INTRODUCTION
When I was a little girl, I would go with my parents and my older brothers to visit my grandparents, who lived on the west side of Chicago. When we arrived, I would run as fast as I could down the street to the synagogue to see my grandfather. I sat upstairs in the balcony, where all the women sat. As I looked down at my grandfather, I saw all the men in long black coats, yarmulkes, and white-and-black-striped shawls over their heads. I never saw anything like this in the middle-class, predominantly Anglo-Saxon suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, where I grew up. Everything about the synagogue was awesome and wonderful to me. As my grandfather prayed, he chanted in Hebrew and swayed back and forth. As his prayers intensified, he would clap his hands, fling them into the air, and jump about. Although I didn’t understand what he was saying, I felt his voice and his movements within my body. I felt his passion and his heart, and I understood intuitively that he was dancing.
His dance expressed intense emotions—sadness, anger, exhortation, joy, and ecstasy. I had never seen anyone dance that way before. It was free and wild and uninhibited; it was fun and spontaneous and emotional. I didn’t feel like this when I went to my dance classes, or to Sunday school! After he finished, my grandfather and I would meet at the door. He would be glad to see me and lift me into the air and hug me. Then he would hold my hand and we would walk slowly back to his house. I could tell by the way he touched me that he loved me. I was so happy I would skip and gallop down the street with him at my side. I believed that my grandfather, with his white silky hair and his long white beard, was God and that God was a dancer.
The memories of my grandfather’s love, his dance, and his ritual have been with me all my life. I believe that what I have been doing as an adult is trying to recover the means by which I could experience a dance of such spiritual power and meaning. I didn’t inherit the same customs, community, or clear social roles my grandfather did. I can never live like him or do his dance with that sense of authenticity and devotion, but I have been driven to find a dance that moves me and the communities I work with as much as his dance moved him.
We may no longer have the kind of clear, if unspoken, agreements about the meaning and function of dance that my grandfather and his community did, but I believe we are still drawn to dance as an expression of our humanity. The diversity of dance forms we do have—folk, ethnic, ballet, modern, postmodern, jazz, tap, and street dances of all sorts—is a testament to the enduring human need to express ourselves through movement. As a longtime dance artist, my interest lies in reinvigorating our relationship to dance so that it once again serves our lives in substantive and essential ways. Throughout history, people have danced their most profound needs and struggles as a means of reaffirming harmony with themselves, with each other, and with the natural world. For traditional peoples, dance and all the arts provided an important language, communicating ideas about power, spiritual matters, and the natural world. Before written language, dance was an essential part of the oral tradition, a way of passing morals, ethics, and story from generation to generation. For thousands of years, dance has played an important role in forging collective identities among cultural and ethnic groups throughout the world. Through dance, people have marked major life transitions, from birth through initiation into adulthood to death. Dance has allowed people to vent strong emotions, such as grief or anger, as well as to express love and gratitude; and it has helped motivate community members to cooperate. Dance contributes to social cohesiveness and provides a venue where people can enact spiritual rituals and beliefs. Part of the challenge I have faced in my work is to take our practice of mostly ornamental or performative dance to a place where it can serve multiple community, social, and survival needs. This is a book about creating dances that matter to people in their real lives, repurposing dance as a vehicle for social change and community resilience.
Although dance has to a great extent been emptied of its range of meaning in our modern world, I have been lucky enough to witness how it can still bring communities together to encounter issues that may be overwhelming, unresolved, destructive, or even life-threatening. Over many decades, I have danced with a variety of people—seniors and youngsters, people of different ethnicities and racial backgrounds, the able-bodied and the disabled, trained dancers and everyday
