Gesture in Yiddish Dance, Speech & Music
A six-part course with Walter Zev Feldman & Judit Frigyesi Niran
Drs. Walter Zev Feldman and Judit Niran Frigyesi are teaming up for a six-session course titled Gesture in Yiddish Dance, Speech, and Music.
This six-session course will familiarize participants with the fundamental issues that connect Jewish prayer, dance, and speech through expressive gesture. The course is structured be accessible to a wide audience, with short reading selections, images, and videos as the starting point. Christina Crowder will sit in as moderator for each session to encourage dialog and discussion as we explore each topic through a combination of formal presentation and robust Q & A.
Registration & Dates
Course registration is by free, though if you have the means, a donation to the Klezmer Institute will help us continue to offer this kind of programming.
Spring Sessions (Feldman)
Sunday May 4 1. Gesture in Dance
Sunday, May 18 2. Gesture in Speech, Oratory and Learning
Sunday, June 1 3. Compositional Rhetoric in the Multi-Part Tunes for the Tentser
Fall Sessions (Frigyesi)
TBD 4. The “gesture of the soul” in the melody of prayer (context)
TBD 5. The forms of gesture in prayer melody (examples & discussion)
TBD 6. Summation and Dialogue (Feldman & Frigyesi)
Sessions will begin at noon eastern time and run for about 1.5 hours.
“During the dance, Mikhoels’ face assumes an expression of wise weariness and sad exaltation, as if his face had become the ancient mask of the Jewish people ….all this is absorbed in the trembling hands, the vibrating of his thinking fingers, inspired like articulated speech……”
Session Topics
Course Description
A deeper understanding of Yiddish music and dance is impossible without understanding the role of both musical and physical gesture. This mini-course will familiarize students with the fundamental issues that connect Jewish prayer, dance, and speech through expressive gesture.
While many cognitive psychologists and biologists view gesture as foundational to spoken language across human history, the nature of hand gesture in Yiddish speech was first studied by the anthropologist David Efron. Efron found that the most typically Yiddish gestures are ideographic, meaning “tracing out in the air the path and direction of thought.” This ideographic gestural practice connects to Yiddish solo dance, performed by a skilled dancer known as a tentser, who internalizes the rhetoric of the melody and then corporealizes it through dance—especially with the movements of the hands, arms, and head. The historical inspiration for gesture in Yiddish dance is found in the daily prayer practice known as davenen. Hand gesture is not essential to davenen, but it is essential that the melody of davenen traces a rhetoric of expressive (musical) gestures. This melodic rhetoric is the basis of the music played for the Tentser, which in turn is expressed in the totality of the dance movement.
Session 1: Gesture in Dance (Feldman)
“The performance repertoire of the East European Jewish dance tradition included two major types: social dancing and exhibition dancing…..Exhibition dancing was highly specialized, and demanded that a dancer cultivate a higher level of physical skill or develop expertise at improvising.” — Lee Ellen Friedland, 1985
Session 2: Gesture in Speech, Oratory and Learning (Feldman)
Session 4: The “gesture of the soul” in the melody of prayer – the context (Frigyesi)
Session 3: Compositional Rhetoric in the Multi-Part Tunes for the Tentser
Musical allusions often will refer to the nusah of prayer, featuring both the “proclamation style” and varieties of pentatonism, as well as snatches of broader modality.
Session 5: The forms of gesture in prayer melody – examples and discussion (Frigyesi)
This session will deepen the ideas presented in session 3. We will discuss visual representations and authentic musical examples chosen from recordings of davenen and songs from the point of view of their gestural-expressive nature.
Session 6: Summation and Dialogue (Frigyesi & Feldman)
This session will a moderated discussion between Zev and Judit discussing, with the help of concrete examples the following points:
- the connection between the gestures of klezmer music/dance and prayer melody (davenen)
- aspects that differentiate Jewish and non-Jewish melodies
The meeting will serve as summary of the ideas presented during the preceding five sessions.
Judit Frigyesi Niran
Judit Frigyesi Niran is a teacher, poet, musicologist and ethnomusicologist. Her main ethnomusicological work deals with the prayer chant of the Eastern European Jews known as davenen, and she is the only scholar to have carried out fieldwork in Communist East-Europe after WWII. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, she recently completed a documentary novel treating this topic, Writing on Water –The Sounds of Jewish Prayer (CEU Press 2018). As a writer and photographer she has published short stories and poems, created photo exhibitions and multimedia projects. Her theatrical montage “Fleeting Resonances”, which combines poetry, film, audio, and live performance, has been staged in Germany, Hungary, and Israel. Judit is also a specialist in music of the twentieth century, publishing on Béla Bartók (Béla Bartók and turn-of-the-century Budapest) and Felix Mendelssohn.
Walter Zev Feldman is a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music. He is author of the books Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition, and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Berlin, 1996), and Klezmer: Music, History, & Memory (Oxford, 2016), and From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes: Music, Poetry, and Mysticism in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh 2022).
His current research interests include the relation of rhythmic cycle (usul) and melody in Ottoman music, and gesture in Ashkenazic Jewish and other dance cultures. Feldman is Academic Director of the Klezmer Institute.
