and men, separately) would participate in traditional celebrations of the bride (“How should one dance before the bride?” asks the famous Talmudic commentary), older couples would enact a ritualized fight and making-up in a “Broyges” dance for the edification of the new couple, and grandma might even “do the Cossack dance” from sheer joy at the wedding of the youngest daughter in the family!
- Folksong Heritage: This segment represents Musicologist and historian Ruth Rubin and others unearthed, published and re-popularized great numbers of Yiddish folksongs for rabbis, youngsters, and everyone to dance to.
- [ third rosette] Jewish Ballroom dancing – Latin roots!: With natural connections to Latin heritage, Jews in NYC were often mainstays of the Latin ballroom scene – and who knew Arthur Murray was Jewish?
- [ fourth rosette] Klezmer Renaissance: Extending the folkdance heritage once again in the 1980s and 90s and beyond, new klezmorim like the Klezmatics and Andy Statman resurrected ecstatic chasidic and “Introspective” dances, volekhls (Wallachian dances), Rumanian schers and freylekhs, and traditional pair-dances and Jewish called dancing… the renaissance continues!
