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Dance

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Sara Levi-Tanai

Sara Levi-Tanai was the founder, choreographer, and artistic director of the Inbal Dance Theater. With an original style, she established a unique dance theater that combined the East and West and the early history of the Nation of Israel with the present, as well as creating a new language of movement in the world of dance that is called “the Inbal language.”

Pearl Lang

Pearl Lang was the first dancer Martha Graham allowed to perform some of Graham’s own roles. She also brought elements of the ecstatic poetry and dance of Jewish traditions to her own praised work.

Gertrud Kraus

Gertrud Kraus was a pioneer dancer and choreographer, mainly in expressionist dance. Her career began in Vienna during the 1920s, but she performed her solo and group recitals throughout Central Europe and soon became a prominent modern dance artist. In 1935, at the peak of her European career, she immigrated to Palestine and her extensive and innovative work made her the leading figure of modern, expressionist dance in Israel.

Allegra Kent

During ballerina Allegra Kent’s long career with the New York City Ballet, she starred in many of George Balanchine’s most famous ballets, originating several principal roles created specifically for her.

Gurit Kadman

Gurit Kadman earned fame as a pioneer of Israeli folk dancing. In Germany, she joined the Wandervogel, a youth movement that focused on German folk culture, and after she moved to Palestine she continued to learn, teach, and preserve Israeli folk dance.

Lydia Joel

Lydia Joel began her dance career as a performer, but it was as the editor-in-chief of Dance Magazine that she had the greatest impact on the field. She expanded the magazines’ coverage, staff, and popularity, and she remained influential in dance until her death in 1992.

Irina Jacobson

Irina Jacobson, the wife of the prolific and innovative Soviet-Russian choreographer, Leonid Jacobson, was a living archive of his scores of radical and innovative ballets. A former soloist with the Kirov Ballet and the protégé of Agrippina Vaganova, she emigrated to the West in 1982 and was in demand internationally as a teacher and stager of Jacobson’s works, as well as of Romantic and Classical ballets.

Israeli Folk Dance Pioneers in North America

Dance has been an integral element of the Jewish community since biblical times. An intense desire to share the joy of dance, coupled with a strong identification with both Israel and their Jewish roots, spurred a group of influential women to create a flourishing movement of Israeli folk dance in North America. Today, Israeli folk dance enjoys a wider popularity than ever.

Hilde Holger

Hilde Holger’s choreography incorporated her interest in religion, politics, and the natural world. Her works provoked important discussions about the role of dance in the public sphere.

Hebrew Song, 1880-2020

Hebrew song as a whole, including songs of Erez Israel and the State of Israel, is a unique socio-cultural phenomenon that has developed over time. The dawning of Hebrew song can be traced to the period between 1880 and 1903, and it has grown to reflect the diverse aspects of Israeli society since then. The contribution of women to Hebrew songs, in general, has risen steadily over the years. 

Hadassah (Spira Epstein)

Hadassah Spira Epstein was a major dance artist of the twentieth century, a performer of Jewish, Hindu, and other ethnic dance forms, and a leading force in presenting the dance of other cultures to the American public. She was a pioneer in bringing Jewish dance to the United States and was recognized as such in the first U.S. Congress on Jewish Dance held in New York City in 1949.

Marjorie Guthrie

First a dancer, then a teacher, Marjorie Guthrie founded the Woody Guthrie Children’s Fund and Archive in 1956 to preserve her husband’s works for future audiences. By the end of her life, she was a national activist for Huntington’s Disease and other genetic and neurological diseases.

Marika Gidali

After surviving the Holocaust and immigrating from Budapest to Brazil, dancer Marika Gidali became an influential performer, teacher, and choreographer at a time when the arts faced serious repression under military dictatorship. In 1956 Gidali began dancing with the Ballet Company of Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro. Gidali later set up her first school, which was the meeting point for many artists in the mid-1960s.

Annabelle Gamson

More than any other artist in the mid-1970s, Annabelle Gamson initiated unprecedented attention to the history of American modern dance. Her musically inspired, passionate performances of dances, choreographed by Isadora Duncan and others in the early twentieth century, brought about a resurgence of interest in Duncan’s work and her legacy, modern dance.

Esther Gamlielit

Esther Gamlielit was prominent in a lineage of Yemenite singers, after Brachah Zefira and before Shoshana Damari. Gamlielit was a talented singer, dancer, and actress, known for performing songs with the Yemenite-style pronunciation of the Hebrew letters het and ayin.

Mary Frank

Mary Frank was a sculptor and painter inspired by dance, photography, and the moving body. Born in London, Frank immigrated to the United States in the 1940s and danced with Martha Graham and studied art at the American Art School in New York. Frank imparts a sense of the timelessness and her work, and her sculptures have been described as sensual, sublime, poetic and profoundly moving, placing her among the foremost figurative artists of our time. 

Folk Dance, Israeli

Folk dances in Israel are a staple of the national and cultural consciousness and were largely created and performed by women. The halutzim's festival pageants, combined with dance traditions brought to Israel from the Diaspora, led to the creation of many beautiful folk dances. Today there are over three thousand Israeli folk dances.

Community Dance Practices in the Yishuv and Israel: 1900-2000

Women have been at the forefront of preserving community dance practices in Israel. In the 1970s Gurit Kadman worked with ethnomusicologist Dr. Esther Gerson-Kiwi to collect, document, and study ethnic music and dance practices in Israel. Eventually elements of ethnic dances were incorporated into the canon of Israeli folk dance.

Rosa Eskenazi

Roza Eskenazi was a renowned Greek singer who had a long and influential career. She recorded hundreds of songs throughout her life, and her powerful range and unique voice continue to inspire generations of listeners.

Oshra Elkayam-Ronen

Oshra Elkayam-Ronen is an Israeli dancer and choreographer who belongs to the pioneer generation of Israeli movement theater; she was one of the important Israeli choreographers in this style in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1984, she established her own troupe, which includes artists from different theater disciplines.

Maya Deren

Maya Deren pursued an ambitious career as a writer, publishing poetry, essays, and newspaper articles. She was also one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of her time for her use of experimental editing techniques and her fascination with ecstatic religious dances. In 1946 she used a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph Haitian dance.

Katya Delakova

Katya Delakova was a pioneer of Jewish dance, blending folk traditions, Hasidic worship, modern dance, and improvisation. Her integration of various dance philosophies from around the world allowed her to create and teach her own philosophy, titled “The Art of Moving.”

Modern Dance Performance in the United States

Jewish immigrants to the New World brought with them their ritual and celebratory Jewish dances, but these traditional forms of Jewish dance waned in the United States. Working-class and poor Jewish immigrants parents sought out culture and education in the arts for their children, often as a vehicle for assimilation. Jewish women were particularly attracted to the field of modern dance.

Dance in the Yishuv and Israel

Artists began to try to create a new Hebrew dance in the 1920s. Israeli Expressionist Dance flourished first, followed by American modern dance. Israeli dance became professionalized and centralized, and over the past few decades, efforts to promote local creativity accelerated, ethnic dance companies have flourished, and choreographers have taken increasingly political stances.

Yardena Cohen

Incorporating biblical themes and Sephardic music into her dances, Yardena Cohen helped create a uniquely Israeli artistic culture. Cohen opened her Haifa dance studio in 1933 and maintained it for some seventy years, stressing creative dance. She continued to teach well into her nineties and in 2010 was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

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