Author: Hannah Kosstrin

Unlocking Corporeal Puzzles: Master Class with Danielle Agami, March 25, 2021

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Choreographer Danielle Agami likes algebra’s complicated puzzles, the ones that require subcutaneous investigation to approach their solutions. Her movement class also fosters this kind of inquiry. On March 25, 2021, she Zoomed into The Ohio State University Department of Dance for a master class with participants in Audiences and Online Reception: Before and After Covid. She guided us to negotiate various interlocking qualities in our bodies to find a summary balance. She directed us to engage our spines like seaweed and our heads like helium-filled balloons (and then to re-locate that helium in our pelvises). We led our bodies by the elbows; we pushed one palm against the other with the full force of each arm, then did the same with the legs against the floor; and we retained a rumbling quake deep within our full-body investigations.

The movement exploration in Agami’s class is a kind of compositional practice, wherein participants compose the body. Her visceral, gastronomical imagery renders seaweed limbs and interstitial ribcage cartilage melting like butter. Negotiating these divergent movement qualities established spaces between my muscle fibers that made way for ascertaining renewed bodily information. As participants, we toggled between Agami’s verbal instructions and watching her and each other on our individual screens to tap into feelings of dancing together across the online distance.

Agami founded her Ate9 Dance Company in Seattle, Washington in 2012 and moved it to Los Angeles in 2013, where she is currently based. She began her dance career with eight years in the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, as a dancer and rehearsal director, then moved to New York in 2010 to serve as Senior Manager of Gaga USA. She left New York for Seattle and Gaga for her own explorations to carve her way as an artist and to establish a touring company in the United States. Her company has toured widely, stopped only by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The main change that Agami identifies in the pandemic is not to take anything for granted. And, she told us, she believes the pandemic has made people in the wider society understand the precarity that artists have long experienced. But for her, the pandemic has not been about dancing. She has made some short films to keep creating, but she was under no pretense that dancing on Zoom was any kind of replacement for dancing in the theater. Her audiences? They disappeared. She took another job and considered preparing for medical school to fulfill a long-held dream, but decided instead to continue her dance research and to establish the arts more prominently in society. Zoom has been necessary during the pandemic, but she has not given up her desire to perform in large theaters for the immediacy and power of live performance. She plans for Ate9 to tour extensively as the pandemic wanes. As we transition out of the pandemic’s peak, she looks forward to seeing more young artists take up the political charge with provocative experimentation to challenge conservative societal structures.

Composing During Covid: Master Class with Dege Feder, March 10, 2021

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On Wednesday, March 10, 2021, Ethiopian-Israeli multimedia artist Dege Feder Zoomed in to The Ohio State University Department of Dance to teach a master class and to talk about her experience as an artist working in Israel during Covid. Feder’s movement practice blends the torso articulations of Ethiopian Eskesta dancing, a pan-Ethiopian dance practice focused on swiftly shimmering, rolling, and bouncing isolations of the shoulders, sternum, and belly, with improvisational-compositional explorations of Israeli contemporary dance. As the artistic director of Beta Dance Company, she makes dances about women’s kinship and collective power.

Feder led Ohio State workshop participants through an improvisational exploration, Eskesta instruction, and a compositional exercise, all based in her practices of movement and making. She began class with an improvisation working through the full capacity of each body part: head, neck, shoulders, belly, hips, arms, legs, followed by a lesson in Eskesta with double drops of the shoulders playing against upward belly rolls and ribcage quakes. Then she directed us to make short compositions based on material we had learned in the first part of class. The popular Ethiopian line dance with which Feder ended class reinforced the pan-Ethiopian connections of the practices she taught us.

Feder was born in Gondar, Ethiopia and immigrated to Israel as part of Operation Moses, the Israeli government’s clandestine operation to bring Ethiopian Jews, also known as Beta Israel, to Israel in the mid-1980s. She joined the Eskesta (later Beta) Dance Troupe, an Ethiopian-Israeli dance company founded by Ruth Eshel, when she was a student at the University of Haifa; since 2013, Feder has directed the company now known as Beta Dance Company and has also toured internationally as a solo performer. Ohio State audiences may remember Feder’s powerful solo Jalo! that takes up an Ethiopian men’s warrior call to highlight the plight of refugees that she performed in Barnett Theater in February 2020 in the weeks before Covid hit Ohio.

As she has navigated Israel’s patterns of Covid lockdowns, Feder has found different ways to keep her artistry afloat. There is no question that Covid has shuttered theatrical dance performance opportunities and streaming performances do not always go as planned. In the midst of these navigations, Feder has found an appreciation for intimate, garden-sized performances.

After making dances in her living room for months, she decided to make a dance based around a chair to represent the limitations of living and working under Covid conditions. “The Corona took your freedom, took your feet, took your legs, took your hands, your spirit, everything,” she told us in a conversation after class. The new solo, she explains, is about limitations both in terms of body and in terms of space. She looks forward to Covid restrictions being lifted in the future so she can return to the theater.

Audience engagement, Feder admitted, has been the most difficult part of Covid restrictions. “When I perform without an audience, it is sad and lonely,” she said. “You don’t have a dialogue or spiritual conversation with the audience. You are just by yourself.” For Feder, performing is about sharing her knowledge with other people and making spiritual connections with audience members. She has recently found these connections in small, intimate performances, and she looks forward to a time after vaccination when she can return to larger performance venues. While her time working during Covid has presented challenges, she has found inspiration through the restrictions. They, in turn, have created new spaces for her to share her work.

“There Is No Prize at the End of the Movement”: Master Class with Alon Karniel, November 2, 2020

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There are few things that feel satisfying or like good translations for connecting with people in our Covid-circumscribed videoconferencing world. But on November 2, 2020, we were thrilled when participants in Audiences and Online Reception experienced a connective Internet-kinesthetic experience during dance artist Alon Karniel’s master class in The Feldenkrais Method®. This somatic practice, developed by Russian-Israeli movement theorist Moshe Feldenkrais, focuses on practitioners heightening their attention to small actions in their bodies through minimal effort to foster sensitivity, being in the moment, and a pleasant experience. Karniel guided us through an Awareness Through Movement® Feldenkrais session on Zoom, and then answered questions about what it has been like to be a working artist during the pandemic. His instruction midway through class, as we coordinated the biomechanics of sliding one palm against the surface of the opposite thigh that itself was wrapped around the other leg, “There is no prize at the end of the movement,” reminded us to attune fully to the moment. Taking a proverbial step back, this instruction to do a thing fully bolsters our reserve against other encounters that come. This moment reminded me of dance theorist Ann Cooper Albright’s discussion about how somatic practices can train us for social justice.

Even though I was lying on a mat in my living room by myself, I felt as though Karniel was right there with me, his instructions so clear and themselves so kinesthetically descriptive that it felt like we were in the same room together. When he gave guidance to the group, I felt the attentive presence of the other people in the class with me as well. Some of the questions we are asking in Audiences and Online Reception are about “after Covid.” While many aspects of dancing and audiencing have not made satisfying transitions to the screen, it was gratifying to feel that Karniel’s Feldenkrais class did, with the ease and release of effort that he stressed in doing the biomechanical sequences. After Covid, we are going to make choices in our hybrid world. We will choose to return to doing some things in person, and we will choose to continue doing some things online. One of the possibilities that Covid has created, paired with the development of videoconferencing technology, is that we can be connected to Karniel in Tel Aviv and take his class there from our internet portal in Ohio, during and after the pandemic.

During Covid, Karniel is teaching, rehearsal directing, and working with students in Haifa and Jerusalem in addition to his home base in Tel Aviv. Israel has gone through patterns of lockdowns and openings, lockdowns and openings since March 2020. This rollercoaster of allowances and restrictions specifically pertaining to theaters have deeply affected Karniel’s teaching work. During the discussion session after his class, Karniel described the effort to bring a dance to performance that he had worked on staging with students for nearly a year. First they were going to perform in a theater with an in-person audience; then without the audience and without the dancers being able to touch or be close to each other; then in a studio with an in-person audience; then in a studio without an audience. Finally, they were allowed to perform the work without any audience members in the studio space, so they filmed it. Karniel mentioned the extra effort it took to rechoreograph the movement patterns to comply with the no-touch, no-partnering restrictions, then to transform a dance made for a theatrical stage to a studio space, and then again still for the camera. Karniel’s experiences are common across Israeli theatrical dance companies during the pandemic thus far. Dance writer Deborah Friedes Galili discussed what it felt like to experience a studio performance of Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv during the narrow window in which Israeli restrictions briefly lifted so that audiences could attend dance performances: the excitement of being kinesthetically together again, and the anxiety about virus transmission. As we look toward what this landscape may turn out to be, the potential for remaining connected through practices like Feldenkrais and Karniel’s teaching offer possibilities for navigating this as-yet uncertain future.

Dancing through the Pandemic, Jewishly

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Theatrical dance artists’ work conditions changed overnight when COVID-19 shuttered theaters and canceled tours. These changes affect how audiences access and understand dance. My work in Audiences and Online Reception: Before and After COVID focuses on Jewish and Israeli choreographers’ experiences of COVID-19: how lockdowns during the pandemic affected and continue to affect reception to their work; how they maintain mobility online or in other ways when they are stuck in place or their movement is otherwise restricted; and what they foresee and hope for the future.

The research I pursue with this grant supports my current book project on Jewish choreographers who circulated between the Americas and the Middle East through migrations, dance touring, and intercultural collaborations between the 1950s and the 2020s. Central to my project are Jewish choreographers in cultural minorities and Jewish interracial, intercultural, and LGBTQ+ contexts in concert dance. I examine how the reception to these choreographers’ work in print newspaper reviews and online determined how audiences understood them. I show how Jewish choreographers’ work from diverse backgrounds engenders what I call “kinesthetic peoplehood,” a transnational phenomenon wherein people feel connected to or estranged from a diasporic community through bodily practices. Divergent reception to these artists’ work across national contexts, particularly in COVID-19 shifts from the theater to the screen and re-conceptions about how audiences can come together around dance performances, generates transnational narratives stratifying the Jewish diaspora.

I am excited to welcome dance artists for online events during the 2020–2021 academic year. These events are open to the Ohio State community and to the general public. The artists will share some of their work and talk with students and community members about what it has been like to be a working artist during the coronavirus pandemic. First up is Alon Karniel, who will give a Feldenkrais Method® master class on November 2 and discuss his experiences working in Israel during the pandemic. Stay tuned for details on this and other upcoming events!