Elizabeth Souritz's book Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s (first published in the U.S.S.R. as Khoreograficheskoe iskusstvo dvadtsatykh godov [Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979) is presently in preparation for publication by Dance Horizons. The book focuses on one particular aspect of Soviet choreography in the 1920s – the changes within the ballet institution, that is, the state lyric theaters. Although her main purpose is to excavate the choreography itself, and especially the work of three key artists (Alexander Gorsky, Kasian Goleizovsky, and Fedor Lopukhov), in the course of reading about the ballets, we also learn a great deal about the dance and theater life on the periphery, about who was included and who excluded from the mainstream and why, about the aesthetic and political debates that brought some of the projects to fruition and buried others, and about the ways in which the period served as a kind of linchpin in the history of ballet. We see in Souritz's account a microcosm both of the larger Soviet dance world of the 1920s and of the larger picture of state cultural institutions.

The book sheds a welcome light on an era, a group of choreographers, and a series of ballets that have previously been little known in the West. We have been tantalized by brief references in the available literature to the revolutionary ballets celebrating the October Revolution of 1917, to the revisions of the classics that remain in the Soviet repertory, to the remarkable innovations inspired by modernist experiments in all the arts of the period, and to the “model ballet” The Red Poppy. These topics fascinate us not only for their own sake, for they have been a missing chapter in our knowledge of dance history, but also because they illuminate the history of American ballet, and in particular the early roots of George Balanchine's oeuvre.

Isadora Duncan inspired many such passages of fervid prose among her admiring contemporaries. From the beginning of her career, around the turn of the twentieth century, to her death in a bizarre automobile accident in 1927, those who saw her dance were less interested in writing about what she actually did than in presenting their bedizened responses to her.

Yet even as she evoked a fragrant never-never land, this American was creating a contemporary image for the stage dancer. Not a steely-legged virtuoso whipping off pirouettes, not a coquettish quasi-virgin, not a disembodied nymph, but a noble-spirited woman, bold, yet pliant — tree to use her imagination and her body as she wished.

New York City is the geographic center for dance in America, and the New York Times is “newspaper of record” for the city. It might be assumed, then, that a researcher looking for historical information about dance in America would find a great deal of it by consulting the New York Times Index. That, at least, is what I thought before beginning to gather documents for a dance bibliography for users of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. Yet a few random dips into volumes of the NYT Index yielded confusing and (for my purposes) unuseable citations. I therefore decided to set my bibliography aside for a time and instead conduct a search through the entire NYT Index, tracing its treatment of articles on dance, from the first long-hand edition of 1851 up to the present. This is an examination not of the New York Times' coverage of dance but of the NYT Index's useability as a reference tool for dance researchers.

More than any other era in the history of ballet, the nineteenth century belongs to the ballerina. She haunts its lithographs and paintings, an ethereal creature touched with the charm of another age. Yet even when she turned into the fast, leggy ballerina of modern times, her ideology survived. If today the art of ballet celebrates the danseur nearly as often as the danseuse, it has yet to rid it aesthetic of yesterday's cult of the eternal feminine. Like her nineteenth-century forbear, today's ballerina, an icon of teen youth, athleticism, and anorexic vulnerability, incarnates a feminine ideal defined overwhelmingly by men.

In the Western music world a score written by a composer is distributed to members of an orchestra who individually learn their parts, come together to rehearse under the guidance or a conductor, and then perform before the public. In the drama world a script written by a playwright is distributed to actors who individually learn their parts, come together to rehearse under the guidance of a director, and then perform before the public. In both worlds a creator has written a kind of “instruction manual” for trained readers to use when preparing for an event to be seen and heard by the public. In both instances the performers as well as a conductor or director read the instruction manual, and each may contribute to interpretation in the process of “translating” that leads from the written medium to the performance medium. And in both instances differing views have evolved regarding how much liberty individuals should take in interpreting or modifying what is on the notated or scripted page as they prepare for performance.

The most exuberant example of dance among the Jews is the dance at weddings. For this rejoicing, Jews have paid the most attention to how they danced in order to celebrate the new couple and also to enhance many different aspects of the marriage process. Written sources have recorded examples of wooing and wedding dances from the biblical period through all the vagaries of more than two thousand years of Jewish life. Today countless examples of wedding dances of the Jews still exist, but relatively little scholarship has focused on them.

Outstanding is the remarkable variety of all these dances and the paradoxical fact that they are all unified by the single Jewish phenomenon of a mitzvah. A mitzvah is a commandment of Jewish life; one of these is the commandment that one must dance at a Jewish wedding. This commandment has been honored through the centuries in all the diverse places Jews have been forced to live—the ghettoes, the Pale of Settlement, the mellah, imposed exile or changes through immigration and through choice.

Why do we dance at weddings? What are we marking and celebrating? Scholars of the family and society have abandoned their efforts to discover for marriage a universal definition which was once thought of as helpful for answering these questions. The search for the lowest common denominator of marriage in all cultures that would reveal the universally shared features of the institution offers little insight into this ubiquitous and complex human relationship (Gough, 1959). Love, economy, alliance, and even oppression have all been abandoned as possible common threads weaving together two people in a socially sanctioned union. We must discover alternative questions to ask in order to understand what marriage reveals about a society and how it functions for the group and the individuals.

Despite the popularity that the Yemenite Jewish dance has achieved among a general public, through Israeli folk dance and stage adaptation by groups such as the Inbal Dance Theater, scholarly treatment of this dance tradition is still in its early stages. My intent in this paper is to address an area neglected by other researchers: the examination of Yemenite Jewish dance in the context of village life in Israel, and further, the consideration of the social significance of the dancing. I will identify the significant social subsets of the village, examining the similarities and differences of dance repertoire and criteria for aesthetic evaluation among these groups as seen in the course of wedding celebrations. These similarities and differences will introduce the dimension of social meaning the intersection of form and function, symbol and meaning, dance and culture.

A moment for definition of basic terms: I use the term culture in its sense as a common conceptual framework, including beliefs, values, and symbols. Culture, as a common conceptual framework, is constantly enacted and re-enacted in actions, events, and symbolic expressions. This formulation is similar to Geertz's definition of culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.” I approach dance as one such symbolic form. Dance style is not arbitrary. It is a learned and patterned activity. By carefully investigation native attitudes, it is possible to learn how dance operates as symbolic and expressive behavior.

Ever since the question was first posed during the time of the House of Hillel and Shammai, there has always been an issue about how one dances before the bride. The action of Rabbi Aha who took the bride on his shoulders and danced with her exacerbated the problem seventyfold for other rabbis asked if they too could dance with a bride on their shoulder. Rabbi Aḥa actually reawakened the question and raised it to a new level: Does one even dance before or with the bride at all?

By turning to examples in the different Jewish communities including the Babylonian of the fourth century where Rabbi Aḥa lived, the European communities of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and also in Israel today, several different ideas as to how to dance before the bride emerge. These examples are to be found in various written sources such as the Talmud, the Shulḥan Arukh, Responsa literature and books by rabbis, as well as memoirs. The Talmud, written in the first half of the third century, is of great value for the study of Jewish history, law, theology, ethics and folklore. Examples of dance also appear there. Dance descriptions also appear in other commentaries by later rabbis, such as the definitive sixteenth century code by Rabbi Joseph Caro, the Shulḥan Arukh. Responsa literature too, provides us with dance information though it is a special genre of literature embracing every aspect of Jewish life, usually responses by rabbis to legal questions posed by individuals and communities. It is rarely an organized or systematic body of writings and of the several centuries when this vast body was produced, only a few hundred survive. Nonetheless, dance and questions of behavior during dancing at weddings are in evidence.

In this paper we will consider Jewish wedding dances in the theatrical situation on stage, rather than in their actual setting. Even in life there is an element of drama in weddings: some are comic, and many a tragedy begins with marriage. There can hardly be found two so dissimilar staged wedding dances as Sara Levi-Tanai's dance drama Yemenite Wedding (Tel Aviv, 1956) and Vakhtangov's Beggars' Dance in the second act of Habimah's drama The Dybbuk (Moscow, 1922). Nevertheless, the two works can be compared, revealing the basic problems to be solved by choreographers attempting to carry ethnic, traditional folk dance onto the theatrical stage without destroying its structure and ambience.

The study of Jewish wedding dances, as represented in this volume, is a new and exciting endeavor. There are untold riches of dance customs and wedding celebrations to be found among the Jewish peoples of the world. A better understanding of these customs will help illuminate the complex nature of Jewish dance traditions and the importance of dancing in Jewish social life.

This paper will discuss the wedding dances performed by the Jews of Eastern Europe. It is ironic that although the majority of Jews in North America are of East European heritage, this dance tradition is probably the one about which we know the least. The reasons for this are complicated, but one of the most important factors is that the dance tradition did not adapt very well to Jewish life in the New World, unlike, for example, food traditions. The foodways of East European Jewish culture have persisted voraciously in New World communities. In fact, in many parts of the country, Jewish foodways have had a profound influence on the culinary repertoire of non-Jewish America. In contrast, the dancing that was part of traditional Jewish social life in Eastern Europe has dwindled, surviving primarily in the Jewish wedding and other rites of passage.

The very first month my husband and I arrived in Israel in 1972, we were bussed from our language center, Ulpan Ben Yehuda in Netanya, some five hours to the northern border to Kibbutz Baram, along with our entire Hebrew class of newcomers, in order to see the daughter of our teacher get married. In true kibbutz fashion, there were several couples marrrying at once so there would be a manifold joy for the kibbutz and all the families involved and no doubt less strain on the kibbutz budget. The bus ride was so long that when we arrived and I saw the brides walking around outside on the green lawns in lovely white dresses, and the grooms in their casual opennecked white short-sleeved shirts, I was sure tht we had missed the entire event. After all, the food was all set out and everyone was milling around eating and greeting each other; only the music and dancing had not begun. Later I realized that the idea of a reception apparently was not relegated to the end of the ceremony. And I learned that buses sent to central places in the city to bring family and friends are a feature of bridging the literal distances between cityfolk and kibbutz life.